Finding Lost Graves In An Abandoned Ghost Town

whoa we found something cool over the past month I've just come to learn that there is so much more history here than any of the history books ever touched on we think the water will be right here I purchased a rock Blaster to get any potential collapse out of my way Owens lake is coming back this might be the longest single piece of Steel it's ever been brought up this road you never stepped in the same wash twice something is going on in that area directly next to the writer's cabin we've located the barrel sites of six people [Music] all right welcome to Cerro Gordo it has been three years in three months that I have been calling this former mining town home there is no way that I could have known back in March of 2020 when I tried to get up to town in my tiny two-wheel drive Tacoma that I would end up walking into the adventure of a lifetime and it takes months like this past month or so to remind me that there is no telling what's ahead of me here at Cerro Gordo and there's really no telling all the stories that are to find from the past too I mean this town used to have 4 000 residents in it there used to be the largest silver mine in California up here you know that's thousands of stories to tell you know we've had historians over the past month or so that have just blown my mind with the people and events that have happened here that have never been told before you know we've had a project that I've been working on for three years finally seemed to get in the stride with the hotel and all that just has made me realize once again that this place is Magic there's so much more to tell here there's so much more to do here there's so much more life to be had here and that's all left me very excited so with that let's get into whatever's been going on the last month or so up here at Cerro Gordo and now an update that I am always very excited to give right now I am sitting in what will become a window here at the American Hotel and there's been a lot of progress since our last update it's actually looking like a building these days I can sit in a window I can look out that window at a surprisingly full Owens Lake and it's all very exciting you know we lost the original American Hotel just over three years ago and it has this been a battle since there's almost an incalculable amount of time spent just getting the materials up here not to mention the architecture the engineering the contractors and all that and that's because we're at the top of Mount in many ways it's been the hardest project of my life but in many ways has been the most rewarding as well you know there's been times where I thought we'd never get to this stage and never be able to look around and look at the first floor and what is going to become the second floor you know it truly took an Army to get here you know so many people whether that was helping with Transportation up here material on the ground even just any of the support system there within whether that's you know water to get the crew going it has this been an amazing experience you know I think each time one of these frustrations come up one of these stressors anytime we get past it it just makes me more and more confident that we're gonna get past all the obstacles that go into building this thing all right good morning as you can see I am walking on the floor of what will be the first floor of the American Hotel today is a very big day though today the walls start going up the issue is the wood for the walls is way down there in Keeler so I am going to jump into the five ton truck and I'm going to head down to Keeler get the wood bring it back up here and we're gonna start framing out these walls all right so we're all loaded up we got 16 foot two by sixes sixteenth boat two by fours I look like a crazy person with these goggles on but we are headed back up the hill neighbor should be up there we just gotta get this wood up there so we can start framing in the walls let's go all right so we're finally ready to start framing uh the boys are hauling up all our studs right now manual labor doing on our forklift back up here and I'm just gonna start standing walls framing walls these days I feel like it's in really good hands you how this grouping up here framing up the wall it's cheating the walls even putting up these beams that I'll talk about in a minute and it finally starts to look like a building foreign [Music] after Kyle got up these walls of the first floor then came a very interesting part of it then came the transportation of 5 26 foot long steel i-beams with crazy tie-ins attached to them this is something that our engineer based in La came up with I think it's due to snow load or just trying to create a cerebral bomb shelter I don't know but there was five 26 foot long steel i-beams that weighed about 2 000 pounds a piece that made their way to Keeler alright today's battle is getting these 26 foot long beams that are going to support the second floor all the way up to Cerro Gordo the problem is our bed of our five ton there's only about 14 feet so you gotta think we would have 12 feet of overhang and each foot of the steel weighs a couple hundred pounds which let us lead to all sorts of brainstorming maybe we're going to put them over the cab over the driver's head which seemed like a certain way to decapitate people well as usual the five ton is not working and so we are going to attempt to put these beams on this vehicle mover and they're gonna be hanging out the back we'll