Spring Updates Living In An Abandoned Ghost Town!

hello there my name is Brent and behind me is the abandoned mining town of COG Gordo and back in the 1800s this was a mining boom town there were thousands of residents hundreds of buildings and they pulled $500 million worth of ore out of these Hills you see behind me I've been living up here for the past four years trying to bring the town back to life I spent my days exploring the abandoned Minds fixing up the old buildings going on Hikes and just trying to understand everything that I can about this town and over the past few months a a lot has happened I diagnosed the Water Source 700 ft down an abandoned mining shaft learned a bunch of new history planted some trees and a whole bunch more so in this video we're ring into everything going on up here over the last few months skeleton maybe a sheep spooky [Music] so it has been over 4 years that I have been roaming these hills around Cog Gordo which is hard to believe you know that's as long as high school or college I feel like somehow even more has happened up here than both of those um there's some ceroni arities I moved somewhere new I really put myself out of my comfort zone I made friends that I'm going to call friends for life I learned a bunch of new things and I feel like on the other side I'm a totally different person than the guy that came up here four years ago in slippers got stuck in a snowstorm in these days the logistical challenges are not how do I feed myself up here but how do I build a commercial building how do we get a massive water tank up the road how do I keep this town alive for future Generations [Music] I would say some of my best memories are right here inside of the Hoist house this is the home to the main M shaft here at sagoro behind me is the 900 ft drop that is the union mine and off of that there's about 30 Mi of Mines this is the first place that I had heard Whispers of water at Cog Gordo I had heard the maybe possibly there was water 700 ft down this m shaft behind me and maybe possibly it just needed to replace a pump and maybe possibly there's a pool of water beyond that but it all just seemed like fairy tale really but after enough time up here I met some guys in the local community and they're like no let's give it a go so we got this cage working made our way down there I saw the water with my own eyes for the first time we ended up running 700 ft of pipe up back here and we got water flowing back up here for the first time thanks to the original water crew and it was very exciting it just felt like everything was possible again up here at Stog Gordo and it stopped and it was an ongoing battle for about 2 years the water would go on go off go on go off and eventually about a year ago I just said forget about it we're not going to worry about the pump at the 700t level we have this military truck now that Dave Sparks gave me and we were just Trucking up water left and right but now that I'm thinking about things like having a pond um all of these other items I realized how nice it would be to get that couple hundred gallons of water out of the mine that we were getting every day and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back down there and I'm going to show exactly what the setup is down there right now and we have a lot of very smart people that watch this Channel that I know in the past have offered suggestions and I haven't been that receptive but I am very receptive to any ideas of how we get this pump producing on a regular level and I'm willing to kind of do the work now and so we're going to go down 700t we're going to look at the pump the water level but beyond that we're going to go all the way down to the N9 herit level and at the nine herit level is where I've been building out a luxury hotel sweets of sort and I've just loved spending time down there and I would say that's a big reminder of how much things have changed in the past four years if you had told me four years ago that I would have been even going down underground at all I would have said no way but uh things changed next time I have that sitting here waiting to go down too sounds good hey just FYI all right we are headed 700t down check on the water and do some other things all right after the Treck I am down here 700 ft underground at sarog goo's Union mine and I'm going to give you the most detailed look I've ever given about the water system because I want help before twoing suggestions I don't I know yes if I put pumps at the other levels up that would be better do not tell me to put a pump at every single level on the way up one at most ideally none but for now let's go back and let's check out where the water actually comes from all right we are way back here and you can see this is a very wet part of the sagoto mines and this is where the water begins it gets brought up and over here it then comes over here to where you see a small Ravine water goes down this pipe and water goes back over to the sump which we're going to go to right now and now that pipe takes a hard right turn and it comes here so you can see it's dripping pretty reliably and so this is probably about 15 ft long by 6 to 7 ft across by let's try to get a depth so people can have a full measurement let me find something to measure with there we go that is how deep it is so it's about 3 to 4 ft deep and it comes in there it goes into the barrel thing so the pipes don't float up there is a float you can see it here if it's still connected I don't know but from here it goes into this this white PEX that goes up and black this could be an issue it doesn't like going up but it's kind going to go up this grade a little bit it comes over here and goes into this pump this pump is a Neptune model number 535 sn3 HP and this is the pump that sends the water to the surface so the water comes in there there's all these checks goes up into here it enters this galvanized pipe momentarily so this comes over to here then it enters new pecs about 100t above this so that is the current water setup here at sordo I would love any and all tips of how to get this thing working reliably how to get more water out of it I think if we lined that area where the water's dripping and maybe increased the sump if we came out here and chiseled it out another five or six feet maybe then it could hold more water so maybe then we could pump more water