Latest / Core Memory / He Bought A Ghost Town And Became A YouTube Star - EP 91 Brent Underwood

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He Bought A Ghost Town And Became A YouTube Star - EP 91 Brent Underwood · Core Memory

0:00
SPEAKER_00: What is it like to buy a ghost town?
0:03
SPEAKER_00: That is what we get into on this week's episode with our guest, Brent Underwood.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, he bought the Cerro Gordo Mine in California.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: It's near Death Valley or in Death Valley.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: It was a silver, and I want to say copper, Mine that ran for many, many decades.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: It had a ghost town, an old town that is remarkably well preserved.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: Somehow or another, Brent ended up buying this and has turned it into quite the pet project.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: He's been...
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Exploring the mines.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: There's many, many, many miles of mines to go through there.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: He's been restoring the old hotel that used to be the center of the city,
0:52
SPEAKER_00: and he's built a massive YouTube channel around all this.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: He's an author.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: He's just a cool dude, a really good hang.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: We went to the mine.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: And spent a couple days.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I slept in a house from the 1800s.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: We used a Ouija board.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: And tried to summon some ghosts,
1:13
SPEAKER_00: but our intern ruined the whole process by not really getting into the spirit
1:18
SPEAKER_00: of things.
1:19
SPEAKER_00: That's neither here nor there.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: We talked to Brent about the history of Cerro Gordo,
1:24
SPEAKER_00: what it's like to buy a ghost town,
1:26
SPEAKER_00: what it's like to lower himself down into the mines and explore them
1:32
SPEAKER_00: and why he's doing this.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: And it was great.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: We had such a fun time when we were hanging out there.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: We'll have an episode on our main YouTube video channel,
1:44
SPEAKER_00: the Core Memory channel, about our time in Cerro Gordo.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: But here's our chat with Brent, and I'm sure you will love it.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: I am Ashlee Vance.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: This is Core Memory.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: Off to the ghost town we go.
1:58
[music]
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Brent Underwood, how are you?
2:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing well.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: We are in a ghost town.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: We are in a old mining town.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: You live here.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: Full time.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: Full time.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: I think there's some people tuning into this who will know
2:31
SPEAKER_00: that you've got this mega YouTube channel about moving here.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: There's some people who will not have heard your story before.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: So we have this amazing setting.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: I thought maybe we should explain, explain how we ended up here.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, tell us, tell us where we are and a little bit of how we got here.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so right now we are at Cerro Gordo,
2:55
SPEAKER_01: California, which back in 1800s was the largest silver mine in California.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: And it's a town that started around 1865 and ran all the way into the 1940s.
3:07
SPEAKER_01: So for a mine, it had a really long and active life.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: And the main mine here is 10 feet that way.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: That's the Union Mine.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: And out of that hole right there, they pulled Something like $800 million worth of minerals.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: And so this was kind of your classic Western boomtown.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: There was 4,000 people living up here at its peak.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: There was brothels, bars, saloons, you know, everything that you can imagine happening up here.
3:36
SPEAKER_01: The town eventually kind of went bust in the 1940s for a variety of reasons.
3:41
SPEAKER_01: They lost the vein.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: World War II shut down on all non-essential mining.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: And so the town kind of became a ghost town, you know, abandoned for the first time.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: It's been in private ownership since then, kind of like passing down from person to person.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: And I purchased the town in 2018 with the idea of turning into kind of
4:03
SPEAKER_01: a hospitality destination,
4:05
SPEAKER_01: you know, Airbnb, some cabins, have people come up and stay here.
4:10
SPEAKER_01: I was originally doing it from afar.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: I was living in Austin, Texas, kind of commuting back and forth.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: Then March of 2020 hits.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: The world starts shutting down.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: I decide what better place to spend the pandemic than in the middle
4:23
SPEAKER_01: of nowhere up here and moved up here in March of 2020 and never left.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: So six years later,
4:32
SPEAKER_01: still here,
4:33
SPEAKER_01: still working to bring the town back to life, still kind of loving life up here.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: That was great.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: And there's so much to get into.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: We spent a couple of days here.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: You're kind enough to let us hang out.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: We're like living.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we've been staying in, what's the name of our house?
4:49
SPEAKER_00: The Gordon House.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: The Gordon House, which I think was built in 1910.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: Around 1910, yeah.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: And it's just a very nice, very nice house.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: It's still standing.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: And let's go back, let's go back a little bit.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Like what were you doing before 2018?
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I was living in Austin, Texas.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: I had a bed and breakfast in an old Victorian house from the 1800s.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: So I've always loved this idea of history and hospitality and kind of combining the two.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: My undergraduate degree was in real estate.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: And so I thought I would get into that, you know, but I've always loved hospitality.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: And then my grandfather used to watch Gunsmoke,
5:25
SPEAKER_01: the Western show, just like over and over and over and over again.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: And he had dementia.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: So he would just watch the episodes, the same one over and over and over.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: And I think something about that,
5:32
SPEAKER_01: like implanted this romanticism of the American West and So 2018, I'm in Austin.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: I have this bed and breakfast.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: I also have a day job,
5:42
SPEAKER_01: which is a company called Daily Stoic,
5:45
SPEAKER_01: which is about stoicism that I have with my partner Ryan Holiday.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm kind of doing both of these,
5:51
SPEAKER_01: trying to figure out So when I got my next move,
5:53
SPEAKER_01: I had been in Austin at that point for about six years and I was kind of ready for
5:56
SPEAKER_01: the next chapter.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, Austin changed a lot during those six years.
6:00
SPEAKER_01: And so I was looking for the next project and I was looking
6:05
SPEAKER_01: at different hospitality things around the country.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: Old hotels in the Catskills outside New York City that are kind
6:13
SPEAKER_01: of like dirty dancing, kind of like cool hotels.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: And I was looking at those kind of,
6:18
SPEAKER_01: and a friend of mine sent me this listing that said,
6:20
SPEAKER_01: you know, buy your own ghost town for under a million dollars.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: And he texted it to me at like two o'clock in the morning as a joke.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: He's like, hey, this might be your next thing.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Ha ha.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: And I remember I woke up and started reading about it.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: I was like, man, this is it.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: You know, this is, this is cool.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: And so I flew out here.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: I met with the caretaker.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: I met with the- You flew out like the next day.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the next day.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: I was here.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: I was ready.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: I was like looking for something like this.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: And when it came up, I was like, oh man, this might be it.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: So I flew out the next day,
6:48
SPEAKER_01: met the caretaker,
6:49
SPEAKER_01: met the real estate agent, met some people that are involved with the property.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And just, like, fell in love.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: You know,
6:56
SPEAKER_01: you just did the drive up,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: and so you know,
6:57
SPEAKER_01: like, as you're going up the road, it's like, the anticipation builds and builds.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: You're like, where is this town?
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Where is this town?
7:03
SPEAKER_01: It's twisting and turning.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: And then finally, the town, like, reveals itself.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: And you're like, whoa.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, like, it's just, like, something cool.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: And I remember walking around that day, and I was like, I'm going to figure this out.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: You know,
7:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't have the money to do this yet,
7:16
SPEAKER_01: but I'm going to, like,
7:17
SPEAKER_01: figure out whatever I need to do to,
7:20
SPEAKER_01: like, Yeah, so
7:22
SPEAKER_00: you're not coming into this as like some .com tech millionaire?
7:26
SPEAKER_01: No, no, not at all.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I didn't have any other money.
7:29
SPEAKER_01: But from my real estate background, I knew that I needed to put in a strong offer.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: And during the time in which I came out here, the press really got a hold of the property.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: Articles started coming.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: I was talking to the real estate agent.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: He's like, listen, it's becoming a bit of a bidding war, which is crazy for an old ghost town.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: And the price kept going up and up and up.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: And I'm talking to hard money lenders,
7:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
7:51
SPEAKER_01: that like huge interest rates that'll like take out your kneecaps
7:53
SPEAKER_01: if you don't pay them kind of vibe.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, man, how am I going to make this work?
7:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm calling up friends, anybody that I know that has a little bit of cash.
7:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, hey, do you want to throw some money into this ghost town?
8:01
SPEAKER_01: If they ask you a question, I hang up.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: I call the next person, you know?
8:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: And...
8:05
SPEAKER_01: Finally scraped together the money.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: We close Friday the 13th, which felt very fitting for a ghost town.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: And I remember driving out here,
8:15
SPEAKER_01: stoked about the possibilities, but fully not knowing what I was getting into.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: And at the bottom of the hill,
8:21
SPEAKER_01: the old caretaker handed me this key ring with like 80 keys on it.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: And he's just like, good luck, you know?
8:26
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, all right.
8:28
SPEAKER_01: And so we came up, had a blast, you know, like, oh, it's like everything was new and exciting.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: And at the time, I was still living in Austin.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: So I was commuting out here on the weekends.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: I was like, well, I'll go out there.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: I'll do whatever I can.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: And then I'll go back to Austin and to my real life.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: And like I said, everything changed during the pandemic when I came up here at first.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: And I thought this was maybe going to be A couple of weeks,
8:52
SPEAKER_01: maybe a month at most,
8:53
SPEAKER_01: you know, I don't think anybody knew how long the pandemic was going to last.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: Right.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: You know, when it started.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: And so I was like, okay, I'll hang out out there for a couple of weeks.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: Then I'll go back to my normal life in Austin.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, and yeah, six, six years later, I'm here.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: I've sold everything in Austin.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: I don't have anything down there anymore.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: You're, yeah.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: Pushed all the chips in.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: You're definitely here.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: We could, we could tell, um, I mean, we'll have a video on this later.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: So people will be able to see what the town looks like and what we've been hanging out with you.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: So, so they'll have a,
9:21
SPEAKER_00: A picture for people who haven't had a chance to see that yet,
9:24
SPEAKER_00: or, you know, I want to paint, I want to kind of describe the town.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned this drive.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: It is, it's really cool.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: It's like eight miles winding back and forth.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: It's a little cliffy in spots.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: And then,
9:37
SPEAKER_00: like you said,
9:38
SPEAKER_00: you really,
9:38
SPEAKER_00: you get up to the top and then all of a sudden, um, I mean,
9:42
SPEAKER_00: I've been to ghost towns before,
9:43
SPEAKER_00: so you never fully know what to expect in terms of what's left over
9:47
SPEAKER_00: and how well preserved it is.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: And you said this used to be a town of 4,000 people.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: So it would have had a ton, a lot more infrastructure.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so when you pull up, it reveals itself.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: And how would you describe what you found or what people would find today?
10:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think,
10:06
SPEAKER_01: so when people would think ghost town,
10:07
SPEAKER_01: sometimes I think flat desert and a town in the middle of the desert
10:10
SPEAKER_01: with tumbleweeds and stuff.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: We're in the high desert.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: So the town's at 8,200 feet in elevation.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: And so during that eight mile drive up, you're increasing a mile in elevation during that.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: And the town itself If we were to look this way,
10:22
SPEAKER_01: we would see all the Sierra Nevada with Mount Whitney
10:25
SPEAKER_01: and they're all snow-capped peaks.
10:27
SPEAKER_01: And from the ridge, if you look the other way, you see Death Valley National Park.
10:30
SPEAKER_01: So just desert as far as you can possibly see.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: And so it's one where these days there's about 20 buildings left.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: Right now we're sitting in what's known as the Hoist House.
10:40
SPEAKER_01: So this is kind of the building
10:43
SPEAKER_00: that Built the whole town.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: It's like the temple.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is where it all began because the mineshaft right there
10:49
SPEAKER_01: that goes 900 feet straight down with 30 miles of mineshafts off of it was
10:54
SPEAKER_01: the economic engine of this entire town.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: And then beyond the hoist house,
10:58
SPEAKER_01: there's About four or five houses left, a couple different cabins.
11:03
SPEAKER_01: We have a general store that we've turned into a museum.
11:05
SPEAKER_01: There's an old mechanics garage that's now kind of a movie theater.
11:09
SPEAKER_01: And so there's a variety of buildings left that are all in various states of repair.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's one that, yeah,
11:19
SPEAKER_01: I think is naturally very beautiful with all the geography around us,
11:23
SPEAKER_01: but then also very like historically exciting to me.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful.
11:31
SPEAKER_00: And one of the most iconic buildings that was here down in the town part was the American Hotel.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: And I know when,
11:40
SPEAKER_00: like you mentioned,
11:40
SPEAKER_00: when you first got here with your history and the breakfast and everything,
11:46
SPEAKER_00: it was like, oh, let's restore this hotel and make this the centerpiece.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: And then...
11:53
SPEAKER_00: A couple years into your adventure here, there's an electrical fire.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: This thing burns down,
11:58
SPEAKER_00: which I think some people might have then walked away from this
12:02
SPEAKER_00: or been really devastated.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: If you look out now,
12:07
SPEAKER_00: you guys have You've rebuilt this hotel from scratch and the hope is then
12:12
SPEAKER_00: that becomes again,
12:13
SPEAKER_00: the centerpiece for, for people being able to come and visit this place.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: It's like,
12:18
SPEAKER_01: so when he first arrived,
12:20
SPEAKER_01: the crown jewel of the town very much was the American hotel.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: So this is a hotel that was built in 1871.
12:26
SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of rumors of the infamous guests that have come through it,
12:29
SPEAKER_01: you know, from like Butch Cassidy to Mark Twain to all these different people.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was the center of the plans.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: It was a place where everybody congregated when they come here to town.
12:38
SPEAKER_01: You know, everybody would go there to hang out at nights.
12:41
SPEAKER_01: And it was kind of the centerpiece of the plan for the place as well.
12:44
SPEAKER_01: And then fast forward to a burning down an electrical fire,
12:48
SPEAKER_01: then it's suddenly like, oh, we've just lost the heart of this town.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: This was the center of all of our plans.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: And so...
12:54
SPEAKER_00: And you like watched it burn.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: And like there was four people here that night that had to like experience that
12:59
SPEAKER_01: as well,
12:59
SPEAKER_01: which is very traumatic of seeing a fire of that size and all that type of thing.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: And then you kind of sit back and you're like, you know, Where do we go from here?
13:08
SPEAKER_01: And one option, yeah,
13:09
SPEAKER_01: was to kind of put my tail between my legs,
13:11
SPEAKER_01: go back to Austin,
13:12
SPEAKER_01: figure out the next move, which probably financially would have made the most sense.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: At the time,
13:20
SPEAKER_01: I didn't have any idea of how much effort and resources would have to go
13:24
SPEAKER_01: into rebuilding the hotel,
13:26
SPEAKER_01: but I just thought, no matter what happens, it has to stand again.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: It just became like,
13:31
SPEAKER_01: it was deep in my core that This is not going to be the last chapter for Cerro Moro.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: And so we started rebuilding and it took a very long time.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: We're five years into the building process and you were just in the hotel
13:44
SPEAKER_01: and we still are just still down at the studs inside.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing done inside of the building.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Luckily the outside is there and you can still walk through the building now,
13:51
SPEAKER_01: which it feels like a building, which is very exciting after five years.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: But it's been five years of just kind of Two steps forward a step back you know over
13:59
SPEAKER_01: and over and over again for various reasons because again we're building this thing
14:04
SPEAKER_01: at the top of a mountain up an eight mile dirt road in California and so there's
14:08
SPEAKER_01: as many hurdles as you can imagine but to me For this town to continue on
14:14
SPEAKER_01: for generations to come, which has been my goal from the very beginning.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: We need that kind of heart of the town for people to congregate and come up here
14:20
SPEAKER_01: and stay overnight.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: And I'm hoping that in the next year or so that we get that done and
14:28
SPEAKER_01: that will hopefully open up a whole other set of people that want to come up here
14:32
SPEAKER_01: and learn the history here.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: And I see you around here.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is hard work.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: People should know.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the conditions here are no joke.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: And you're a bestselling author.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: You've written a book about this place.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Ryan Holiday, your business partner, is quite an academic.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: You guys are into the Stoics.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: You've got a bookstore in Bastrop, Texas.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: And Ryan, I always see him on social media, digging deep on all kinds of books.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Were you wired more as an academic?
15:00
SPEAKER_00: Before or growing up?
