I've Been Living In A Ghost Town For 11 Months!

hello my name is brent and that is sarah gordo california this former mining town used to be the largest producer of silver for the state of california back in the day there's 5 000 residents here and hundreds of buildings these days there's only me and a handful of buildings left i bought this town two years ago and for the past 11 months i've been living here full time my dream is to bring life back to this abandoned ghost town and this month my 11th month was my best month yet let me show you some of the things that happened around here [Music] 11 months that's almost a year and i gotta say this month my 11th month at cerro gordo was one of my favorite that's not to say that it was not without frustration i have a nagging 90-yard concrete problem that i'll discuss later in this video i'm getting a lot closer on that and in this month i spent a lot more time on building renovations and sourcing supplies and equipment for the town and that led me on all sorts of various field trips to surrounding towns that i'm really excited about and i think will do the town a lot of good in the long run so without further ado this is my 11th month here at cerro gordo [Music] a lot of the progress this month has been around building restoration and there's been two primary suspects as the building restoration this month number one is a little miner's cabin up above town and if you remember about two months ago i decided between these three cabins i chose the middle cabin and my hope was that was gonna be a very easy job you know that i was gonna kind of slap on some new siding and then it was gonna be fine and then as i started taking apart the building i realized it needed way more work than i might have thought initially so it took quite a bit more work quite a bit longer timeline but this month it really started coming together and looking like a cabin all right i'm out here to retrieve more wood for the small miners cabin i'm hoping to get this tongue and groove stuff to go in the inside walls of the cabin and i'm taking the wood from my cabin that was falling down and it's beautiful what it's stamped with like cerro gordo on it and all this but as i'm hiking out here to get this snow is falling and it's a decent hike out here so hopefully it doesn't hit too hard but so this is it this is the wood that i need to bring back to build the other cabin it's a couple miles but that's all right but all this wood look it's how beautiful it is and it's important to me because this is part of cerro lordo and there's even stamps of cerro gordo on a lot of the wood and so to be able to use wood from cerro gordo to rebuild a cabinet cerrogordo obviously that means a lot to me so i'm going to keep taking as many bundles as i can it's a little bit of a hike back to cerro gordo but that's okay hopefully this snow holds off and i can get a decent amount of this back in time let's go look at this the briar hill steel company [Music] super cool look at the amount of rat poop that was in this wall and the nice [Music] so gross all right snow starting to come down but it's coming down really peacefully you know it's just kind of fluttering down [Music] get my morning exercise in you know if nothing else at least i don't have to get a gym membership here at sarah gordo every day is a bit of a workout [Music] do so it's starting to snow a little bit more but let me show you what i'm doing i'm staging the wood in here away from the elements so this is all the wood from that cabin that i was hiking out of and when the cabin i'm rebuilding is ready i'll bring this wood up there but for now it stays in the church it's a beautiful space in here isn't it one day this will be something really cool [Music] so as you can see some of the wood that i'm hiking out has this stencil cerro gordo mine's healer and that's because this wood came up in bundles so imagine a big bundle and this is how they knew where the wood was supposed to go so quick update on the cabin all this wood is laid out to hopefully match up to this and now this is waterproof starting to push back some dirt into it and you see that wood over there is going gonna go on here and this cabinet is gonna look old again it's really looking like a cabin again which i like a lot as you can see the roof this is the inside and you may recognize this wood down here from that cabin that i was hiking out the wood from so this wood this tongue and groove is going to go on all these walls so the inside will also look old and that'll be your view there'll be a eight foot deck there so it's coming along i'm excited you know now it's just a point of bringing out the right size pieces to go on the outside and getting this thing back together stay tuned [Music] project number two this month was lola's palace of pleasure all right progress on lola's continues and lola's is one of the original brothels here owned by lola travis who also owned property in darwin and panama springs and lola's has seen better days it used to be a building with three cribs so imagine three little individual rooms with a door in between the three so that way if there's a problem the girls could go next door and see what the problem was between them but over the years two of the cribs have fallen down leaving one that was kinda about to fall over too so step one was just reinforcing the one that was still there so put back up a back wall put reinforcements cut away a lot of the weeds from it cleaned it out and then i decided i was gonna tackle the other two today i am down to the floor joist and what i'm going to do is number each of them so i can put them back in order i'm going to level this piece of dirt to then rebuild the floor level and much more secure as you can see all of them have come apart so to redo all