if we're getting more water from the top but I'm open to all solutions I want two things one how to increase the amount of water that we can pull from the pump I think that's really important and then number two is how we can have it be more reliable let's hear it your best mapped out plan you know if you have a great one I'd love to even bring you out here and you could help implement it with me this is hat in hand looking for help so that's going with the water and I'm hoping to get it kind of fixed for not just the summer but year round it would just make a huge difference this trip to the 900 is to try to control the dust a little bit you know I went down there was just rotting Woods for a long time and uh a lot of dirt you know he still have this Grand ambition of having a whole house 900 F underground and uh got some extra supplies and fun stuff to get into that now we just wait all right I am back to my home away from home look at this this looks great our beds been covered no dust on that thing my desk this is a where I recorded Ghost Town living looks actually now with a little dust on it my book it has took months but I have brought power down here I brought internet down here I brought beds down here about all these things and I think the long term this is going to be a whole house all right so this is the area that I kind of want to control the dust at first so I'm going to lift up the bed I'm going to level some more get some more of this material out here than this and I know there's better ways to do this but right now all we're trying to accomplish is controlling the Dust the reason that I'm down here again is yes it's cool to have a room but also to the right over here there should be an entrance to five lower levels of the M five levels that have not been explored by anybody living the hope is that by digging through the collapses that I have to do to get to those levels I could come back to a relatively dustless area there's an area that once upon a time I went to that a little bit of Galina I'm wondering if the G is still there let's go a little exploring I'm going to show you guys more of the 900t level we see if we can't find a couple new things we're back at it we exploring and no matter how many times I've done it it just brings me joy looking through these things trying to imagine what used to be here brings back memories of when I was down here with Dave Sparks and Heavy D we browsing around or the first time I was down here right after I hit a million subscribers I brought my plaque down here to preserve it let's see what that looks like after couple years now wow way more water is dripping here than I've ever seen before that might mean that my uh plaque looks extra special now here you go if you ever wondered what is a YouTube plaque that's put 900 ft down B in mind looks like after 2 or 3 years there's your answer thanks to you guys that will remain I know there's an upshoot that one time I went up a little bit I want to go up more looks like as they going up this little tube here see down below found a little pocket of Galina there they chisel most of it out but couple little bits remain some really good malachite azerite in there so the blue and green we CH a little bit more of this out see if we can't bring it back up and refine a little more hey any day you find Gina it's a pretty good day now it's time to do the slip and slide down this is way steeper than look on uh the GoPro see actually if I could get some of that beautiful Galina or M made over there is that green some really good stuff in here that was like a timbered shaft almost over that way you see all the timber what do we got here too we got uh oh look what we got this is exciting this is cool we have an old drill steel and the crazy thing about this is I've never seen a bit without Foy Ruster so that's what it more looked like there see almost steel so this would be a drill bit that would drill into the Rock to P the dynamite later all the way down this look at that blue oh look at that azerite oh the amalekite look at these little pockets even over there if I can sneak over there without falling down this hole oh it's kind of cracked we get that piece see I had that steel I definitely could oh start decorating my room down there look at that look at all those colors in that you got blue up here some green some red some other color green that is some blue I've never seen that much Azure right in one place it's huge too this might be my favorite little tube that I've gone into there's just so much ooh look there's Galina inside of the green and look at this this Gina is all up this tube this whole tube there we're just chasing the chasing a vein [Music] when it comes to the logistics of living up here reliable power is probably right underneath reliable water as far as the top of the list and the power goes out here a couple times a year it's not if it's going to go out it's a when it's going to go out and so I am very excited that recently I added this into the mix this is an ankor solx 3800 and this thing is just a beast it's 6,000 Watts it has 120 and 240 hookups and it can just power not just a couple appliances this thing can power the whole bunk house for a week at a time if I needed it to there's solar panels on something like this and even plug it into a car if you need to and this thing is just added the peace of mind that I needed living in a place like this and if you're interested they're offering 22% off in order all you have to do is use the code that you see on the screen I also put it down in the description I put a link in the description this thing is amazing it is just changed the game for us up here and I hope you guys check it out [Music] so behind me is probably the main project up here at SRO Gordo over the past four years this is the rebuilding of the American Hotel here and it's very hard to believe it's been almost 4 years since we lost the old hotel and the rebuilding began and when I look at this thing I just remember all the steps along the way I think about every single one of those blocks in the basement that had to be loaded down at the bottom of the mountain brought up here I think about the concrete underneath those blocks that I poured with Dave Sparks and a bunch of others or all the wood that had come up the framing that happened the steel beams inside of that there's just a thousand memories