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Like I see you doing,
15:04
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:05
SPEAKER_00: you have to work on just about everything here from vehicles to buildings
15:08
SPEAKER_00: to just making things function.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: Was that in your nature or is this stuff you've all picked up?
15:14
SPEAKER_01: Kind of both.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: So both of my parents are school teachers.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: So like, I think the love of history that brought me here was instilled by them.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: And they're very much into like research, school, all that type of stuff.
15:26
SPEAKER_01: But all my grandparents were very much blue collar.
15:31
SPEAKER_01: So my grandfather worked at GM his entire life.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: My other grandfather after the war, he owned a gas station.
15:37
SPEAKER_01: So he was fixing up vehicles the whole time.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: And so I would dip my toe into that with them kind of on summer breaks
15:43
SPEAKER_01: when I was visiting my grandparents.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: And at home, it was always about, you know, let's dive into this academic stuff.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: And so my work before moving up here was very much Academic basis,
15:54
SPEAKER_01: working with authors, working with online stuff.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: And I think coming up here,
16:01
SPEAKER_01: I was forced to start learning new skills and habits and things like that,
16:05
SPEAKER_01: that were much more manual based, like physical touching base.
16:09
SPEAKER_01: And it was very rewarding in a lot of ways.
16:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think that it's something very satisfying of building something,
16:16
SPEAKER_01: of using your hands, and there's this almost Deep desire to do that more.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: And since coming up here, I feel very blessed to be able to do both.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: So like half my days these days are, I spend it helping run the Daily Stoic stuff.
16:30
SPEAKER_01: I work on video stuff for Cerro Gordo.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: And way too many hours reading through historical archives related to Cerro Gordo
16:38
SPEAKER_01: to pull out any type of information that I can.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: And then I kind of come out here and start working on any project we have going on.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you look around this where we're sitting right now,
16:46
SPEAKER_01: you see 18 different projects mid-sentence.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: So there's, we have a sawmill outside that we mill lumber.
16:52
SPEAKER_01: There's lumber stacked up over there that we have.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: There's a hoist back there that always needs work.
16:57
SPEAKER_01: There's how many, 10 dirt bikes in here that always needs that type of repair.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: And so it's been one where I've been forced to learn all these skills.
17:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're not running to the hardware store to figure things out.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: We're kind of having to figure out ourselves.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: And I think through this,
17:14
SPEAKER_01: I've been really fortunate to have a lot of local people that are really experts
17:20
SPEAKER_01: in those fields come up and help kind of on a volunteer basis.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: And so I've been able to You know, absorb some of their skills by osmosis.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: And these days I feel like my work every day is much more rounded maybe than it was
17:35
SPEAKER_01: before I moved here.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: I think you're such a cool person to be doing this because I'm always so impressed
17:41
SPEAKER_00: by the intellectual rigor you've put into this,
17:44
SPEAKER_00: learning the history of the place,
17:45
SPEAKER_00: gathering new history,
17:47
SPEAKER_00: both through you going down into the mines and finding things.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: From having your YouTube channel with people reaching out and bringing
17:56
SPEAKER_00: in new documents and you're serious about this.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: I think sometimes on YouTube,
18:03
SPEAKER_00: obviously it can reward being sensationalistic and just shock value
18:09
SPEAKER_00: and all these things.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: So I like that in your videos,
18:12
SPEAKER_00: you're bringing all that history to bear as you're showing people
18:16
SPEAKER_00: the projects you guys are working on.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: It must be rewarding,
18:24
SPEAKER_00: in a sense,
18:25
SPEAKER_00: to have had this channel blow up like it did,
18:29
SPEAKER_00: and then have this feedback of people telling you new things.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: They're like investigators for you.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they'll dive into all the rabbit holes that we can.
18:39
SPEAKER_01: With YouTube, it's interesting, right?
18:40
SPEAKER_01: Because short-term, I think sensationalism is rewarded, but then long-term...
18:46
SPEAKER_01: It's not almost in a way.
18:47
SPEAKER_01: I feel like that's like very like fleeting audience.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: And at this point,
18:50
SPEAKER_01: six years in,
18:52
SPEAKER_01: the people that watch the videos have a really deep love of history of kind of like
18:56
SPEAKER_01: the American West and things that happened here.
18:58
SPEAKER_01: And so I feel fortunate to where One, I get rewarded for diving deeper into the history.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Anything that I can like bring to the surface is satisfying for me personally,
19:08
SPEAKER_01: but also satisfying for the audience.
19:10
SPEAKER_01: But then two, suddenly everybody out there helps research on their own right.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: You know,
19:14
SPEAKER_01: maybe they had family I lived up at Cerro Gordo 100 years ago,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: and they can bring that information to me.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe they just choose to go down a rabbit hole themselves and kind of send me the results.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: And so it's almost like a lot of research assistants on this giant project that is Cerro Gordo.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think collaboratively,
19:32
SPEAKER_01: we've been able to piece together the clearest picture
19:34
SPEAKER_01: of Cerro Gordo's past that's almost ever existed.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: And that's pretty cool.
19:40
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19:43
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20:48
SPEAKER_00: You got a lot going on, man.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: You have to build this town.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Making the YouTube videos is time-consuming.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: You put a lot of effort into them.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: Then do you start to feel a pressure?
20:58
SPEAKER_00: I guess it's good...
21:00
SPEAKER_00: It's decent financially, probably it helps the project.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: You and I've talked, I know it does a bit.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: And then you've got people coming to visit,
21:08
SPEAKER_00: so it's creating this energy and interest around the project.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: But then, yeah,
21:11
SPEAKER_00: do you feel this relentless kind of,
21:14
SPEAKER_00: now I have to keep feeding the beast and I already have enough to do?
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Early on, I did a little bit more.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: I started YouTube as a hobby, right?
21:23
SPEAKER_01: I was bored during the pandemic.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: People started their own little hobby and I brought up a camera up here
21:27
SPEAKER_01: because I wanted to learn how to do astrophotography.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: I started making videos.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: They did good.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: I felt no pressure at all to create them because it was purely a creative outlet.
21:35
SPEAKER_01: And then shortly therein, I met a lot of other YouTubers.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: They started coming up and they're the ones that were like,
21:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, you need to be releasing a video a week.
21:42
SPEAKER_01: You know, they started telling me the YouTube best practices.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: And I fell into that for a while.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: I was like,
21:46
SPEAKER_01: all right,
21:47
SPEAKER_01: a video a week,
21:47
SPEAKER_01: you know,
21:47
SPEAKER_01: and then it switches a little bit more from like a creative outlet to more of a job,
21:51
SPEAKER_01: you know.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: And I found a lot of pressure during that time.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: These days I only put out a video a month.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: And so like I've had to figure out what works for me and it needs to be fun for me
22:03
SPEAKER_01: to continue doing it.
22:04
SPEAKER_01: And I've got feedback when I've switched to that schedule of like, Hey, we need a video weekend.
22:09
SPEAKER_01: I did see like performance,
22:11
SPEAKER_01: you know, drop,
22:12
SPEAKER_01: but at the same time it has to be sustainable because I'm six years into making
22:15
SPEAKER_01: the videos about the same town.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: And so, uh,
22:18
SPEAKER_01: I found that The relief of pressure of me is just making the videos that I want
22:23
SPEAKER_01: to make when I want to make them.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: And I've been lucky enough to find partners that support that,
22:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
22:27
SPEAKER_01: and then also the audience now knows that I'm making a video a month,
22:31
SPEAKER_01: but I hope that I put so much effort into each video that they hope
22:35
SPEAKER_01: that like every video is a banger, you know, hopefully.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the cadence that I've fallen into.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: And it's, it's these days very much something that I enjoy doing.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: While I've been here for a couple days, I don't know, man.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it comes through in your videos,
22:51
SPEAKER_00: but people should know you're committed and you're nuts.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, like this...
