Living Without Running Water (In A Ghost Town)

water it's the key to life but it's one of those things that's very easy to take for granted if you've never been without it but if you live in an abandoned ghost town that hasn't had reliable running water for 150 years you tend to think about water a lot and that's what this video is going to be about it's going to be about the past present and future of the water problem here at cerro gordo and what i do to survive every day without any running water [Music] so throughout the history of sarah gordo water has been the missing puzzle piece and that's true of my time here too you know a week ago water was flowing out of this thing two months ago it wasn't two years ago when we bought the place i was told that it was impossible to get water ever running out of the mine again and so this quest for water has been one of the white whales here at cerrogoro for as long as the town has existed and remember before we bought it i was well aware that there was no running water at cerro gordo but i don't think you fully appreciate what that means until you're without water for a while meaning right now it's cold outside right let's say you go outside it's a winter you want to go in and wash your hands in warm water impossible without running water wash dishes very difficult without running water take showers everything is more difficult without running water so in the summers here at cerro gordo i can shower by putting a bag in the sun but there's snow on the ground it changes things the current way i take a shower here at cerro gordo is back in this back bathroom of the gordon house this is the only shower that works because the house i stay in doesn't have a shower so if you look in here this is the setup as it stands and this setup was designed by a volunteer we had up here named richard so i appreciate that but this 55 gallon drum holds water i fill this with five gallon drums this is what heats the water and then basically turn it on and there you go you're able to take a shower and in order to make sure that the water isn't freeze there's always a little heater in here just because it gets real cold even the houses there is a way to take showers and i assure you that i do take showers here at cerro gordo even during the winter so obviously all the sinks in the house if you're checking them on nothing so to wash dishes this old school you know put a pan here put a pan there fill it up with water from this jug wash clean put over there now you get used to it it's not quite as easy as my dishwasher in austin but it'll do that if you need to really warm stuff up boil the water there and out here all these jugs are basically being staged before being filled so there's always water receptacles here right now they're pretty empty and these will go down the hill to keeler and down there in keeler seven miles down i own a little trailer and that trailer has a water spigot and i'm able to use as much water as i can from that water spigot so i'd go down there fill up the jugs bring them back up but water can be very heavy uh i believe about eight pounds per gallon and my little truck can't take that much you know i have two trucks related to serogoto i have the one that i brought from texas and that one is a very small two-wheel drive base model 2008 tacoma so it can't drag anything and then there's a larger trd tacoma that's kind of like the towns and that has a blown head gasket and those are expensive to fix and so for right now as you can see i haven't been able to haul very much water but the jugs are here moving up here i was like we'll figure that in the future and the best lead that we had when we bought the place was somebody had told me that there was water once in the main union mine and this is the union mine shop right behind me this cage goes 900 feet straight down and every 100 feet there's levels of mine and around the 700 foot level somewhere in the 1950s they discovered that water was pooling there so they dug a stump so imagine like digging like a little box out of rock where the water collects and then they would pipe it from maybe 50 yards back in the mine shaft to the main shaft here and then 700 feet straight up right to here and then underneath here goes into town and that's how the water gets to town and from maybe the 50s until the early 2000s that's what they did saragordo had water it wasn't a lot of water if it's performing its best it produces something like 250 gallons of water per day from down there but if you're one or two or three people that's plenty of water you know you can get by but somewhere around 15 years ago the pump went out and given the danger liability and potential expense of going down there and fix it they decide not to replace it so for the past 15 years or so cerro gordo has been without any running water and if this town's ever going to become a place that can host more people and allow more people to come up and enjoy the water situation has to get figured out so i started thinking about it more talking to different people i met a few guys that had been around for a while i started talking about the water and how i was told it was impossible to get water out of the mine anymore one of them's you know i liked his daddy's like well you know nothing's impossible and i met another guy who actually had planned to go down and replace the pump for the old owners and he actually had a replacement pump already and so slowly over the course of a few weeks almost the dream team developed right so we had somebody that was comfortable running the hoist somebody that had the pump already an electrician safety people and guys just with a huge amount of knowledge so the crew came together they looked to me for the thumbs up i thought about a while gave them the thumbs up and maybe about three or four months ago we went down there for the first time i remember the first time down there it's exciting right so you don't know a bunch of things one you don't know if water will be down there anymore you don't know that the pump can be replaced you don't know if the piping all the way up is burst and even if you get the water to here you know the town's still a half a mile away so i remember crew came together that day everyone was kind of excited sent people down went and there's water so that's a huge excitement right two or three weekends later went back down with a new pump replaced the pump flipped the switch and waited and we thought water started going but water wasn't getting up here so we took the hoist back down and realized about 200 feet after the pump when it's going up by around 500 level the pipe was burst so it was time to replace the pipe so a couple weekends later we got about 