locked up in this place and hundreds of people that I've met and so let's talk about the latest with the American Hotel all right let's power so I need to go from here trench all the way over to the back of the hotel there cuz the last thing I want is another power pole in town aesthetically I think it takes away from a lot so we're going to go underground need to come down here trench down there all the way over there that's what we're about to [Music] do all right and just like that we have our trench a pad Mount Transformer box here here that's then going to power the entire Hotel we're going rock in a roll weather's great kind of make some serious progress on the hotel we're just waiting for the power company to come out put in the line put in the Transformer box and the power source will be good to go for the American Hotel the roofer it's coming any day now we're going to put on the pernament roof I think that by the time I make the next month update video The Roof is going to be done the siding is going to be here windows are going in the attrici has been here over the last few weeks making his plan for this first floor and the big hurdle right now is a plumber if you are a commercial plumber or you know a commercial plumber I would love to hear from you once again the hotel is just an exercise and patience for me and knowing that these projects take time and trying to zoom out a little bit but I think that there's always you know that idea of controlling what you can control and sometimes when I can't control you know the big project like the hotel focus on little projects I did a lot of that over the last few months as well and so while the hotel gets most of the attention most of the thought most of the focus a bunch of other stuff has happened around the town not just in the last few months but in the last four years you know this building I'm sitting right now didn't even exist four years ago when I moved here or the dynamite Vault that we turn into a library up by the Hoist house or the hunter Studio that we're making into recording studio all of these things together have just changed the town and these past few months I've really been focusing on a couple small projects that will change my experience here [Music] too it is time once again to try to grow a garden up here at sarog Gordo this will be my third attempt and this time we have these items I never have any fruits and vegetables up here cuz it's so hard to get veggies up here so why not grow my own and in our first trench is going to go my most consumed vegetable that is broccoli so I want to get these seeds in get them watered and oo in a couple months we're going to have some veggies [Music] all right we got the broccoli the Brussels sprouts and the corn so far that's going to be it today we're going keep adding on to this and now we [Music] wait something that always seem like it' be very cool to have up here is a little pond it's AIT of water feature obviously we don't have tons of water to play with and so before I built a huge lake or anything I thought it'd be nice to try a little small one I'm interested over time what happen you know like what animals will return first I we going to give it a shot and uh you know hey it's a pond in the desert what could go [Music] wrong Co there experiment number one for the pond did not work I just used this plastic that we had laying around the town and I think it got punctured so we lost the water but the good news is I bought an actual pond liner with the felt so tomorrow I'm going to whip this up even having this little bit of water here feels good and so once we get a little Landscaping going on this the is going to transform now we're cooking now we got the felt down the liner down time to stack some rocks in here and this Pond's coming to life can't wait to see what animals come back and what happens here be a nice feature the M all of this so we're getting there and just like that we got some plants we got the broccoli coming in Brussels sprouts corn is looking great corn is going to be knee high by the 4th of July that's the goal we got zucchini just killing over here spinach is coming in we got pumpkin given a strong showing this box nothing I wonder if the soil in this is just no good look at this cord we're making it happen over here if we go beyond the boxes pond liner is Down rocks going in this is the Year this is the year I'm actually going to get some Harvest out of this Garden we're going to get a pond going we get some animals back this going to be a little shanga here at Cog Gordo one thing you will not see very many of around Cog Goro at least the town core is trees the main trees up here are pinion Pines and juniper trees and you'll see none here in town because 100 years ago miners were chopping down any tree that they could see for firewood for charcoal for building materials or just to get them out of the way and it always been a little sad I thought this place could look so cool with more trees on it you know if you go over the saddle that way immediately there's trees you know it's just a different setting completely and to take that quote they say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is today so I lot some pinion Pines we're going to put these right around here and I'll update you each year when they're 1 in [Music] taller and listen I don't think it's good to name pretty much anything after me it's not my goal but I'm going to say this if these little trees become a forest right here on this Ridge call this little Forest on the ridge right here Underwood Forest you can see I got them all the way up the hillside got a little pool around each one we are going to watch as these grow and grow and grow so yes one day right here on this Ridge with this view of the Town Underwood [Music] Forest one thing I have wondered about for a very long time is what miners back in the day would have eaten you I've seen headlines for meat markets up here for breweries down in Lone Pine for restaurants up here I even got this inventory list from January 1st 1919 of this exact General Store we're in right now it talks about all the different items for sale and so luckily this month I had friend of mine Max Miller who is one of my favorite YouTubers he has tasting history with Max Miller he came up we filmed a couple videos and I was able to talk to him about what the typical Cuisine