this but as i was in this part of the building look at what we have here pants not jeans but like trousers i don't mess with them too much because i don't want to ruin them but they have buttons there's an old pair of trousers i haven't checked in the pockets yet [Music] nothing in that pocket but pants shoes almost have a full outfit for me [Music] so now the boards are up i need to dig it down to level a little bit and as i'm digging through it just to make sure i don't miss anything i'm putting each scoop up here before i put in the wheelbarrow and just kind of sifting through so i got a bunch of dirt to move i'm going to sift through all of it and i hope that you know by the end i can find some treasures to add to the museum and then you know once this is dug out i'll make it level the plot is mostly flat i got a little work to do left not a ton of treasure yet a couple pieces of denim which is always interesting from underneath this so maybe some more investigation in this general region but this is ready to be rebuilt well as you can see progress continues over here at lola's except it seems to be the place where all the snow wants to accumulate so for now i need to clear this of snow so i can get a floor back down [Music] all right a little bit exercise and the snow is mostly gone now the sun should want to take care of this today i mean this is already looking dry so so i need to flatten this a little bit more then i need some rocks underneath it so it's not sitting directly on the ground and then as you can see i have a little bit of room to go up to this floor level and hopefully this floor comes back to life and after the floor is back to life and the building can rise once again today rebuilding the floor begins i have my tools here and i'll walk you through what i'm going to try to do today so as you can see i started putting the boards back in order what i need to do is connect these stronger before they say i'm laying like that i basically need to do this i need to put supports on each of the junctions here to make these ones very long and sturdy so when i put all this stuff back together i really want to put it the same distance as it was before you know these days there's more accepted distance to put all this stuff apart but that's not what i want to do i want to recreate it as close as i could to how it was before and so i lettered all these so they go back in this correct order but as far as spacing if you look down here you can see i'm marking there and i'm marking there and those are called ghost markings and what better for a ghost town than use the ghost markings and so i am going to start rebuilding this floor it's going to be a good day sunny it's nice out like getting outdoors using my hands so what better day than today all right now i want to support this so they're straight and more structural so i'm going to go over to my scrap pile of wood all wood that was from this building itself seems like that would work and probably no cutting needed start with that [Music] [Music] okay it's getting there so you take shape uh it is not even close to level as you can see over there's a lot of gaps i don't have to play around especially that first board and then going back it's pretty much all rotten along that back and my trench is encroaching upon my floor so i gotta move back the trench a little bit but it's getting there you can start to see where the floor will be and then the walls go up now the thing i'm debating is this bringing up this floor and leveling it out it's a whole nother process and some of this floor might not be able to survive being brought up but it just looks like trash now so it's either at least level this out and get more floors in i love seeing that we're almost there not really we're almost there back at it i need to get this piece of wood and now connect all these joists to this to basically create a box i'll put one of these on that side too and then i'll have a movable box because i don't actually know if this is square or not or if it's level so once i have a box created then you know i can move it as needed level it out a little bit floor's never going to be level i don't know if i wanted to be level [Music] so i'm getting my box going but as you can see on the back almost all the wood is rotten i think it's because water would slope down there and just accumulate i'm switching them every once in a while so that way all the rotten wood is on one side but when i bring up here i kind of have to create something to reinforce it box coming along but i need a bunch more for the sides this is a two by five i don't know if i'm gonna find any two by fives nothing really there i hear you gotta go out and just make do with what you have some wood there but where i'm hoping there's wood is under the old trestle so if you watch my tram exploration video you'll know that this is the beginning of where ore used to go down the mountain you can see some of the cables still in there and underneath it is tons of old wood so let's find a 2x5 or something really anything even close to that what do we got there that might be the one [Music] yep boom just like that [Music] and just like that the old new blend seamlessly together to continue i need one more 2x5 finish this side of the box is that one right there what do we got oh a bit big boom right there bingo so i might actually use this for that back part to start back there it's a little thicker and a little sturdier start actually completing my square and then figure out some more stuff here [Music] another big thing this month was just making sure that i took my leisure time it might seem ridiculous that when i'm in a town by myself in the middle of nowhere i still need to schedule time to kind of get away but i do you know like everybody i get caught up in an