500 feet of pecs went back down replaced the water from where it was broken all the way to the top all the way to right here and then again turn back on the pump and waited it's it funny right so you turn on the pump it's not an immediate thing you have to fill up 700 feet of pipe before anything gonna come out here and so it's a weight a weight and then slowly this thing just started beating you know as the pump was like it was almost like a heartbeat was back at cerro gordo [Music] 2 45. that's right water afternoon water is coming first time since uh well hell's been 14 years almost 15. look at that water oh hell yeah i remember the first time i saw water dripping out of this it was like the best day at cerro gordo yet you know it was like hope that hey maybe this is the solution and so we were all pumped we were ready to you know break out the cold beer and the hot steaks and then the water stopped working again about two days after it started water stopped we couldn't figure out why and so for a couple months we had no water again and then about two weeks ago the team came back together dave your time right now is 132. all right is the crew going down like craig johnny of course of course let's look just like what we yeah snakes our way [Music] all right sneaking past the 550 going to 700 700 level of cerro gordo should we get off yes all right there's the pump this is how we get water here at cerro gordo we're 700 feet underneath the ground oh this is craig's handiwork yep so we're in 700 feet under the ground inspecting the pipe oh nice fancy led light looks great we keep going to the actual stump the water source oops let's see the pipe leaving all the way back here to where cerro gordo gets water look at that it's incredible you haven't got ducks down here just didn't know he had life ow sweet the guys went down rebuilt the pump and then slowly you heard the heartbeat again and water was back there got a lot of water awesome chugging away what's that we got water baby what the hell where did that come from 700 feet [Music] damn look at that thing chugging away too yeah oh yes all right well done guys these are the crew that got this all done good job [Laughter] and then about two days ago the water stopped working again this time it wasn't a problem of the pump or the line but somewhere in this vicinity it froze you know it's freezing cold outside and we have heat tape on a lot of it but not heat tape in all parts and so it's just too cold right now so i've turned off the pump again but in the spring i hope to get the pump going again and have water at zero once again but even if we get the water going again from the mine that's not gonna work for the hotel that's not gonna work for any future development that we do here and so i need to come up with a different solution water from a mine is fine for my personal consumption but um no matter how many lab tests you have i'll never be comfortable using that for you know the main hotel so over the past few months i've been exploring different options these options include piping it all the way from keeler keeler about five miles straight down if you were to go by the power lines does have a well and they would be willing to sell us some of their water now this will take a lot of things to go right i'd have to get a easement all the way up the mountain and then there's the fact that you're pumping water up 5000 feet in elevation which will require multiple stations and pumps and just an extraordinary cost one that i definitely can't bite the bolt on right now you know two and probably the most practical that we use for the hotel is we'll haul up water and the county's approved that for the hotel meaning we'll get a state certified water hauler have massive tanks both in the ground and out of the ground that people can't see fill those up you know every two weeks wherever they need to get filled so that's kind of the interim option three so the other day this guy came up and his brother owned some property north of here and he was telling me about how his brother had a water witch come and you know i guess a water witch is somebody who can tell where there might be water underneath the ground and apparently it's something to do with their body chemistry it seems a little wacky to me but listen after being up here for two years with no water i'm going to try everything i'm going to leave no stone unturned so if we get a water roach up here which is hard to even say out loud maybe we could locate an area that would be worth drilling you know and for the longest time i was told that drilling at such a high elevation is useless just because you'd have to go so far to get to any water table but you figure drilling technology has advanced a lot in the last 150 years so there's always the potential to drill i would say that's a outside chance especially after some other engineers and people that i've talked to they're not super confident about that you never know that is another chance next we have rain and snow collection you know it's snowing right now it's actually dripping you can hear it dripping on the roof and that's an option there's a lot of strange legalities around collecting rain water and snow water particularly in california but if i was to use it for like gardening and things like that i think creating some type of guzzler or you know like system that would store some of the rain and snow runoff would at least be useful you know any drop of water that we could have up here is going to go to use water has been a problem at cerro gordo as long as this town's been a town you know the town was established in 1865 and at first they had to bring everything up on mules including the water and at its peak sarah was using 35 000 gallons of water a day so there's a lot of mules but in 1869 mortimer belshaw the guy whose house is right across the street found three springs surrounding cerro gordo and ran lines to them these springs from 1869 to 1873 provide water serogordo you know it's boomtown again and there's all these articles in the newspaper about the skyrocketing price of soap and bathtubs in the area because all the miners are finally taking showers well it looks like this is about as far as the razor's going to go as you can see it's fully off its own wheels it gets just thicker over there but we are in luck because it stopped us just in time to see some of the former spring operations for cerro gordo and we're probably i don't know three four miles maybe from cerro gordo if you look down there towards death valley you'll see you'll see two of the cabins that were part of them spring operations here at cerro gordo so just down there those cabins let's hike down there but the sun is setting it's