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Life in This Ghost Town Keeps Getting Stranger

Brent shares his life restoring the ghost town Cerro Gordo, exploring mines, drilling for water, and rebuilding the American Hotel.

Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.

Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.

Key Takeaways

  • Revitalizing a ghost town requires overcoming significant infrastructure challenges, especially water access.
  • Historical mining towns often fail without sustainable water sources, but Cerro Gordo may have a second chance.
  • Modern technology and traditional knowledge (like water witching) can aid in restoration efforts.
  • Community events like weddings help bring life and attention back to abandoned places.
  • Persistence and expert collaboration are essential in tackling unexpected setbacks during restoration.

What the video covers

  • Brent has lived in the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo for over six years, aiming to revive it.
  • He used explosives 700 ft underground to free a stuck drill pipe during well drilling.
  • Explored nearly 30 miles of abandoned mine shafts searching for miners' names.
  • Employed ground penetrating radar to locate lost gravesites in the area.
  • Progress resumed on rebuilding the historic American Hotel, including ADA-compliant rooms.
  • Hosted the first wedding in Cerro Gordo, marking a new chapter for the town.
  • Discussed the challenges of lack of reliable running water historically and currently.
  • Drilled a well that successfully hit water at 600 ft, a hopeful sign for the town's future.
  • Detailed the use of explosives and expert techniques to free the stuck drill pipe.
  • Shared reflections on the history and future potential of Cerro Gordo as a revived community.

Answers

Questions about this video

Why is water access so critical to the revival of Cerro Gordo?

Water access is essential because the town historically lacked reliable running water, making daily life and fire safety difficult. Securing water is key to sustainable living and rebuilding efforts.

How did Brent and his team free the stuck drill pipe underground?

They used explosives, specifically Pentex charges and detonating cord, to break the collapsed material trapping the pipe, successfully freeing it after several attempts.

What progress has been made on the American Hotel restoration?