22:56
SPEAKER_00: This wide shaft over here,
22:58
SPEAKER_00: so it goes down 900 feet,
22:59
SPEAKER_00: I think,
23:00
SPEAKER_00: and it has these different levels you can get off at,
23:02
SPEAKER_00: and then it's just 30 miles of interconnecting,
23:06
SPEAKER_00: or not, but just different avenues you can go down.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: Obviously,
23:10
SPEAKER_00: it's like pitch black and cold down there,
23:13
SPEAKER_00: and you, I mean,
23:14
SPEAKER_00: we're walking around here,
23:15
SPEAKER_00: you're explaining it to us,
23:17
SPEAKER_00: there is an elevator,
23:18
SPEAKER_00: which is sketchy in its own right,
23:20
SPEAKER_00: and then you repel Down this shaft and you have at times stayed down there
23:27
SPEAKER_00: for like five days straight.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: I love it down there.
23:31
SPEAKER_01: It's weird because when I moved up here, I had a fear of heights.
23:35
SPEAKER_01: So the idea of dangling on a rope with 900 foot of exposure below you is not one
23:40
SPEAKER_01: that my mind still like enjoys thinking about.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: No, we looked at it yesterday and I was getting nauseous.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's terrifying.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you shine a light to the bottom, it's a terrifying proposition.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: But I think that like...
23:51
SPEAKER_01: My curiosity related to the town overweighs that.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm like, well,
23:56
SPEAKER_01: I have to know what's down there,
23:57
SPEAKER_01: you know,
23:57
SPEAKER_01: because everything above ground was only built
23:59
SPEAKER_01: to surface whatever happened down there.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: And so I feel that like, A huge part of the history here happens down there.
24:05
SPEAKER_01: And how fortunate am I to be able to go down in this mine and explore it,
24:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:11
SPEAKER_01: this historic mine that since it's closed,
24:13
SPEAKER_01: probably only a handful of people have ever been into.
24:16
SPEAKER_01: So I feel like fortunate to be able to do that.
24:18
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean,
24:19
SPEAKER_01: I probably tow the line of like reckless,
24:22
SPEAKER_01: you know, many times when I'm down there, I'll admit that.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Parts of the mine are collapsing.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, actively collapsing.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: In a hurry.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: 160 years ago with dynamite.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: So it's not structurally sound,
24:36
SPEAKER_01: but I do think that like by exploring it, I've uncovered more about the town.
24:41
SPEAKER_01: And that's just the way I like doing,
24:42
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:43
SPEAKER_01: some people love riding dirt bikes fast,
24:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
24:45
SPEAKER_01: and like they have their own thing in mind is like,
24:48
SPEAKER_01: Going down that hole right there and seeing what's down there.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I'm super impressed.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: Like if you,
24:52
SPEAKER_00: if when I'm hanging out with you,
24:54
SPEAKER_00: you seem like a very chill guy,
24:55
SPEAKER_00: you come off,
24:56
SPEAKER_00: like I said before,
24:57
SPEAKER_00: I think more like on the intellectual side and,
25:00
SPEAKER_00: and like a thinker,
25:01
SPEAKER_00: you know, and,
25:03
SPEAKER_00: and the thought of you rappelling down there and just being off on your own
25:07
SPEAKER_00: for days, I would never do that.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: I sometimes,
25:14
SPEAKER_01: even to myself,
25:15
SPEAKER_01: I'll intellectualize it because I'll research deeply the level I'm going to
25:18
SPEAKER_01: before I go there.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: So then it almost feels like a research mission where I'm like,
25:22
SPEAKER_01: okay, they talk about this intersection at the 400 level where this event happened.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: So then I'm just like,
25:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm like,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm researching,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
25:30
SPEAKER_01: I'm an investigator,
25:30
SPEAKER_01: kind of like you do in some of your stories where like,
25:32
SPEAKER_01: okay, I'm going down to the 400 level.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: No one's been here probably since whatever happened down here happened down here.
25:37
SPEAKER_01: And let's get to the bottom of it.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: And it's been really rewarding.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's recently, 200 feet down, there's the 200 level of the mine.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: And that's where the most infamous accident happened in Cerro Boers mining history.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: So in 1871,
25:51
SPEAKER_01: they were taking out too much of the ceiling and the rock collapsed on a number
25:55
SPEAKER_01: of miners and they died and they're still there.
25:58
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the newspaper reports, It says between 8 and 30 people died.
26:04
SPEAKER_01: And as somebody that's deep into this, I was like, that doesn't make any sense.
26:07
SPEAKER_01: How do you just say between 8 and 30?
26:10
SPEAKER_01: And I think part of that was that they were Chinese miners, and those are the 1860s.
26:14
SPEAKER_01: There was an inherent racism that was happening at the same time.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: But I was like, surely there's a better answer than between 8 and 30.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: And then over time, I saw that number...
26:25
SPEAKER_01: And so I spent many months at the microfilm in the local library,
26:34
SPEAKER_01: like researching,
26:35
SPEAKER_01: okay, what are the actual reports from when this actually happened?
26:39
SPEAKER_01: What matches up?
26:40
SPEAKER_01: When did it become a game of whispers to go on?
26:43
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of zeroed it down that it was actually probably between Two
26:46
SPEAKER_01: to four people, not 30 people.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't repeat so many times.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's like, it's exciting to me.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: That's satisfying to me to be able to like actually tell the true history that happened up here.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: And there's electricity up here.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: You guys did this massive project to bring water up here,
27:05
SPEAKER_00: but you know, it's, you know, there's Starlink.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, so Some of the bits of regular life, you still have to like haul all your food up here.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: Showers are probably a bit rarer than they would be if you were back in Austin.
27:22
SPEAKER_00: And you've just adjusted to this life.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've only been here for two days and I'm really looking forward to
27:27
SPEAKER_01: going to a hotel.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: What's crazy is this is as comfortable as it's ever been in six years.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: When I first moved up here, there was no showers at all, no water at all.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: The only internet I could have was an AT&T hotspot.
27:39
SPEAKER_01: So it was like one megabyte per second up and down.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: And so like barely get emails out.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: It very much felt like secluded from the world.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like we've made huge leaps and bounds by like having a shower at all,
27:49
SPEAKER_01: having a working sink.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: Starlink has obviously has been a huge thing to us, but I don't really notice it.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: Until I go back to a town,
27:57
SPEAKER_01: you know, then I go, like if I'm traveling, I was just on a road trip.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: If I'm at a hotel, I'm like, wow, you know, the sink just turns on and stuff like that.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: There's a baseline difficulty of living here that these days I don't notice.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: But I do think when people first come up for the first time, you notice it quite a bit.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: But you're so committed now and into this, that doesn't get to you.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: Like, you're not just sitting around at night and just like,
28:22
SPEAKER_00: fuck this, dude, I'm gonna go order a pizza.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't really think about it at this point.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: I meant to ask you to bring your book up here,
28:34
SPEAKER_00: and I should have brought it up,
28:36
SPEAKER_00: but I just love the way you open it,
28:38
SPEAKER_00: describing what life was like here and how hard it was for people.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: You mentioned it a little bit, but can you paint...
28:45
SPEAKER_00: A picture for...
28:48
SPEAKER_00: We romanticize ghost towns,
28:51
SPEAKER_00: the California Gold Rush era,
28:54
SPEAKER_00: and then everybody knows that it also came with a lot of baggage.
28:58
SPEAKER_00: Or not baggage, it's probably not the hardship.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I mean, life was pretty miserable for the most part.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, it's really...
29:06
SPEAKER_01: These days, people come up and they love to enjoy the peace and quiet and the beautiful nature.
29:10
SPEAKER_01: And even right now, we're sitting in this building, it's relatively quiet.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I went out last night...
29:15
SPEAKER_00: At maybe like nine o'clock and everyone was already asleep,
29:18
SPEAKER_00: but you can, you can just hear like the entire valley, anything that's happening.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: Any whispers anybody's doing around town,
29:25
SPEAKER_01: you hear the stars are out and it's very like,
29:27
SPEAKER_01: like you said,
29:28
SPEAKER_01: romantic these days,
29:29
SPEAKER_01: but like back in the day,
29:31
SPEAKER_01: This building that we're sitting in now would have been insanely noisy 24-7, 365.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: So the miners going 24 hours a day.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: That means miners were coming and going 24 hours a day on 12 hour shifts.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: So there's a day shift and a night shift.
29:43
SPEAKER_01: That means all the supporting businesses,
29:45
SPEAKER_01: the brothels, Everything related to that were going 24 hours a day.