might have been like for the miners up at sarog Gordo so the the big question is where are they eating and who's doing the cooking yes are they out near the mines because then it's going they're going to have really basic food uh they often said it was the the three bees beans biscuits and bacon you know they'd have flour they could make biscuits either with sour dough which a lot of miners kept with them they kept some sour dough or they would use used solarius which is basically baking powder their bacon was usually salt pork it's basically like raw bacon but it has so much salt in it that it it stays preserved so you have to soak it over and over and over to get enough salt out and even then it's really salty they had something called the free lunch which was a staple of saloon culture and you would go in and pay for a drink and then you got to eat lunch for free and the idea was you're going to drinks and we're going to make our money back and that didn't always happen which is the same thing today you go into a bar and it's pretzels and peanuts and stuff can you tell us a little bit about like where do oysters fit into the mining culture that's kind of an interesting thing in the middle and and through the end of the 19th century in all of the United States oysters were were huge back East you had like the oyster craze where they were just wiping out entire beds of oysters in the matter of years and that happened here too in in San Francisco in 1849 there were huge oyster beds around San Francisco and by the end of 1852 Gold Rush by the end of that year they were completely gone and there was actually there's a dish that is kind of known as the quintessential I struck it big dish when you found your gold or your silver you would go get a Hangtown fry and what that was was scrambled eggs that were cooked in bacon fat and mixed with oyster yeah I just love that like even those little insights into the past bring it to color is the way I would look at it you know more than in the past so I think that's just awesome and um if you guys are interested Max actually just made two or three videos about the cuisine in American mining towns so you check out his channel and yeah thanks for coming up this has been a lot of fun thanks for having me this has been awesome you know it's really cool being able to learn from all these different people I think that learning isn't something that just comes by chance you know you kind of have to seek it out and then once you have it you have to act upon it in a way so if you're out there you think of any people that might be able to come up and lend a little bit of expertise I'd love to know but uh it was great having Max up this month and I can't wait to have more people up in the [Music] future another very exciting thing that has happened in last few months is that my book Ghost Town living came out and thanks to all of you guys it hit the New York Times bestseller list to hit the USA Today bestseller list and a lot of others and it's just very exciting you know growing up books of always been a big part of my life and there's always that little bit of me that wanted to write a book that would always push down deep but thanks to SAR Gordo thanks to all you guys I feel like I finally had something to talk about something to say and it's it's a very weird feeling writing a book because you work on something for over a year trying to encapsulate the last three years of your life and then you put it out and then it's no longer yours um and so for me I tried to schedule some events around the launch week you know I knew I was going to be nervous I didn't think being up here pacing by myself inside my cabin would be a good idea so I had an event in Austin Texas I had one in Los Angeles and then eventually I had one here in Bishop California just about an hour north of me and it was awesome I just really enjoy meeting people offline the last night I was looking through my journal from my first month up here and there's an entry from March 25th 2020 and it said something to the fact it would be cool to develop a writing skill I think it'd be really nice to be able to put my words together but for now I'm tired and that was kind of the extent of it and it's cool to think you know over four years later I'm sitting here in a library uh that exists now Soro is and having a book out so thank you guys so much if you haven't yet I hope you check it out it's got some great stories I'd really appreciate it but um yeah I just wanted to share the news that was all possible thanks to all of you one thing that's continued no matter what the year has been some Explorations and I try to make myself almost go on these because I think on these projects you got to remember what excites you we're headed out that way and we're going to check out see if we can't find some areas I've never been to before w [Music] all right now we're hiking we're out in an area where I have never been so this is very cool there's very few places that I feel that's ever this quiet or that I almost feel a little bit like spooked even being the middle of the day there's just something Eerie about being so far from people so kind of being the Canyon's narrowing and I feel like this used to be a great place where some of the previous populations have hunt from my understanding they we kind of her animals into a chute like this stand above and hunt them from above and if they did that often times they would leave petroglyphs on the Rocks you know paintings of what they killed maybe as a remembrance of an offering as a way just to be remembered Canyon's kind of steepening up on me again sometimes this can mean there's a waterfall I don't know if that's the case I'll have to turn around but great pretty when it does this the end of the line we've come upon a very big waterfall likes of which I don't want to walk down that makes some great climbing though this is what happens when start's getting a little steeper around the edges a lot of times is what you'll get W that is cool look here right at the top of this Cliff skeleton maybe a sheep maybe a donkey I bet what happened is it walked down the wash got to the same Cliff couldn't get down that's pretty haunting a long time ago that bleached this is the bottom sheep mu anybody know over there as I was sitting up here you look very closely you'll see some cribbed rock which would mean a