Work resumed on the hotel, including constructing an adjacent cabin with ADA-compliant rooms, aiming to restore the hotel as a functional community hub.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:01
Speaker A
Hello there. My name is Brent, and behind me is the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo, a place that I have called home for over six years now. And I moved up here with the hope of bringing life back to this dead place. And these
00:16
Speaker A
past few months have been busier and stranger than ever. We used explosives 700 ft underground to free [music] a stuck drill. I explored almost 30 miles of abandoned mine shafts searching for names of forgotten miners. And we brought up ground penetrating radar to
00:36
Speaker A
hopefully find lost gravesites. Meanwhile, progress on the American Hotel began again. I hosted [music] my first wedding up here at Cerro Gordo.
00:47
Speaker A
And deep in a canyon, I followed out a secret told to me by a dying friend and confirmed something that isn't supposed to exist in this part of California. It's been a very busy few months. So, let's get into it.
01:04
Speaker A
[music] [music] Mining towns like up [music] here at Cerro Gordo usually die when the mine dies. [music] The ore goes bust, the people leave, and the town kind of sits there waiting for what's going to happen next. But not all
01:29
Speaker A
dead mining towns become ghost towns. Some of them get a second act. And usually the thing that determines whether they get that second act is access to water. You can look around the country for numerous examples of this,
01:44
Speaker A
but if we look at a place like Aspen, Colorado, a silver mining camp in the 1880s that boomed to a few thousand residents, then by the 1890s, the ore goes, and the town dwindles back to a few hundred residents. But Aspen had access
02:00
Speaker A
to a river. It had water, so it was able to sustain itself through agriculture and farming until the real big ski boom happened. And so today, Aspen is what we know it as, and places like Cerro Gordo are still sitting here waiting because
02:17
Speaker A
Cerro Gordo never had access to reliable running water. Even when this town was a boom town and had thousands of residents, the vast majority of that water had to come up this 8-mile dirt road you see behind me
02:32
Speaker A
by the tens of thousands of gallons a day. And if you're pulling out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ore, like they were here at Cerro Gordo, you can afford to do such things. But when the mine goes bust, suddenly those
02:45
Speaker A
things are no longer economical. And not a lot has changed in the past 150 years up here. You know, for the six years that I have been here, almost every single drop of water has also come up that dirt road you see behind me, but
03:00
Speaker A
instead of mules, these days I'm able to use a giant green military truck. But every time I flushed a toilet, turned on a sink, turned on a shower, that water had to come from down below. And I have
03:15
Speaker A
felt the effects of not having running water up here, not just in day-to-day inconveniences but in a deeper way, too. You know, when the original American Hotel that was up here caught fire, me and the people who were
03:26
Speaker A
here only had access to shovels and dirt because there's no water to fight that.
03:31
Speaker A
And that was a very devastating moment. And so when I say that all of my hopes and dreams for Cerro Gordo are wrapped up in getting reliable running water, I mean it. And so for many years, I didn't
03:46
Speaker A
do much about that because the thought that there was water potentially down below the town was comforting in a way that if I had drilled and not found it, it would have been devastating. But, finally, a few months ago, I finally
04:03
Speaker A
pulled the trigger after consulting hydrogeologists, after consulting historians, after consulting even a water witch, and we drilled a well right here.
04:14
Speaker A
And down that hole about 600 ft, we hit water. And it very quickly felt like a dream. All my hopes and dreams started coming together for the future.
04:27
Speaker A
And we pushed deeper and not too far after that, the drill got stuck. It wouldn't go up, it wouldn't go down, it wouldn't turn. Something had collapsed around the drill trapping not just my hopes and dreams, but hundreds of feet of drill pipe worth
04:44
Speaker A
tens of thousands of dollars down a hole. And we fiddled with it for a while, and I felt like this dream was becoming a nightmare.
04:52
Speaker A
And in that case, we tried a few different things, and the final option was explosives.
04:59
Speaker A
Hey, I'm Tyler McMillan, owner-operator Well Blaster. Um, I specialize in water well services, and what we have here today is we've got some stuck drill pipe about 600 and some change in the hole.
05:09
Speaker A
Uh, what we're going to do is we're going to back this thing off, or we're going to throw 2 lb of Pentex down that hole and see if we can't turn this pipe loose.
05:20
Speaker A
What I got here is I got Spartan 150s. This is 1 and 2/3 of a pound total. Each one of these is about a third of a pound, 150 g. So, we're going to stretch these boosters here. I'm going to slim
05:32
Speaker A
line them up so we can get them through that drill rod. And these things, when they detonate, they crank out about 3 and 1/2 million PSI.
05:39
Speaker A
We're adding that little bit of water in the hole to make sure that we apply 100% of that burst pressure to the pipe down there.
05:46
Speaker A
So, upon detonation, uh, this thing is essentially going to turn that pipe into Elmer Fudd's shotgun after Bugs Bunny jabs his carrot in the tip of it.
05:58
Speaker A
Now, this white line you see, this is 100 grain detonating cord. Think of it like an explosive rope. Uh, this stuff burns at 23,000 ft per second. When we detonate, we're going to set off this cord, and the cord's going to give us