get some pallets in the back to give it some clearance and then hope that my truck can maybe pull this thing up there never dull moment this is where we ended up trying to take things up and we're able to go all these beams again let's get up there this is what we got surprisingly the transportation of the beams went a lot smoother than I could have imagined you know I just remember the whole time up thinking this might be the longest single piece of Steel it's ever been brought up this road we're just uh gonna attempt to send these steel beams up there and hope for the best just play it by ear after getting the first two up here we load them on the crane put them in place and that was a very exciting day you know I really really need to get this place enclosed by the winter so we can continue doing the work um on the electrical and the plumbing and all that type of stuff I think we're in a good place you know it's so exciting for me to be able to watch from the Gordon house above it and see one corner of this that was just a platform before suddenly turned into a corner of a building it's just finally feeling like this Project's in full stride and that's in good hands and it's very exciting for everybody involved you know it truly took an army to get here but I just can't wait for everybody whether that's you just watching or anybody that's brought up materials or hammered in a nail to come sit in this deck out here and say hey I played a part in building that hotel [Music] right now I am sitting at the cemetery here at Cerro Gordo back in 1800 Sarah Gordo was a silver Boom Town fueled by booze and greed the newspapers back then reported a murder a week but still nobody knows exactly how many minors are buried in this hill behind me that's because back then the headstones were made out of wood and these headstones have been lost to age they've been lost to weather they've been lost to theft I've heard estimates anywhere from 50 to 500 miners are buried in the cemetery it's always been a missing puzzle piece in the history here but tomorrow we might figure it out that's because tomorrow my friend Paul is bringing up his human remains protection dog Bosco and we're gonna try to determine exactly how many people were in the cemetery and exactly where the borders are my name is Paul dosti I retired from the Mammoth Lakes Police Department as a detective Sergeant 2009. Paul is just an expert when it comes to human remains dogs you know his last dog Buster before Bosco Buster was just a star you know he lost one of his legs to cancer it was a three-legged dog that found literally hundreds of human remains including some very high profile soldiers and murder cases back in the day you know unfortunately Buster passed away but Bosco is Paulo's new dog and Bosco is just a star in his own right we have a a pet cemetery it's a it's out in a brush but you know there's hundreds of pets dogs cats and so I'll take one small tube of human dirt from a grave and then I'll hide it and he has to go over all those Graves and goes over like they weren't even there he's only looking for what he's been trained for human decomposition and human blood that's all he knows the thing about human remains is obviously the longer they've been in the ground the more they Decay so you have to imagine the majority of the miners that are up in the cemetery here have been decaying for 150 years dogs can detect these human remains that are decomposing like one part per trillions that Apollo is describing to me I trained him on like a bomb dog he finds the target odor and then he just lays down and waits for his toy so you have to be very animated when you're working with these guys yeah because they're really happy creatures right but they want to play and so this you know human decomposition to them is like if I find some of that I'm getting a toy far as the cemetery goes we'll just get up there and see what we can get and you know I mean you could probably run the dog here he might alert because it's draining down all the way down right it's draining all down sure okay okay yeah yeah sounds good you know our main Target today was three first was to go to the cemetery next I want to go back in a new town and potentially see if there was a separate Cemetery for some of the Chinese miners here and third we just kind of wanted to look around see what else was out there and so the idea that we could individually sort the grave sites didn't quite happen today you know there's so many people up there that kind of just the whole Hillside was triggering for Bosco meaning that there's over the years they're decomposing the rains coming they're washing down the slope it's kind of just spreading out the human remains all throughout that Hillside and so we'll probably make four or five runs going straight down maybe you know five ten meters apart and then we'll know where the boundary is at least the top boundary is of the cemetery from there we kind of just decided that our main goal of the cemetery was going to be defining kind of the outer borders of it you know when Bosco stopped signaling meaning there was a dead area we know that was kind of the borderline of it and I think that in the future there's more technology like ground penetrating radar that we can do to get exact locations of graves in a mass grave like that but we were able to kind of loosely Define the perimeter of what the cemetery would be okay so it's draining down this thing too right so I'm kind of thinking that there's something up there