emails or i get caught up finding the perfect piece of wood for the renovation project that i'm doing i kind of get lost to the task at hand so every evening this month i try to break away and either go on a hike take out my dirt bike or take the razor out and it's really important you know it's my chance to just unplug a little bit renew my spirits i think sometimes when you're so task oriented you forget about the larger beauty around you [Music] and those are really important times for me you know they're some of the most clarifying times for me you know i've been trying to write a little bit more this month and on those rides i've just made connections that were pending but didn't really come through and so one of my favorite parts this month has just been taking those evenings to myself and just going and getting a little bit lost and it's something that i encourage everybody to do towards the evening to get a little unplugged and maybe a little lost and see what connections come to it through your mind [Music] is it bad to have favorite animals is that like a taboo in the animal world because i'm not very secret about my favorites gordo is my favorite cat he's awesome i love all the cats don't get me wrong gordo is just my dude you know very fancy yordo the cats are good it's been really amazing to see them go from the size of my hand to now almost full grown cats and now they've just become a part of cerro gordo's history too you know go to the cat i'll have to make an oil painting and put it on the wall and all the caps sorry there's something i never anticipated having you know a farmer called me one day and said hey a mom cat died you want some kittens and you know four hours later i had cats here i'm glad they're here as well as the goats they just bring a little bit of life and happiness to kind of everyday life here hello lovelies elon tofu looking strong hey no eating my jacket [Music] let me in hello tofu no elon are not playing that game no no [Music] elon the only male likes to headbutt these days but i found his kryptonite because if he comes there's like a snow oh look elon sees me now he thinks it's a game [Music] oh no we're not playing this game it's not a game stop it stop wow kryptonite you're not gonna go in the snow are you doing a baby to come in the snow ah it's like an island of safety for me oh what here you can headbutt me your big strong guy when you head about me and now you're in the snow oh he did it oh you look very majestic elon yet scared of the snow defeated elon walks back down the hill oh just like gordo is my favorite cat tofu you're my hero winner first looking nice keeps you warm see toppo just wants to hang out but you don't want to destroy you not a bad life probably my favorite thing over the last month was a few of these field trips that i was able to go on you know being out here for 11 months now you hear about certain places and people that might have similar struggles to my own all right i just got the phone i have some very exciting news related to the rebuilding of the cabins here at cerro bordeaux so just under an hour away there's another mine called darwin and darwin mines was established in 1874. and cerro gordo and darwin were very interconnected a lot of the miners from here would go over there some of them would come over here and it was a very similar lawless place where murders ran high you know i think at its peak at a few thousand residents and there's another major mine over there and i had heard through the grapevine that they were looking to get rid of a few cabins these are cabins that they needed to take down for this reason or that and the wood would be the exact same period and style as the mining cabins here i like darwin a lot because it shares a lot of the history with cerro gordo you know some of the main characters in this town's past played a role over there as well you know that town was established in 1873 this was 1865. you know a lot of miners would go from here to there or from there to here and so there was this connection between the two towns that overtime was lost you know this this general store that i'm sitting right now this is victor beaudry's general store and he was one of the biggest guys at cerro gordo you know he owned a lot of mining claims he brought water to sterile gold at one he was kind of involved in everything and over in darwin around 1875 he brought water over there a second big connection is the one and only load the travis and lola owned brothels here at cerro gordo and she also owned property in darwin and in panama springs the other place that i go this month finally the big character between these two towns is a guy named ned reddy and ned reddy is kind of one of my favorite unknown characters of the american west he was a gunslinger you know he was very well known in this area for his skills with his pistol you know i know people talk about like doc holliday and johnny ringo and billy the kid and the sundance kid and wyatt earp and all these guys but if you look at this book called the encyclopedia of gunslingers of the american west reddy has more mentions than any of them he was on their level if not beyond them and so to think that he was both here and in darwin's amazing and here at cerro gordo he owned a saloon and he owned reddy's garage and so the chapel here wasn't always a chapel back in the day was a mechanics garage and it was owned by mr reddy and so just to think that just down there was a building owned by this infamous gunslinger who also owned a saloon here and in darwin and in panama city to kind of create the trifecta there between these three towns of this month is amazing you know and i love just discovering these little connections within cerro gordo's history and they take you down different rabbit holes to learn about