mine and below it you see some timbering but I wonder if this was a mule from the that when they left they just left them here spooky the other context clue I saw is behind this in the Rock way down here is that this must have been the road up and around they could have come in from sailing Valley up to the mine using the wash two just to avoid this Cliff let's scramble over there see if we can get a little closer to the mine maybe more of these guys over there too this definitely was a trail at some point and this washer must have gone away but we're getting closer you can see the cribbing there of whatever that was was doesn't look like there be much left this could have been a portal back in the day an entrance into the mine this could have been a shoot where they're loading the mine into something but not a lot here these days but it's crazy just when you think you know I was just saying oh it feels so cool to be so alone in the middle of nowhere boom humans have been here before there are shark teeth fossils all the way up here at 8500 ft at Zog Gordo that is something that I just read in the Mariam report a USGS report from the' 60s it was pointed out to me by Robert Sloan so we're going to get my dirt bike I don't know exactly where it is we have to guess based upon what the mar and Mar Port was talking about so I'm going to go take a route see if we can find any fossils hopefully some shark teeth how crazy would that be so let's go [Music] all right I probably have about 30 minutes maybe 25 for the sunsets and so we got a little bit of waste don't we're going to find these shark teeth tonight but if we do that would be very cool if nothing else I get a pretty good view of the sunset so we give it a shot all right so I'm basically where I wanted to go this is again just a guess it could be anywhere around here but I'm finding some stuff there's a lot of shell obviously I'm just picking up rocks and looking at them um this I mean is this a fossil you see that kind of like iron looking Circle that this feels like almost like a sponge or like a a a bone almost but it's got this it almost feels like foam very light it's perfectly circular on one side I take that back ask some people what that might be well today might just be a scouting Mission oh there's a bone maybe that other thing I did find was a bone I'm make keep hunting I think this could be a nice evening activity cuz if you look not bad sunset not bad at all all right don't think I found any shark teeth but I found a lot of something I think is interesting you all the shell I kept finding these like rounded bits most of the stuff I see up here is like Jagged broken off it's kind of like this these all these rounded edges that don't feel natural to me they're very light so I don't know where this is I'm going to bring it back to town and try to see if Steven the town manager who studied geology knows what those are but these are the M oh look that's another thing see oh wow look it's like it held something inside of it it's the same type of bonish material I wonder if I break that open if it had something in it like that see that there is almost like it like formed around something else it's like dirt inside I wonder if this is like of the insect that makes this feels almost like a nest or something gross this is like CL it just broke again oh look this one's got a hole in it too what the heck is this I'm going to bring these back back and we're going to investigate further what these could be brief update they were all discussed and this actually is a fossil of a shell so I did find a fossil first time out no shark teeth but these things are interesting apparently there's something in them that dissolved away but I think I'm on to it if I found a fossil of the shell in that spot there could be the teeth there next so stay tuned [Music] these past few months are the first time in my experience up at sagoro that part of the experience feels like a long time ago meaning if I look at a video from four years ago now I can barely remember what I was thinking feeling doing outside of what was captured in the video beyond that it just feels kind of like segments now almost like when you're in high school or college and there was freshman sophomore junior senior it kind of feels like that which is crazy because I've been up here longer than either of those experiences I think that's why coming out here and like seeing these fossils is it's kind of important you know the last when I cracked this Rock open the last time the dirt inside of it saw the sky was hundreds of millions of years ago and to me it just helps remember the interconnectedness of everything you know of us of our connection to the dirt under our feet I think that's what we're all looking for in some way whether it's more recent and we're looking up our family history about how do we fit in how are we connected you know or way in the past if we're debating the origins of the cosmos and all that or the in between which would be fossils you know everything is connected and I think the difference is the fossils that just get to leave behind their remains humans get to leave behind their actions every single day I that's what we leave behind more than anything else more than it remains is our actions that impact the world around us that impact every other person that's around us and all the way from the top to bottom and it's beautiful in a way it just feels very empowering that you do get to leave that imprint that Mark that reminder not just in remains in a rock but in your actions every single day and so uh four years into living up at the mountain that is what I'm thinking about that is what these fossils are reminding me of and that is what I'm leaving you with in this video and I just want to say thank you again you know this has been an amazing four years I'm very much looking forward to the next four years and uh the records that I'm able to leave behind in these videos and elsewhere hope you guys have an amazing week get out there check out your family history check out fossil history think about the cosmos whatever you need to do make a decisions and uh I will see you guys next time

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 295,755

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Id: 30V5Bf6WWeU

Length: 37min 30sec (2250 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2024