in those trees oh I'm sorry are you on overtime or what [Music] just above the 1870 head marker it seems about 10 feet above that the cemetery pretty much stops or at least the hits for Bosco were stopping so we can assume that above that not too many people are buried you know to the left if you're looking at the cemetery there's a pinion tree that seemingly marks kind of the left border and to the right they trenched in a power line of you know not too long ago and it seems like that's kind of the right border of the cemetery area well this is what we call the decomposition or plume okay okay that's what we call this yeah which is decomposition with that and it's rolling downhill you know when it rings it pushes yeah get down here and then that's why he just put right there yeah I think it was somewhere in here right as we walked up the road further Bosco triggered on this wash and this wash is probably about 50 yards of void in between the other cemetery and so that would mean potentially a few things you know one above there there might be another burial site or two originally Paul thought that it was potentially a second graveyard you know back in the day with these mining camps a lot of times they wouldn't want the less proper citizens of that town to be buried with everybody else so prostitutes gamblers thieves sometimes different ethnicities would have to be buried outside of the main Cemetery so Paul potentially thought that maybe there was two cemeteries right next to each other or just outside the main Cemetery gate they would bury everybody else you know after we explore the cemetery the main Cemetery here I have a few other places I'd like to go with Paul first I like to go to Newtown a new town is just on the backside of the property over the saddle and Newtown is also known as Chinatown and from my understanding back in the 1800s in similar mining camps the Chinese workers wouldn't have the same burial grounds as the rest of the miners which leads me to believe that if that was the case there's potentially a second cemetery on the backside of Cerro Gordo and this is not reported in any of the history books has not been reported to me by any of the people that worked here or any of the journals or other research that I've done but if that theory is true that again would just add to the history here that was never known before and so Bosco Paul and I just walked around for a while you know searching out seeing if anything triggered and there was three places and the first of which is very interesting the first place the Bosco triggered was immediately next to the what I call the writer's cabin so next to this cabin on the back side the final standing wooden cabin which is next to a mine directly next to the building Bosco triggered almost immediately on a very strong scent of human remains and when we were there Paul did something really interesting that I thought was just very Illuminating on how sensitive these dogs are you know Bosco wasn't signaling anywhere else around this cabin but in that one area Paul got a rock really put in the dirt you know that's where the human remains would be that's what they're picking up on Chuck That Rock with the dirt elsewhere when Bosco was looking somewhere else and I had Bosco go and try to signal once again and immediately when they got to the Rock signaled wow good boy wow so yeah that's a it's a good training aid you know if you have a place where there's you know you know someone's deceased or something right yeah and uh he's been there for decades the rocks are going to be Boom for the dog really easily right let's see if we can okay okay let's go all the way up I'll take you up there yeah because the strain's down it's gonna pull right here right yeah right something is going on in that area directly next to the writer's cabin which doesn't seem to me you know that was a mine at one point there was maybe somebody living there at one point maybe this is a check-in thing and I wonder if potentially if accidents happen inside the mine if back there they won't even go through the effort of bringing over to the other side of the mine they're just bury them near the entrance and something that we found a little bit later on would point to that as well but as we were wandering around the second place that we came to is there was a flat spot next to the road that when Paul looked at it he said that just doesn't look like it should be flat in the way that it was and so we went over there with Bosco and on the course of potentially a 30-foot flat spot he signaled three times to indicate that there's three separate burials all along whether there's now a road you know as you guys may have know on the backside of the property there's a famous mine called the lower Newtown mine and right by the mine itself no triggers you know nothing Bosco wasn't going crazy but kind of off to the side of the mine down in a flat area next to two very conspicuous pinion Pines Bosco triggered directly in between those two Pines and so an idea that I come to after finding two burial sites next to the two mines on the back side it's on the back side you know maybe and it's Heyday when the people were to die inside of those mines in a mining accident whether it was like a fall Dynamite a collapse or this and that they would just bury them pretty much on the closest flat spot that they had after that sixth bind you know three in the one place two by the upper Newtown mine one by the lower Newtown mine we decided to call it you know it's