all right i'm headed over to darwin i'm really excited it feels like i'm back in the old days and trying to strike a deal with another mine owner from a neighboring mine i've heard a lot about darwin i've heard it's beautiful and i've read a little bit about the history so i'm really excited to go over there and see it in person and i'm sure that'll bring me back to do even more research when i get home but hopefully we can work something out we can restore some of these cabins and the scenery out here is beautiful you know it's kind of an amazing road all right i'm a little bit before town proper right now and i think that i go left here because i think the mine he said was before the town itself and now what i'm looking for is a flagpole to indicate his office so let's look for a flagpole more cabins it just looks stunning and it looks like ahead of me i do see the flagpole these cabins are awesome [Music] i'm gonna put down the camera last thing you want to do is put a camera's always right right away so let's go down here just wrapped up with jack the owner up here darwin and he's a real solid dude i'm gonna go back to darwin itself the main town show you guys around a little bit so here you can see some of kind of how the cabins are here in darwin as you can see it's kind of that weather aged wood that's very similar to what cerrogordo would be which i think is just beautiful you know [Music] and there's a lot of them the hope is to bring some of them over to sarah gordo to make some of the cabins we're rebuilding maybe part of the hotel look a lot more like it used to all right well what you can see it says old darwin post office right across the street is a darwin dance hall and next to is a darwin station so this is kind of i think main street darwin right here there's a number of these sculptures out here that are obviously by the same artist you'll see one there a few more over here and they're very cool and they're all kind of just scattered throughout the town [Music] jim honold [Music] we're kind of in the town core and way up there you can still see the waste rock and mine machinery where the actual mine is there's a few more of those statues and there's a bunch more over there as well so pretty much everywhere you look you'll see some of those around the town so that's kind of it from darwin like i said it's a small little place i'll give a proper tour later for now i need to get on my way to the next stop of panama springs after the darwin experience it was time to go to panama springs in the middle of death valley and they are completely off the grid there's been a hotel there since 1937. so you imagine they have a lot of experience about how to run hospitality locations off-grid i've been banging my head up against the wall trying to get concrete up here you know these companies are just taking me for a ride saying one week that they'll do it the next week that they won't so finally to kind of like take matters into my own hands i reached out to the guy that runs panaman and i said hey you know would you mind if i came over there and just see how you guys did it because i knew that they had a mobile concrete batch plant you know they kind of make their concrete on site very generous he invited me out so i packed up my truck once again went down some twisty and turny roads down into the death valley and it was amazing you know it's really incredible to see how much they just have there they're completely off the grid right so they make their own electricity and everything you can imagine was on site there you are panama springs and right away right over there you can see the little mobile concrete plant so this is how they make a concrete out here at panama you know it's a whole operation where rock comes in it gets sifted rock goes off goes up gets sifted more so you get the fine stuff and you know we're out here in death valley so you gotta figure out ways to get stuff done and so i just had you know aaron was very kind with his time to tell me what he knew about concrete and doing it out in the desert and so got some new ideas and they were getting closer to the concrete situation for me the main thing i took away from these trips was just a sense of self-reliance you know i've been up here kind of in the city mentality waiting on all these different operators or companies to carry out different tasks that i need done and that's just not the mentality that they have at darwin or a panamant you know when i went to darwin jack there showed me machinery that he had to put up his own telephone poles if he needed he told me he had just bought 50 miles of electrical poles and the day i was there he had the truck out with a crane and his guys were running new electrical poles you know you have to take this mentality that you're on a deserted island and you got to figure stuff out yourself and then when i went to panama it really drove it home because over at panama aaron's got a whole lot and this lodge is full of machinery and stuff that they may one day need and they're self-reliant you know they if they need to pour a pad and build a building they don't have to wait two months for some construction company to slot them in they're gonna take things into their own hands and get it done and so that's why i've been thinking about a lot this month you know obviously it's gonna take a while for me to get the resources together to have that type of machinery you know we're talking about tens or hundreds of thousand dollars worth of machinery and i'm not there but it did change my mentality i don't want to get stuck in a situation like i'm in with the concrete i never want to be waiting for a company again i want to be able to handle these things myself and who knows maybe five ten years down the road you know i have that same sense of