stunning back here right i love stuff like this you know i've never been down to those even i know they existed i've never made the hike because i usually want to keep going to a place called the salt tram which is about another three miles [Music] all right so this is it tucked away out here in the mountains as part of cerro gordo's spring system and so back in the day all the way over here maybe three miles away or so he's trying to get water right to cerro gordo never been enough water at cerro gordo still isn't today they tried everything you know you can see they tried piping it three four miles back up and over into our cerro gordo viz today this just kind of remains it's really beautiful over there though so still and quiet [Music] that thing down there so cool to think that everything had to be brought in by mules and hiked in [Music] it's incredible really incredible and that each piece of this ted ties back to sarah's history [Music] so maybe there's some other stuff oh there's a bunch of stuff over there there's more pipe system of piping there's another big thing down there speaking of walk the wash so think about this so there's this cabin here there's a wash right next to it i bet if you were to walk that wash i mean all the way down into death valley there be some amazing artifacts in there i'd love to do that one day probably not today just because as you can see the sun's already behind those mountains and the shadows creeping up that hill quick i'm glad i came over here today you know i have ever been over here i think about water a lot but i made the trek over maybe we can find some little souvenir to bring back or the very least let's walk to that cliff oh man that's got to be a view [Music] i mean if nothing else if you're working at that little spring house you'd have had incredible views look at this peak does it just drop i i'm not a big fan of heights oh yeah oh yeah yeah we're gonna back up or we're gonna turn right around there oh man oh look over there yeah it's just like a straight drop oops it's exactly what you don't want to hear when you're buying a straight job oops and my shoelace is untied perfect i am pretty stuck so they have to dig out underneath it because i am not going anywhere damn it just before it got dark i should get myself out of this disaster somebody cost me my jacket just give a little bit of grip but it's a strong jacket plus if anything looks cooler now yeah it was not liking the snow here we're out right back home look how freaking crazy it is right now out here oh my god so beautiful [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] think about heading down as you can see i never like to go down or up with an empty bed so we got gas water i can't bring up that much water because this truck is very weak and i'm gonna fill the rest with trash and the way back up i will bring supplies propane and fresh water so for now let me go take you down to keeler and show you where we get the water [Music] no discussion about water and sara gordo would be complete without talking about lake owens and keeler so right now we're in keeler i'm actually at the keeler pool club as you can see it's seen better days but so is the lake and lake owens the lake behind me used to be seven miles across and 70 feet deep it was important for a lot of reasons the ore from cerro gordo used to be brought down by bucket put on boats just over there and shipped across the lake and from there the trains would go into los angeles where it would be sold so this is it this is lake owens today and i think really close to right here is where the oar used to come all the way from cerro gordo ship down packed on boats and sent on its way you know and if there are springs ever sort of chance up by cerro gordo don't say much of a chance now after this lake's drained but as you can see nature always wins so to speak and there's birds coming back there's fish and wildlife coming back in small pockets and who knows maybe one day this will all have water over it again but sometimes i like to sit down here and think can you imagine the views imagine this is like a 70 foot deep lake surrounded by all this but you got to think of it both ways if this was still a 70 foot lake i probably never would have been able to be involved with cerro gordo so for now it's part of the past part of the history and another of my favorite little towns in this area to me both owens lake and keila are beautiful i watch the sunset over both of them almost every single night and i remind myself that both are part of cerro gordo's past and sarah gordo is a part of both of their past and they're both these monuments to the history and hardship of the area you know they're also monuments to decisions that people made over a hundred years ago and how those decisions are still playing out today and that helps remind me that the decisions that i'm making will hopefully have an impact hundreds of years from now as well and if you look at it from a distance owens lake looks like a forgotten desert and keeler looks like a town that time has forgotten but i think like everything in life that depends on what you're focused on if you look closely at owens lake you'll see that the birds are coming back and there's new vegetation everywhere and i just find myself filled with gratitude for everything that is not just you know what could be if cerro gordo had perfect running water the first time i ever went up here i wouldn't appreciate every time i went somewhere and the faucet just works so in that way the hardship has given me a greater appreciation for the small things i try to remind myself whenever i flip a switch and just turns on that's more than the founders of cerrogordo had at their disposal i try to put myself in the position to think about what it would be like without it so in that way i'm grateful for the water struggles at cerro gordo and owens lake and keeler you know they all help me appreciate the hardships that come along with living here and i think all improve my life in that way [Music] you

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 1,137,945

Rating: 4.9625096 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: RWzj8HlMGLE

Length: 27min 51sec (1671 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/JethroTheFrog]

He knocked it out of the park with this one! Beautiful video, and it answered a lot of questions.

[u/Sensistuck]

I wonder about the water in the mine if it is drinkable it had a lot of debris in it and a film on the top. Either way find a good pump and I think that is you best bet. It amazes me how much materials are in the mines and how much work went into the spring cabins/piping back in the day for it only to work for a few years.