getting quite warm out Boston doesn't need to be outside for that that long we have three locations and it's in an area I believe to be where Chinese workers worked you know there's three at one site there's two at another site so I think from looking at you know what we're seeing and you know and looking at some of the really old stuff around that uh We've located uh the barrel sites of six Chinese people and this is kind of like going to be an ongoing thread as we explore all the different Technologies available I think ground penetrating radar is going to be next to where we can actually identify the exact number and potentially position even of some of these grades so we can mark them off but it makes you think if they weren't as bearing people here and there then they could potentially be burying people everywhere throughout these Hills you know and it kind of changes my mentality that people were just getting buried in a singular Cemetery or potentially two cemeteries you know there's been times in the past when after a big wash there'll be a bone in the wash and I always assume that it's just an animal bone because again I would assume that it's not by the cemetery but after seeing this I don't know tonight I'm gonna go above that Cemetery see if there's anything up there see if there's any more indication of burial sites but as far as history goes I think this is a great first step I think this is obviously a morbid and kind of sensitive topic to kind of dive into as far as the history of cereal goes but I think it's an important one and I think it's one of where it's going to continue growing over the next few months that's going to be um informative one way or the other [Music] all right so we're back and right here behind me is where Bosco was tracking earlier for human remains now above that if you look up there is a wash and we think maybe there's another burial site or at least another grave or buried person up somewhere in those trees way up on that Hillside appears to be a mine all right we have a context clue along my road look down [Music] see charcoal charcoal see [Music] anybody can find that rock yeah if you dig down more charcoal so you're doing something around here well well well [Music] we did not find all right grave at least I know if we did fine this Taylor's pile holy cow [Music] whoa holy that is so sick oh man I do not have my uh climbing gear with me [Music] whoa it's still going this is insane whoa we found something cool the history just keeps continuing here at Cerro Gordo you know get better and I cannot wait to go down that hole tomorrow see if this rain doesn't wash us all out let's go [Music] all right we're back the next day Phil's here good to go there's one level there I'm gonna wait to go to that on my way back up for now we're going to keep going down see what's down there all right we got to the bottom of that first shoot and it's very narrow here because all of the debris over time the rock everything else is falling in and made it how much taller than my head a lot of rock here I hope that these levels go a long ways in both directions let's check it out well it looks like at least for this bottom part this might be the end of the line I wonder back in the day if that other side went further but there's the one level above us but getting to that level is gonna be tough we're gonna have to kind of do some acrobatic swinging to get over that level so we're gonna go back up the ropeways see where that leads to keep tracking either way crazy [Music] all right with the assist of that wood we made it up at this first level doesn't appear to go too too far back we're gonna find out the shot of that wood getting off of here is gonna be pretty interesting remember this is probably not a huge operation this is probably done with hand steel meaning like you know you hit a rod twist it hit a rod twist it and you're maybe making I don't know a couple inches of progress a day so this I don't know we're looking at let's say it's 40 feet long might represent like a year I always wonder like that mentality of a minor when to kind of call it a day and I wonder if like they heard of other guys striking a big and thinking just hey if I just go two more feet maybe I hit that vein you know and again this whole Adventure started with trying to find a graveyard and we found another mine which I didn't even know existed and now I can know what was here try to theorize maybe what was here what the motivations were but uh I love it you know no matter what these always feel like a win to me hello welcome back yep not the one I did yeah that's cool yeah it was something so that was a very fun exploration for me I always love going into Old Mines they're probably my favorite thing to do you know I just hate how everything is so programmed hour by hour and just like to get onto a rope and go into an old mine and literally not know how deep that goes or where it goes to is just amazing it's probably the biggest and most exciting thing over the past month has been history and more specifically the history yet to be told over the past month I've just come to learn that there is so much more history here than any of the history books ever touched on and it's just lit me up you know in addition to Paul and Bosco who came up a guy named Robert Sloan also came up this month and Robert is a cyber security analyst he has a background in uh Computer Engineering and for the past few years Robert has just been making databases of every mention of a person every