29:50
SPEAKER_01: The mine itself,
29:52
SPEAKER_01: if you look at the newspapers,
29:53
SPEAKER_01: there was many, many, many, many accidents that claimed the miners' lives.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: Down in there, if they weren't dying from collapses, they're dying of silicosis.
30:00
SPEAKER_01: They're breathing in so much dust that their lungs basically became cement.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: So much to the point where they said a miner was old by the time he got to 30.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: So me sitting here at 37, I'm like,
30:13
SPEAKER_01: Ancient in mining terms.
30:14
SPEAKER_01: And so it's interesting to be in this town that was built by people
30:17
SPEAKER_01: that were all younger than me.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: And so if you weren't dying from silicosis,
30:20
SPEAKER_01: there was a murder a week up here that's in the newspapers.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: There's different, every building here has bullet holes all in it.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: There's disease that ran rampant up here.
30:28
SPEAKER_01: There wasn't running water.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: And so it was a town that was very difficult for the vast majority of people that lived here.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: You know,
30:36
SPEAKER_01: I think that every time we hear about these Success stories of the mine owner
30:41
SPEAKER_01: that went on to do this and that.
30:42
SPEAKER_01: There's a thousand miners that came up here for a better life and never left this place.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: Some are still buried 200 feet below where we're sitting right now.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: And it's just a reality of the place that,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:53
SPEAKER_01: isn't the most fun to think about or even that people want to think about as much.
30:58
SPEAKER_01: But I do my best,
30:59
SPEAKER_01: even in the museum,
31:00
SPEAKER_01: to show those different parts of Cerro Gordo's past just so people can kind of have
31:04
SPEAKER_01: a full picture of what happened here.
31:06
SPEAKER_00: But you don't feel like There's some curse looming over the whole,
31:10
SPEAKER_00: like when the hotel burned up where you're like,
31:12
SPEAKER_00: well, maybe they don't want me to
31:14
SPEAKER_01: do this.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can get lost in those types of thoughts up here easily.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: I mean, even within the people that quote unquote own the town,
31:23
SPEAKER_01: there's many of them that have just completely lost everything.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: You know, when I first moved up here, I found a briefcase.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: He was tucked away in this corner of the general store.
31:31
SPEAKER_01: And in the briefcase, there was just everything about this miner's life.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: So there was love letters,
31:37
SPEAKER_01: there was divorce settlements,
31:38
SPEAKER_01: there was bankruptcy, there was new mining claims, there was bank stubs.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: And through it all, he seemed to have just an absolutely miserable life.
31:45
SPEAKER_01: He was always broke.
31:46
SPEAKER_01: This guy, this miner I found, he was broke.
31:48
SPEAKER_01: His wife divorced him.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: He was sick.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: You know,
31:53
SPEAKER_01: later you find this journal entry that says,
31:55
SPEAKER_01: you know, lamenting for one more night up here.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: So there's something about this place that like draws people in,
32:00
SPEAKER_01: takes everything out of them, but they still want to give it more.
32:04
SPEAKER_01: And I've definitely felt that over the years here.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, two years into living here when we were full on in the hotel,
32:10
SPEAKER_01: it very much felt like I was giving it 16 hours a day.
32:13
SPEAKER_01: It was just
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Wearing me to the bone, and like, for what, you know, kind of thing.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: But these days, I feel like I'm on the other side of that.
32:23
SPEAKER_01: And I hope,
32:24
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:24
SPEAKER_01: as every mindowner here, I hope that there's another life still for Cerro Gordo.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's what kind of keeps me going forward.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: You found the briefcase in one of the houses?
32:32
SPEAKER_01: In the general store, yeah.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: It was just left over?
32:34
SPEAKER_01: It was wrapped in this blanket shoved underneath the counter.
32:37
SPEAKER_01: I can show it to you when we go down there.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: And it's really cool because you...
32:40
SPEAKER_01: Through it,
32:41
SPEAKER_01: you can piece together his life,
32:42
SPEAKER_01: this miner,
32:43
SPEAKER_01: but also it's a composite of all the miners that were up here to kind of give you
32:46
SPEAKER_01: an idea of like what life would have been like for this guy.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: So even though the general store, because people had owned this property for decades after.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: And I tried to make like a hotel off and on that had just the general things were just sitting.
33:00
SPEAKER_01: It was shoved in a corner.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: So the back of the general store was used for just storage.
33:04
SPEAKER_01: So when I got here, that whole area with all those display cases was just storage.
33:07
SPEAKER_01: It was floor to ceiling stuff.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: And we slowly went And then tucked away seemingly intentionally.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that the miner left it there.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: I think it was a previous owner found it and intentionally put it in somewhere.
33:18
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, it says, you know, bank stubs for a paycheck that says like $3.48 and stuff.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: And like receipts from different mining companies.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: It's just a beautiful insight into life here and like how hard it was,
33:31
SPEAKER_01: but how devoted the people that are up here were.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: And so like in the,
33:34
SPEAKER_00: in 1865 ish,
33:36
SPEAKER_00: when people are first coming here,
33:38
SPEAKER_00: this is part of the gold rush, in this case, the silver rush.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: And so there would be people coming from all over the world,
33:47
SPEAKER_00: the United States to try to fight,
33:50
SPEAKER_00: to try to get rich before somebody had really taken control of like,
33:54
SPEAKER_00: like the mind we're sitting in right now,
33:56
SPEAKER_00: belong to an individual who was, had found the good stuff.
34:01
SPEAKER_00: So, so how, for how long, Was it a free-for-all?
34:04
SPEAKER_00: And then when did it turn into this?
34:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the town was established as a mining cap around 1865.
34:09
SPEAKER_01: So originally there would have been a lot of people up here staking their own claim,
34:12
SPEAKER_01: you know,
34:13
SPEAKER_01: claiming their portion of the hillside,
34:15
SPEAKER_01: hoping that that part of the hillside led into a rich ore discovery.
34:19
SPEAKER_01: So there would have been many hundreds of individual miners here.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: And eventually some of those prospects paid off big time and some of them went bust.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: And so if you're a miner,
34:29
SPEAKER_01: If you were a year into your mine,
34:30
SPEAKER_01: you weren't hitting anything,
34:32
SPEAKER_01: eventually you have to think, hey, I got to make a living somehow.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: And this mine that we're in right now is called the Union Mine.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: And this was owned by the guys that had a lot of financing,
34:40
SPEAKER_01: the amount,
34:41
SPEAKER_01: the money to be able to sink a 900-foot shaft,
34:43
SPEAKER_01: to be able to build a building like this.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: So slowly, everybody started working for the main mine here.
34:47
SPEAKER_01: And the main mine was the Union Mine that we're sitting at now.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: It was owned by this guy named Mortimer Belshaw and his partner, Victor Beaudry.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: And they, kind of like a lot of mine now, they owned everything.
34:56
SPEAKER_01: They owned the road, they owned the general stores, they owned the mine.
34:59
SPEAKER_01: And they got fabulously wealthy.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, they went on to do great things.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of the miners ended up working for $3 a day for a 12-hour shift.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: And so it was one of those towns where, yeah, I don't know, difficult to be at.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: And do we, are those, did that generational wealth continue?
35:15
SPEAKER_00: Do those families still have money?
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Do they come back to this place or have any interest?
35:19
SPEAKER_01: I haven't heard from those families, but there was three main players at Cerro Gordo.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: So there was this guy named Mortimer Belshaw.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: And he brought the first wave of financing here.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: So he was tapped into San Francisco.
35:30
SPEAKER_01: And he knew this guy named Edward Judson, who owned the California Paper Company.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: And he got a huge investment from him and came back here and blew this place up from
35:38
SPEAKER_01: a sleeping mining camp into a mining boomtown.
35:40
SPEAKER_01: Then there was Victor Beaudry, who owned the general store here.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: And before he lived in Independence,
35:45
SPEAKER_01: which is just up the road,
35:46
SPEAKER_01: and he had a general store at the camp there, the military camp.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: And he saw this rich ore Brink coming into his town, and he set up camp up here.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: And then there was a guy named Remi Nadu.
35:56
SPEAKER_01: And Nadu is the guy that figured out transportation to and from the mountain.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: So he had 20 mule teams coming and going.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: He built stations all across the desert.
