Cerro Gordo Is TikTok's Favorite Ghost Town — With a Dark Past

[Music] [Applause] looking for brynn underwood you him depends on who's asking rumor is this brent underwood owns this town did you hear that tick-tock come on up i'll show you around all right this is cerro gordo and bryn underwood actually does own it back in the 1870s this was one of california's silver mining boom towns but now it's one of the most infamous ghost towns in the west [Music] two years ago underwood put up his life savings and with the help of some investors he bought the town for 1.4 million dollars he's planning to open it up as a tourist destination next year what kind of place was this it was dangerous it was the wild west the police wouldn't come up here you know the reports on the newspapers are something like a murder a week murder week yeah i mean if you look at every single one of the buildings around here from this one to the one we're sitting in there's bullet holes in them when the pandemic started underwood moved out here and got to work restoring the place by himself and in his downtime he does what anyone would do if they were stuck in an abandoned mining town he makes tick-tocks the other night i decided to sleep down in an abandoned mine yesterday i found a 350 year old coin in an abandoned silver mine i'm going to try to squeeze my way through and see what's in there and hopefully find some treasure what is the tick tock that blew it up for you i really want to find denim in their minds because like the original levi jeans are from 1873 and those are like the holy grail for denim collectors and i remember one day i thought i found them and i thought i saw some denim down on a ledge but i didn't have my climbing gear so i have to come back a different day this one video has almost 15 million views and between tick tock and youtube sarah gordo is starting to get a pretty big cult following i'm brent yeah hey nice to meet you guys thank you so was that about uh they just were passing through and they had seen some of the youtube videos and people come up here is out they say yo i saw it on tick tock you know i saw it on youtube yeah probably like three or four times a day what do you think it is that people like about watching you on tick tock watch you on youtube there's the historic element that people like there's the treasure hunting element that some people like there's alone in the wilderness element that i think is particularly interesting right now but taking over a ghost town also means taking on problems from the past in june an electrical fire burned down the town's main attraction the american hotel [Music] then there's the mines they're dangerous and unstable but that doesn't stop underwood from going down there almost every day so this is the reason sergio is what it is like underneath us right there there's a vertical shaft 900 feet straight down it's around the 500 it gets stuck a little bit this cage and starts chattering so as it's trying to get past and then you free fall for about a couple feet some people jump out of perfectly good airplanes for no reason and i think that's crazy some people think going down into an old mine is crazy i guess me yes me i think that a lot of the mine hasn't been explored in hundreds of years there's like a pretty famous collapse in the 1870s that killed 30 miners it was such a bad collapse that they couldn't get them out so there's 30 people still right below you yeah wow like most western mining towns cerro gordo has a complicated backstory the town was established after american settlers forced the indigenous people off the surrounding land with the help of the us army and its mining industry relied heavily on chinese workers who were pushed to live on the outskirts of town and this is where the chinese people in this town were living a lot in this whole area around here right this part of the town people kind of made their houses where they could whether it was an old exploratory tunnel that they ended up putting a door on making out of rocks like you see above us or this i mean this is just a crevice in the side of the mountain that you throw on a door i grew up watching some of the same cowboy movies that i think everybody watched sure and all those you know it's black guy rides in town has some adventures right shoots a couple bad guys rides off in the sunset but sarah gordo has a history that you know about i mean indigenous people pushed off the land also killed right chinese people actually segregated on the dark side of the mountain that accident that happened with 30 miners that died were they all chinese miners right there was a lot of bad stuff that happened here and it's part of the town's history do you think the tourists who come up here do they want to hear that part to me i don't care if they want it or not it's part of zerglar's history right and hopefully people resonate with that and yeah if again if they don't go to disney world or something i don't care when will this project be done i don't think cerrogodo will ever be done i commented that once on youtube and someone's like unsubscribe you know because like they want like they want like the finale but sorry guys you gotta keep watching for a while because i don't see it ever ever stopping really sarah gordo was here before i was around it's gonna be here long after i am here [Music] there's a latin term called memento mori which means remember that you're going to die i think about my own death a lot and i think for me it's clarified what i think is important what i don't think is important and i think cerro gore is important do you think you think more about death now that you've come up here definitely i mean it's impossible to avoid death at cerro gordo i mean whether it was the people dying in the streets whether it was the miners dying down in the mines there's a cemetery up there just past that final poll where there's miners that died in the spanish influenza so the last major pandemic that hit the world affected cerro gordo as a to be here during this modern pandemic is like a very interesting time to me to be here for historical reasons and so it's impossible to escape death when you're at cerro gordo and so for me it's like a constant reminder there is a lot of risk in you going into these mines yeah you're doing anyway the only place in the world where everything else in the world disappears from me meaning like i'm sitting here now and there's like all sorts of anxieties and thoughts you're going through like maybe somebody's emailed me my phone might go off this might happen but in the mine my phone doesn't work and i have to be so focused on not getting hurt and i'm maybe finding whatever i'm looking for that it's almost becomes like literal tunnel vision i think about nothing else and i just get lost and the sense of time for me just evaporates and occasionally you do get the moments of like clarity where it's just like not only you're by yourself in a ghost town you're now in a mine miles from the ghost town miles in the earth like nobody in the world knows where you are yeah um and if you get lost that's it that's where i'm going to be yeah i'm okay with that i think if the worst case scenario happens and it's pretty like it's really morbid to think about that but like let's say i died in mine at cerro gordo i've already told my friends what i want to happen i want them to basically like see all of the entrance that become like my tomb they were just like you know brent's brent's there i love this place and i'm willing to like spend my life working on it and i see this as my life's work when we were thinking about buying the town a lot of the potential investors asked what's your exit plan right i don't have an exit plan there's no exit plan here like me dying is the exit plan i plan to like build this place up and run it for the rest of my life you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 251,511

Rating: 4.9107127 out of 5

Keywords: CERRO GORDO tiktok, cerro gordo, Cerro gordo ghost town, eastern sierra ghost town, brent Underwood, ghost town, VICE News, vice news 2020, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, mining town, california ghost town, abandoned mine, death valley, owens valley, death valley ghost town, nevada ghost town, abandoned house, eastern sierra, inyo mountains, treasure hunting, sam and colby, wild west ghost town

Id: Lk0FD2VmNjE

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020

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[u/hkaustin]

Hey guys, VICE put this together and I thought you all might enjoy it.

How is everyone? NYE plans? I'll be watching the stars here at CG