mention of a building every mention of everything related to Cerro Gordo and we'd sit over in the order and Robert would show us his presentations of what he's discovered over the past few years you don't ask me about this information we learn more it's just like every corner of Cerro Gordo beckons you to come out and learn more you know now that piece of dirt that I've walked past hundred times that I've forgotten about it's full of sage grass isn't just that now it's the 50 by 100 home site of Jacob Jacobson who lived here in 1871. you know with that piece of information you can figure out who lived next to them you know what about the schoolhouse to talk about just the north of him what about this barber shop over here you know every little part of this town is telling a story if you take your time and use the right resources you're able to figure that out I think we've been doing that this month more than any other and it's got me almost every night over the past few weeks getting out there hiking repelling searching hunting looking for these things and it's just brought me so much joy you know and I think what we're going after isn't just past history you know it's not just to fill in a history book it's about the future of cerebral II you know one of the main things we've been looking for is former well sites you know you know that back in the day they're using so much water here and they had Springs and I'm roughly familiar with some of these Springs and where they were there's a lot of literature handwritten letters you know prospectuses that talk about Wells here at Cerro Gordo proper and these walls are producing between a thousand and ten thousand gallons per day you know and when they were mining up here they needed 30 or 40 000 gallons so that might seem like enough but how we're using it 10 000 gallons a day would be enough to put every building existing with running water probably every building we could build up here with running water we could have you know Landscaping we could have agriculture it would just fundamentally change the course of this town forever and pave a path to its future hey I'm Robert Sloan here in the beautiful town of Cerro Gordo up here trying to uncover some some lost history and today we're going to take a walk down toward lower Cerro Gordo looking for the first well here which was known as boaters well it was that said to produce a thousand gallons of water a day and uh is that a very important point in the town where there could be a lot more water so Brett and I are gonna head down there today we're gonna see if we can locate this thing and uh maybe bring some water to Cerro Gordo foreign came prepared with these letters that talked about these welts he had a perspectives that showed where these walls were even there's a town manager up here has a background in geology and so kind of together we just poured over these maps and almost every night and during the day Robert and I took dozens of trips out trying to slowly zeroing and triangulate on where this water was Britt and I have been down here in the wash on the way from the upper town of Cerro Gordo to the Lower Town of Cerro Gordo looking for water at a place known as the the Beaudry well we came across this lovely flat spot in the wash there's plenty of green grass which is uncommon for the area and we're going to concentrate our efforts here to see if we can find some uh Subterranean proof of uh fill of maybe a hundred foot well shaft the grass and as I was saying to Robert I will hike around a lot and I don't really see grass like that and again I know it's been a record snow year but like this pocket here just seems full of this longer grass and vegetation there's cribbing here I don't want to say exactly where we think it is but I think we're getting very close and it just gets me stoked on the future Cerro Gordo and what we can do with that much water I just think that it'll just immediately change everything about this place that's so exciting for me we're discovering stuff always leads me is to the minds and I've read different reports that there's levels below the 900 foot they try to drive it deeper I had heard of maybe one two levels but for discussions with Robert reviews and different documents it seems that there's potentially four levels below the 900 foot level and I think this past month given how much new history we're uncovering that has led me to get some tools get some things needed for a very serious exploration the 900 level an exploration with the sole intent of getting down to these lower levels you know I've got the Rope I have 950 feet of rope I purchased a rock Blaster to get any potential collapse out of my way two one but my next exploration in your mind which will be the next video that's coming out on this channel is gonna be crazy it is going to be my biggest adventure yet into the Union mine I'm gonna spend the most time down there I'm at the most tools the most resources and more importantly the most information to know exactly where I need to go or exactly where I needed to clear to get into these levels and again just paint an even clearer picture of Cerro Gordo so stay tuned that is coming you know all together collaboratively everybody this watches this you know the reason that we're able to have this clear picture is just by the number of people that watch this Channel and it's beautiful and it's just got me so fired up this past month or so one thing that is always fun up here is just the animals you know no matter what's going