36:05
SPEAKER_01: And then he later serviced.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: All of the different mining camps around here.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: And Nadu went on to become very, very wealthy.
36:11
SPEAKER_01: He moved eventually to Los Angeles.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: He built the very first hotel with an elevator in Los Angeles ever, which was the Hotel Nadu.
36:19
SPEAKER_01: It's the one that where now the LA Times was for a very long time.
36:23
SPEAKER_01: And so he built that building after Cerro Gordo.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Went on to become very much to the point where there's an old LA news article
36:32
SPEAKER_01: that says,
36:35
SPEAKER_01: That Victor Baudry, or Remi Ndou employs more people than any four men in the city.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: So he was employing half the city as far as everything went.
36:42
SPEAKER_01: He went on to do great.
36:44
SPEAKER_01: Victor Baudry, his brother went on to become the mayor of Montreal.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: And so they They're very, like, did very well off.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: Belshaw moved to San Francisco.
36:52
SPEAKER_01: He was involved with the Empire mine up there, which is a massive mining complex.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: He went on to retire in Antioch when he was very well off.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, those guys did very well.
37:04
SPEAKER_01: That's why I think the contrast of those stories to the miners briefcase
37:08
SPEAKER_01: that I found, this guy named Chet Reynolds, you know, so like Chet, he got divorced.
37:13
SPEAKER_01: He had a bankruptcy.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: He had lawsuits for unpaid like tabs at the general store.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: It was like a good contrast to remember that not all the stories worked out in
37:22
SPEAKER_01: the way that those three guys did.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: Is there any one particular person's story that you've uncovered that's your favorite?
37:29
SPEAKER_01: I like this, yeah, there's a guy named Porter.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: So Porter was kind of like not really mentioned in any of the main history books,
37:38
SPEAKER_01: but there's a woman whose great grandmother Was somehow involved with Cerro Gordo,
37:45
SPEAKER_01: and her and Porter had this romance.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: And so she,
37:48
SPEAKER_01: for her whole life,
37:49
SPEAKER_01: had dozens of letters from Porter that nobody ever had in the public.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: And so she compiled all these into a book, and she gave it to me.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: And in the letters,
37:59
SPEAKER_01: Porter's writing to her,
38:00
SPEAKER_01: and you can see his ascent through mining camp, which usually doesn't happen.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: So it starts off where he's basically just An employed miner here.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: So he's making $3 a day.
38:09
SPEAKER_01: He's complaining about like the working conditions, this and that.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: You know,
38:13
SPEAKER_01: a couple of years later,
38:14
SPEAKER_01: he's talking,
38:14
SPEAKER_01: he says, you know, Belshaw, the main owner, has asked me to build a smelter for him.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure if I'm going to do it, but like, that seems like a good thing.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: Then the next one,
38:23
SPEAKER_01: he's like, I'm now superintendent of all the mines at Cerro Gordo, and on and on.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: And then I eventually found his will when he died,
38:31
SPEAKER_01: and he had become so wealthy that he left money to Belshaw,
38:34
SPEAKER_01: the main owner of the whole town.
38:35
SPEAKER_01: So it's a guy that actually did have that success story that we talk about so much.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: Through these love letters,
38:41
SPEAKER_01: you could see his assent from $3 a day miner to he left Belshaw
38:45
SPEAKER_01: a few thousand dollars in 1890, which was quite a bit of money.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: And so he definitely...
38:51
SPEAKER_01: Kind of ascended through the ranks, which I thought was pretty cool.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: Do you think there's still a ton of stories to be uncovered or you've gone about
38:58
SPEAKER_00: as deep as you can go?
38:59
SPEAKER_01: No, I think there's a lot because I think that there's,
39:01
SPEAKER_01: you might have 4,000 people living up here.
39:03
SPEAKER_01: There's so many more of them.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: The unfortunate part is the Inyo County Courthouse,
39:08
SPEAKER_01: the county that we're in,
39:09
SPEAKER_01: during the period that Cerro Gordo was its largest,
39:12
SPEAKER_01: it burned down twice and it got knocked down by an earthquake once.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: And so, so many of the records were lost over time.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: But every year somebody comes out of the woodwork with some type
39:21
SPEAKER_01: of original research and brings it to me.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: So I'm hoping that we can keep compiling that.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: And we try to make it all like public source.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: So we put it all on a website so anybody can review it.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: So that way maybe that one name in that journal rings a bell in that person's mind
39:35
SPEAKER_01: and we can kind of like weave together the whole story.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: This place is very much alive now.
39:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, just over this couple days I was here.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's, we're kind of like at the tail end of winter.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: So it's probably, yeah,
39:48
SPEAKER_00: it's probably not ideal tourism season,
39:51
SPEAKER_00: but there's people coming up all day to see you guys.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: There's people living here who saw your YouTube channel and decided to go
40:00
SPEAKER_00: on this journey with you.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: I think we were talking something like 8,000 people maybe over
40:05
SPEAKER_00: the last
40:06
SPEAKER_01: Last year we had,
40:07
SPEAKER_01: in our logbook, we had about 8,000 people that came and visited the town.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: So you really are.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: And then it's cool because I think when you first started,
40:15
SPEAKER_00: the locals were looking at you with the side eye of maybe you're just,
40:20
SPEAKER_00: you're not committed or you're just trying to capitalize on this hotel
40:25
SPEAKER_00: and not really...
40:27
SPEAKER_00: You know, be opportunistic.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: And then, so you've, I think you've proven yourself now.
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: After all these years.
40:34
SPEAKER_00: And, and it's like, it's creating this new energy here.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
40:37
SPEAKER_00: And so let's talk about that a little bit.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the, not to bum people out about California.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: I love California, but there's some, there's some issues.
40:45
SPEAKER_00: So like,
40:47
SPEAKER_00: If you look straight out from where we are,
40:50
SPEAKER_00: there's what should be like a beautiful lake and there's water there,
40:55
SPEAKER_00: but it's just, it's not the lake that it once was.
40:57
SPEAKER_00: So if I'm not,
40:59
SPEAKER_00: and I hope I don't butcher the history because we've been talking about this
41:02
SPEAKER_00: a little,
41:02
SPEAKER_00: people are probably familiar with the movie Chinatown because it's a classic and
41:06
SPEAKER_00: that is the lake that's been drained historically to give Los Angeles water.
41:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
41:13
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean,
41:14
SPEAKER_01: When Cerro Gordo was a booming town,
41:16
SPEAKER_01: below Cerro Gordo there was a lake called Owens Lake.
41:19
SPEAKER_01: And it was a massive lake, seven miles across, 70 feet deep.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: It had a lot of agriculture in Owens Valley.
41:25
SPEAKER_01: It was a very big part of this community.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: As Cerro Gordo developed,
41:32
SPEAKER_01: what's interesting even more is that when Cerro Gordo was at its peak,
41:36
SPEAKER_01: it was around 4,000 people.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: And at that same time, Los Angeles was only like 7,500 people.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: So they're almost like equal trading partners.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: And the demand of Cerro Gordo helped Los Angeles develop quicker because this was a mining town.
41:50
SPEAKER_01: We weren't growing agriculture here.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: We needed all these supplies.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: And Los Angeles was the closest port city.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: So the demand of Cerro Gordo kind of Forced Los Angeles to develop a little bit quicker.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: And then kind of in a cruel irony,
42:01
SPEAKER_01: eventually Los Angeles grew to the point where they're running out
42:04
SPEAKER_01: of drinking water.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: And so William Mulholland, you know, started thinking, how are we gonna solve this issue?
42:09
SPEAKER_01: And he came out here to Owens Valley and he saw this massive lake and he thought,
42:13
SPEAKER_01: you know, that's it.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: That's how we're gonna solve the issue.
42:16
SPEAKER_01: And so slowly Mulholland with the Department of Water and Power,
42:21
SPEAKER_01: which is the origin of That department is what Chinatown's based on.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: Slowly, Mulholland came out here.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: He had officers posing as ranchers,
42:31
SPEAKER_01: buying up ranch land under the guise of,
42:32
SPEAKER_01: hey, we're going to have these different things.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: Eventually,
42:36
SPEAKER_01: they owned enough land where they redirected the river that feeds Owens Lake,
42:40
SPEAKER_01: Owens River, into the LA Aqueduct and directed it 200 miles away to Los Angeles.
42:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's what supplied Los Angeles with the drinking water that it needed to prosper.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile,
42:49
SPEAKER_01: it slowly drained the lake below us,
42:50
SPEAKER_01: leaving a Dust Bowl that eventually became so toxic that the EPA sued them in like
42:58
SPEAKER_01: the 1990s where they had to mitigate the dust.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: And so now if you go out onto the lake,
43:02
SPEAKER_01: there's tons of Department of Water and Power trucks out there
43:05
SPEAKER_01: that are all responsible for dust mitigation.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: And Los Angeles spends something like $2 billion a year controlling the dust out here.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: But they continuously take the water away from here.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: And it's, I mean, good for Los Angeles, I guess, but it's a tragedy.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this place is so beautiful.
43:21
SPEAKER_00: Like you said, you got Mount Whitney, right?
43:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like if we will show people later,
43:25
SPEAKER_00: you'll have to come see the video, but I mean, it's majestic.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: And then if there, I mean, that lake would be just amazing.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: And you would have, it was one of the downsides of this place is you have to truck water in.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: And so there's less wildlife here and you have to deal with.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: Bringing water in.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this would be like one of the most idyllic spots in California, I think.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: It'd be beautiful.
43:49
SPEAKER_01: The way I think about it though,
43:50
SPEAKER_01: is like if that lake was still there,
43:52
SPEAKER_01: I probably never would have been able to buy Cerro Gordo.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: It would have been such an expensive piece of real estate.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: And if you talk to a lot of locals, We have an interesting mentality towards it.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the people locally say,
44:01
SPEAKER_01: you know, you either bring the water to the people or the people to the water.
44:05
SPEAKER_01: Meaning if that lake was still there, this would be like Lake Tahoe.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: It would be the vacation home for every single person in Los Angeles.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: It's stunningly beautiful already.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: And if that was a seven mile across lake,
44:14
SPEAKER_01: every single person in LA would have a vacation house out here.
44:17
SPEAKER_01: And the people out here kind of like the rural kind of remote nature to it.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's just like a rationalization of what happened,
44:24
SPEAKER_01: but it's a deep seated issue that Way predates,
44:28
SPEAKER_01: obviously, my time here, but it impacts me every day.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: So you're bringing in 8,000 people last year.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: We're in the desert.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: There's not a lot going on out here,
44:36
SPEAKER_00: but there are some towns nearby that appreciate having visitors come spend money
44:42
SPEAKER_00: and stay in their hotels and eat in their restaurants.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: And then you've been working on this hotel.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: I cannot stress to people enough, first of all, you're in an old...
44:55
SPEAKER_00: Mining town where people did whatever the hell they needed to do to get stuff done.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: And it still feels like that here,
45:03
SPEAKER_00: but we're in a more modern time and you have to build your buildings
45:08
SPEAKER_00: to certain codes and things like that.
45:10
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, there is a craziness to you guys have been working on this hotel for years.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: People are putting up Roadblocks to you around nails and walls and permitting
45:23
SPEAKER_00: and all this stuff,
45:24
SPEAKER_00: even though you're clearly through your YouTube channel and
45:26
SPEAKER_00: the work you're doing here, you're obviously the hottest, the most promising thing.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: Some of this just strikes me as insane.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting.
45:36
SPEAKER_01: Ed, you have to deal with
45:38
SPEAKER_00: just living here.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: They're adding this layer.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: Baseline, it's tough to live here, as you're finding out after two days.
45:46
SPEAKER_01: Then beyond that, it's harder still to build anything here.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: And then being in California,
45:51
SPEAKER_01: there's another level of regulation that I think it's kind of like
45:55
SPEAKER_01: a joke these days.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, California is hard to deal with as far as business-wise.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: And you can never really appreciate it until you actually live here.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: You know,
46:01
SPEAKER_01: living before this in Texas and before that in Florida,
46:04
SPEAKER_01: you know, very different places.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't We're prepared for kind of the bureaucracy that comes with it.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, we still have to abide by both local code and state code.
46:15
SPEAKER_01: And I think in a small county like this,
46:17
SPEAKER_01: there's not a lot of infrastructure to make sure that those things happen quickly.
46:22
SPEAKER_01: We're five years into the process.
46:24
SPEAKER_01: And the most common question that I get from visitors or people online is like,
46:27
SPEAKER_01: what's going on with the American Hotel?
46:29
SPEAKER_01: As if like, I'm not working on it every day.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm always pushing.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: It's just the permitting process here is so slow that it makes it just like a crawl.
46:42
SPEAKER_01: And it is frustrating.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: I think as far as the things I get most frustrated about six years into living here,
46:48
SPEAKER_01: it's the permitting process.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: It's fucking crazy, man.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the headline is like,
46:53
SPEAKER_00: passionate,
46:54
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:54
SPEAKER_00: possibly irrational man has decided to dedicate his life to building a cool thing in
47:01
SPEAKER_00: the middle of nowhere that bothers no one.
47:04
SPEAKER_00: Let him do what he wants to do.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, you want the building to be safe.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: So like, as long as it's...
47:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:10
SPEAKER_00: Save, like, let the man build.
47:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and what's tough with me is, like,
47:15
SPEAKER_01: it's not like I'm drawing up the architectural plans and I'm trying to push through.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: These are made by our architects,
47:22
SPEAKER_01: an amazing architect,
47:23
SPEAKER_01: that since we've been trying to build a hotel
47:25
SPEAKER_01: at Cerro Gordo has completed three hotels in Los Angeles.
47:28
SPEAKER_01: So that just shows kind of the difference in speed timelines.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Our engineering companies, they're not, like, backwater engineering companies.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: They're all based in L.A.
47:35
SPEAKER_01: They're all used to building massive hotels.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: And so it's not for...
47:40
SPEAKER_01: Lack of sophistication within the plans.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: It's from just lack of resources in this small county to kind
47:46
SPEAKER_01: of see permits move quickly throughout it.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: And now it's funny that like,
47:51
SPEAKER_01: I've become one of the people that's like,
47:53
SPEAKER_01: California is so hard to deal with,
47:54
SPEAKER_01: you know, that you hear so many times, but I'm living it.
47:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I can tell it has not broken your spirit, but it broke my spirit a little bit.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
48:04
SPEAKER_00: So the, and the,
48:05
SPEAKER_00: all this stuff with the water,
48:08
SPEAKER_00: It feels like that's another, I know you like to get into rabbit holes and things.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: I get the sense that this is another,
48:16
SPEAKER_00: like an ongoing thing that you're looking into is what's been happening
48:20
SPEAKER_00: between Los Angeles and this place.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a deep-rooted history here,
48:26
SPEAKER_01: and there's been lots of strife throughout the years here,
48:29
SPEAKER_01: and it's something that I literally look at every single day.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: And for me, though,
48:34
SPEAKER_01: the thing that I take away from it is,
48:37
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like the long-term consequences of short-term thinking,
48:41
SPEAKER_01: meaning like when Mulholland found the water,
48:44
SPEAKER_01: that was In many ways, it was an amazing engineering feat.
48:49
SPEAKER_01: The idea that you can bring a river 200 miles away to feed a town of now millions
48:53
SPEAKER_01: and millions and millions of people is insane.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: He probably didn't think or care to think 100 years later how that would devastate
49:00
SPEAKER_01: the local area.
49:01
SPEAKER_01: And so whenever I'm doing projects here,
49:03
SPEAKER_01: even if they're smaller projects like the type of material we're using on a roof,
49:07
SPEAKER_01: I try to think like long term just because I'm sitting in the shadow
49:11
SPEAKER_01: of this consequence of it.
49:14
SPEAKER_00: So if the hotel gets finished, we got to walk around it yesterday.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: I think it was seven rooms or six in the main building and then, and then kind of an ADU.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: Um,
49:23
SPEAKER_00: and then you would like to have some cabins in the hills and then maybe like a tent,
49:28
SPEAKER_00: like glamping.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: So people could have this, this mix of experiences and, and so that's, that's the current.
49:37
SPEAKER_00: Vision is to really,
49:38
SPEAKER_00: you would come here,
49:40
SPEAKER_00: you get the beautiful views, you would get the history, you get to like hike around.