self-reliance that i saw in these two guys and i gotta say it really it really made an impact on me this month it does feel like an island sometimes up here just removed from everything else but going to these other mining towns and having these guys just open up their doors and not just offer their equipment but their expertise as well felt very much like you know now there's a series of islands and i think every day that i come out here i feel more at home here and i feel more connected to the community whether it's a business owner in town texting me asking me how everything's going or this channel i mean this channel is probably the coolest thing to happen to me in the last decade or i can't even remember when i mean every week i try to be in the premier chat talking live with everybody and it's just amazing to be able to interact with people from all over the world so that's why i think sometimes when i feel alone up here or that i'm kind of you know on this island i'm able to tap into the youtube community and tap into the local community more and more and i really don't take that for granted i really really really think this is something special and i just love to see the community develop around the channel and it's so cool to be able to share this stuff with you guys every week and i try to respond as many things as i can if you have a question that i didn't answer hit me up on instagram handle there's just brent w underwood i really appreciate you guys taking an interest in this it's really made this last 11 months so special for me and i hope you guys stick around for the next 11 months you know who knows where this goes thank you guys so much thank you the other kind of side benefit this month of going to these different towns was just spending some time in my truck going through the desert you know the desert is a beautiful place sometimes you forget that and there's just something super special about being alone in a car driving through the desert i just think it leads you to different thoughts that maybe you don't have every day and i mean there's few things better than a drive through the desert [Music] you know i grew up in the flatlands of florida so mountains and deserts are relatively new to me but there's something about the scale of the landscape here that's breathtaking you know it's truly awe-inspiring and awe is something that's missing a lot today you know i didn't experience it nearly as often living in a city or growing up in the suburbs and awe is humbling you know it's inspiring it forces respect and a bit of fear it reminds you of your place in the world and that we're all connected and it's calming to me and awe is something that doesn't happen every day you know but out here driving between these cities this month it's what struck me the most my head would involuntarily tilt back and i'd gasp without realizing i pulled my truck over the side of the road on a handful of times and i just sit and stare at the way light was hitting a joshua tree i was like a bug attracted to a porch light and out here there's such a variety of these awe-inspiring scenes you know you turn your head one way and you're dominated by the mountain ranges they're looming there showing you all three forms of water at once with snow and streams and mist it's enchanting and it's almost like calling you to its peak making you wonder what's up there what's the view like up there giving you that human instinct to want to climb it to conquer it in some ways but you can never conquer mountains because like the haitian proverb says beyond mountains more mountains you know there's always more to see and you don't know what else is out there until you get to the top and then you turn your head the other way and there's the desert just sitting there exposed and to me the desert is really intimate it's just you in the desert you know there's nowhere or nothing to hide all the desert is before you there's no city sounds no lights no noises there's not even birds chirping or brooks babbling there's nothing to distract you from your emotions and thoughts you might want to avoid and most the time your cell phone doesn't work and the radio isn't picking up any stations and that's the best times you know those are the best times to be in the desert because you're just left there to look at the desert and sit with your thoughts and once you get comfortable with that you're just left to truly appreciate the beauty all around you and there's no pretense in the desert you know no one is trying to be fancy or fool anyone what you see is what you get and here in the high desert you get both you get deserts and mountains and sometimes you might just get that magical blend where a stream passes through a desert and is surrounded by mountains and by that stream there might be horses and cows and it's almost too much to bear you know it's like aw overload and temporarily shuts you down to where you just sit in your parked truck and stare at a cow for an hour and a half well that's what happened to me anyways and i just think i owe a lot to the landscapes here i've learned about peace from the mountains and desert from this constant sense of awe all around me and it's something i don't take for granted yet and it's something i hope i never take for granted and even if you don't have mountains or deserts around you i hope you find a way to feel that sense of awe in your everyday life it's a truly beautiful thing [Music] you

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 812,569

Keywords:

Id: zFygGNxmnpA

Length: 36min 17sec (2177 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Warduckling]

Amazing video and the last minutes were amongst my favorites ever. Sending love from New Zealand, Brent, were solitude and nature are almost a way of life (and I love it!)