on in your day they're eating the tripod right now and so it's just kind of one of the best things that's happened whoa whoa whoa ah as I was saying we're gonna go to handheld they all just seem to get along great these days if you're having a bad day coming up and hanging out the animals is never a bad thing to do this Beretta and Beretta is the one that just tipped over my tripod she seems to want to eat it that's meatball up there we got linguine back here who's nice we have spot doodle spots one I hello spots how are you our chickens you guys lay any eggs today finally a useful animal up here at Cerro Gordo come on out you want to check it out come on out everyone enjoy nope but that's what we have to avoid is the goats eating the chicken feed sorry a little swapparoo Sun come some go hello there how are you and this lovely young lady is radio and radio has been living inside my house without six months or so she upgraded from the indoor Outdoors she was like no I'm an indoor only lady so radio lives in here and just lives a great life she gets all the toys she goes all the pets she gets all the hang out that is who I call their mayor the mayor's always hanging out in the sun gives him son his friends are over here in the uh tree but these days they like to hang out outside a lot more so they'll go in through there we'll jump through the screen as you're about to see this guy do and they'll go outside to live a wildlife out with all the wildlife they do a great job of keeping all the mice population down so uh on the animal front happy as always [Music] foreign another big thing this month is behind me Owens lake is coming back so this is a lake that used to be 110 square miles two times the size of Manhattan and it was drained in 1913 as part of the LA Aqueduct program and now because of the historic snowfall in the Sierras and the snowmelt coming off of that the water is being redirected back into the lake for the first time in a very long time it is as full as it has been and probably close to a hundred years you know this Lake behind me used to be a huge part of Cerro Gordo there was a port town called Swansea where the Bessie Brady began and the Bessie Brady would transport bars of ore across the lake to what's now known as cartago it was transporting so many bars that hundreds of thousands of them stacked up on the other side of the lake causing the miners to create their houses out of these silver and Lead bars then Keeler was established a few years later when Julius healer came to town and and they started putting more materials across this Lake this Lake was a big active transport Hub with port cities all along it but then after that Aqueduct program it just became adjustable but it's coming back that's got me thinking that's got me dreaming and so I want to do is I want to get in a boat go down this as maybe you know the bestie Brady would have oh 130 years ago and just get a feel and a little transport back in time and just think of how mother nature always seems to win out so we're gonna get in here we're gonna look around and dream of a potential of a lake coming back and the potential of a city coming back you know for the past few months I've watched as water just reclaimed zones like dust is being overtaken you know the Lakes borders are creeping outwards that reflection it throws off the Sierra every morning grows bigger every day you know I watch all this from a town that and it's Heyday saw the lake full every day the lake was full and Cerro Gordo was a Boom Town but a century later many thought both were just a thing of the past chapters closed ashes to ashes dust to dust but gliding on the lake over the pack down dust birds are coming back grass is regrowing water is carving out more of the Crusty lake bed and I can only think about change of regeneration of how nothing is set in stone Owens lake has been a dust bowl for a hundred years Cerro Gordo hasn't had a heartbeat in just about as long you know but the water's coming back and the town above it is too and there's a coincidence there but there's also a lesson to throw out these foregone conclusions to embrace the change to push for that change and gliding across the water thinking of all that just fills me with hope hope not just for the lake not just for Cerro Gordo but for all of us for the dreamer whose dream hasn't come true yet to keep on dreaming that sometimes it just takes a little bit more time a little bit more effort to not write it off that nothing is set in stone the desert became a lake even after Man spent billions trying to keep it dry a ghost town is living once again even after countless setbacks and think of that as just a joyful feeling one of Hope one of change and seeing the water flow back into Owens lake has really just filled me up with that hope with that excitement for whatever might happen next foreign foreign

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 562,800

Keywords: Cerro Gordo, Ghost Town, Ghost Town Living, Cadaver Dog, Cemetery, Hike, Mine Exploration, Hotel Update, Animal Update, History, Mine Expedition, Owens Lake, Abandoned, Exploration, Adventure, Discover, Preservation, Wild West, Old West, Western, California, Desert, Haunting, Mystery, Archaeology, Hidden Gems, Historical Sites, Heritage, Relics, Ghost Town Adventures, Outdoor, Travel, Vlog, Documentary, Wilderness, Nature, Scenic, Landmarks, Heritage Sites, Ghost Town Exploration

Id: LeUt09ZsqPo

Length: 37min 52sec (2272 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023