49:45
SPEAKER_00: And so this would just be this nice little oasis in the desert to come hang out.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I've always wanted to make it a place where people could come and stay overnight.
49:54
SPEAKER_01: You know,
49:54
SPEAKER_01: I think it's one thing to come for the afternoon and look around,
49:56
SPEAKER_01: but then like you guys, you know, like the sunsets and sunrises here are beautiful.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: And so we'll hopefully have Accommitation for people overnight,
50:04
SPEAKER_01: whether they want to stay in the hotel,
50:05
SPEAKER_01: they want a cabin,
50:06
SPEAKER_01: or even if they want to just like pitch a tent on some dry campsites,
50:09
SPEAKER_01: I want it to be accessible for anybody, basically.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: And so that's the hope,
50:13
SPEAKER_01: just to also just to feel the town alive again,
50:16
SPEAKER_01: you know, to kind of hear the buzz of people enjoying the area.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's what I've been working for,
50:24
SPEAKER_01: towards for six years, and that's what I kind of keep pushing towards.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: And how will you know when you, you're what, 37?
50:29
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
50:31
SPEAKER_00: Are you going to be 77 living here?
50:35
SPEAKER_01: I hope.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: People often ask me, they're like, when will Sarah go to be done?
50:38
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if there's ever a moment where you put a feather in the cap
50:40
SPEAKER_01: and you're like, and now it's done, you know?
50:42
SPEAKER_01: But I hope to be working on this project for the rest of my life.
50:45
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that I'll be living here full time in the same way for my whole life.
50:49
SPEAKER_01: It is very difficult to live here.
50:51
SPEAKER_01: Winters can be pretty cold.
50:53
SPEAKER_01: And being from Florida, you know, I still have a little bit of love of warm weather, but...
50:58
SPEAKER_01: I always want to spend a good portion of my year up here.
51:00
SPEAKER_01: I just think it's exciting.
51:01
SPEAKER_01: I get to go on all these crazy adventures.
51:05
SPEAKER_01: And I just enjoy seeing the town come back to life.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: What was the closest you ever came to walking away?
51:10
SPEAKER_00: Or did that not happen?
51:12
SPEAKER_01: Probably like...
51:15
SPEAKER_01: Two years in, when I was working on the 16-hour days, I had just fried myself.
51:18
SPEAKER_01: I had lost like 35 pounds that I didn't have to lose.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: I was like sick all the time.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: And probably when I was having a permit battle with the county, I was like, what?
51:29
SPEAKER_01: What are we doing?
51:32
SPEAKER_01: But at the same time,
51:33
SPEAKER_01: I try to zoom my timeline out where it's like,
51:38
SPEAKER_01: this is a project I'm going to be working on for decades.
51:40
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at a project over the course of decades,
51:42
SPEAKER_01: it's comforting where you don't get so caught up in month-to-month growth
51:46
SPEAKER_01: or year-to-year growth.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: It's so popular, I think, in startups.
51:48
SPEAKER_01: I can kind of relax myself where I'm like, it's all right.
51:52
SPEAKER_01: We'll get through it.
51:53
SPEAKER_01: And you kind of keep just chipping away at it.
51:56
SPEAKER_00: To you, I mean,
51:57
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you still enjoy talking about the place because,
52:00
SPEAKER_00: you know, you've dedicated your life to it.
52:01
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, it must get annoying.
52:03
SPEAKER_00: Idiots like me show up and you got to go through all this stuff.
52:06
SPEAKER_01: No, I love it.
52:07
SPEAKER_01: I enjoy it a lot.
52:08
SPEAKER_01: We get a lot of visitors,
52:10
SPEAKER_01: as you've seen,
52:10
SPEAKER_01: like 8,000 visitors throughout the years,
52:12
SPEAKER_01: a lot of people coming and going every day.
52:13
SPEAKER_01: And I love talking about it because everybody has their lens on whatever I'm saying, you know?
52:18
SPEAKER_01: So you'll ask different questions about it than other people do.
52:20
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, it's cool.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: It's cool the resonance that the town has had with people.
52:26
SPEAKER_01: The fact that people come up here at all is mind-blowing to me.
52:28
SPEAKER_01: And so, no, I'm here for it.
52:31
SPEAKER_00: Okay, wow.
52:33
SPEAKER_00: Mostly I want you to be careful, man.
52:35
SPEAKER_00: I think going down to that mine, that freaks me out.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe you do that solo.
52:40
SPEAKER_00: It's been, this was such a cool experience.
52:42
SPEAKER_00: It was quite different, I guess, than I pictured in my head in some ways.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: Because I've been to ghost towns before,
52:48
SPEAKER_00: mostly Bodhi, which is kind of manicured and it's like what, a state park.
52:55
SPEAKER_00: So it's well taken care of.
52:57
SPEAKER_00: And they had quite a few preserved buildings.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:01
SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
53:01
SPEAKER_00: I hadn't, when I,
53:02
SPEAKER_00: I did not know I'd be staying in a 1910 house that like,
53:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you really just feel the history in your bones immediately.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: And then coming in here, I mean,
53:13
SPEAKER_00: this really is like a, to me, it feels like a temple of sorts to some other era.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like hard to even wrap your mind around.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: But, well, super thankful.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: You let us come hang out here for a couple of days.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: It seems like you have a nice crew of people who all that, that struck me too.
53:33
SPEAKER_00: They all seem, um, like dedicated.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: Like, and really,
53:38
SPEAKER_00: um, and then it was cool to hear some of the visitors like, oh, what can I bring up?
53:42
SPEAKER_00: And, and I mean,
53:44
SPEAKER_00: some people were just tourists and then some people seem like they're trying
53:47
SPEAKER_00: to help too.
53:48
SPEAKER_00: So, um, but you could tell.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: Like you said, I guess your lowest moment was just two years into the project.
53:55
SPEAKER_00: Like things feel very on the up and up now and you get sense like I can see the future.
54:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
54:02
SPEAKER_01: I hope.
54:02
SPEAKER_01: That's the hope.
54:03
SPEAKER_01: It does feel we're in a good place and like a lot of people care
54:05
SPEAKER_01: about it these days,
54:06
SPEAKER_01: which gives me confidence that it'll stick around for a while longer
54:10
SPEAKER_01: because how many people have such a resonance with the town.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I've appreciated you being up here.
54:16
SPEAKER_01: I love showing people around.
54:17
SPEAKER_01: And I hope when you come in the future that we've made progress on the hotel
54:20
SPEAKER_01: and you can see it kind of progressing along.
54:22
SPEAKER_01: And maybe someday soon we'll have a beer in the hotel or something.
54:27
SPEAKER_00: I would love that.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm coming back no matter what.
54:30
SPEAKER_00: When you guys finish the hotel, I want to bring my wife and kids up here.
54:33
SPEAKER_00: And then I think, I mean,
54:36
SPEAKER_00: David Nicholson,
54:37
SPEAKER_00: who works for Core Memories, like our Co-founder and lead cinematographer.
54:43
SPEAKER_00: He used to be a treasure hunter on the side and has some ground penetrating radar.
54:49
SPEAKER_00: I think we might we might have to do an episode where we.
54:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we come dig in.
54:54
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of stuff underground here,
54:55
SPEAKER_01: and if we could figure out how to find it,
54:57
SPEAKER_00: I'd be stoked.
54:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
54:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: OK, well, thanks so much for for doing the podcast.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for letting us come film.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know which is going to air first.
55:07
SPEAKER_00: I suspect the podcast might come out before the video.
55:11
SPEAKER_00: But anyway,
55:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's links up in the screen people can click on right now for more of
55:17
SPEAKER_00: the story.
55:17
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, thanks so much, man.
55:18
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
55:19
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for coming.
55:22
SPEAKER_00: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
55:24
SPEAKER_00: Ashlee Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
55:29
SPEAKER_00: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
55:33
SPEAKER_00: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
55:36
SPEAKER_00: And the show is edited always by the Thank you so much to Brext for all your support
55:45
SPEAKER_00: and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: We love you.
55:51
SPEAKER_00: Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things.
55:56
SPEAKER_00: Thank you and we'll see you again.