06:09
Speaker A
the punch to set all these boosters off at one time. This stuff burns so quick. Realistically speaking, when you hear the 209 from this, this is already gone. So, the event's going to go pop, ping, and then we'll see what we got.
06:23
Speaker A
Okay. Watch your feet. Don't run into the back of our truck. [snorts] Same thing that sets off the old guy's shotgun shell.
06:47
Speaker A
Yeah. You got this tool here. It's basically a handheld firing pin. Yeah. Open it up. Kick our breech open.
06:54
Speaker A
Huh. Go ahead and eject our empty from yesterday. Load that fresh one in. Roll up a few [music] more feet, Bee, 'cause we got that atmospheric pressure thing. We're so high up here, the air pressure pushes the powder out.
07:10
Speaker A
So, this yellow line is what we call noiseless trunk line or nonel line. Because this [music] stuff all burns so fast, you'll hear this, that thing's going to go ping immediately.
07:19
Speaker A
Wow. Everybody ready? I'm ready. All right. We've got all heads accounted for? I hope.
07:28
Speaker A
Air clear? Yep. Fire in the hole. There she goes. Pop. Well. I was so good. It's here.
07:38
Speaker A
Disappointing, all right. [laughter] I wouldn't say anticlimactic, but like, you know. No, that looks cool.
07:44
Speaker A
That's what we wanted. All right, that's pretty. Let's see if we can get it out of there.
07:51
Speaker A
All right, we're going to try to pull it back out now. Blast it. There's less pipe on this pipe now. There's no hammer.
08:00
Speaker A
Hopefully this stuff comes loose. All right. You guys knocked it out of the park.
08:31
Speaker A
Thank you. Well done. So, the positives, we got the pipe out of the well. We showed that there is water 600 ft down. And so, hopefully when Adam's able to come back in a month or so, we can get back down
08:52
Speaker A
to that water, and we can have a successful well, which will allow that second act to happen. And nothing up here has been easy for 150 years, so I don't know why I thought that might be, um, but there's a lot of hopes and
09:06
Speaker A
dreams wrapped up in that, and there's also a lot of hopes and dreams wrapped up in what is right in front of me, and that is the rebuilding of the American Hotel that was lost in that fire.
09:21
Speaker A
[music] Today, finally, some hotel progress continues. It's not related to the permits that I've been waiting for years from the county for. It is related to the other part of the hotel, one that I hadn't talked about too much, but
09:42
Speaker A
eventually, right next to the hotel, right here where this white truck is, will be a cabin. And this cabin will have two rooms in it, and it'll be at the exact same grade as the hotel, and these will act as our ADA rooms, or
09:58
Speaker A
American Disabilities Act rooms for the hotel. So, the hotel itself is going to have six rooms. There'll be two additional ADA compliant rooms here, so that way
10:11
Speaker A
to access the bar and restaurant and all that. And the first step is to get this down to grade. So, today, we're going to start getting it down to grade, then we'll dig the footers for the concrete to go in, then we can start
10:28
Speaker A
building this thing up. And when we lost the hotel in 2020, there was a little cabin here called Crapo's house, and Crapo was a surveyor eventually for Cerro Gordo. He was eventually a murderer here. He shot somebody dead,
10:42
Speaker A
Boland, right here, and went on the run. And so, we've been calling it the surveyor's house. So, today, we finally get going on a little bit of hotel progress.
10:55
Speaker A
[music] All right. So, as we've been going through this grading of the site for the cabin next to the hotel, it seems like we're going to have to move a lot of dirt. And since it we're going to have
11:09
Speaker A
to move a lot of dirt for this anyways, we may as well start backfilling the basement of the hotel. So, what you see behind me, all of that block will eventually be underground. So, the grade of this is going to come up a lot. And
11:22
Speaker A
the reason that I haven't backfilled it so far is because I wanted to leave the ability to punch out pipes as we were doing the plumbing. And now Now the MEP plans are approved, I kind of know where
11:32
Speaker A
some of those pipes are going to be more. So, this front bit, the part in between this cabin and the hotel, is not going to be having pipes on it. So, we can backfill this part. But, before we do that, we
11:44
Speaker A
need to do some steps. So, what we're going to need to do is we need to first waterproof that block. So, that way if the water comes down, it doesn't get in.
11:52
Speaker A
So, we're going to put a waterproofing membrane on it. Then, we're going to put insulation on the basement. So, that way it stays cool and warm when we need it to. Then, we're going to put more waterproofing on top of that. Then,
12:05
Speaker A
we're going to put a little French drain at the bottom, so we can control the water flow if it were to hit the side, go down, drain down cuz it can't get into the basement. It needs to go
12:14
Speaker A
somewhere else. Then, after all of that, we have the county come inspect. Then, we will backfill it. And so, I'm excited to at least have some progress going. I think it's going to look a lot better. It's going to look a
12:25
Speaker A
lot closer to what it's going to eventually with all of this backfilled. And so, progress and soon this grade, as you can see, will become up a lot and it'll be more even with [music] the cabin that we're building over there.
12:46
Speaker A
[music] [music] [music] So, there's been some progress. Next, we're going to get the drain in, get this backfilled, finally be able to walk up to the hotel. I'm just so stoked to see any change at all on it. It's still
13:22
Speaker A
going a little slower than I would like, but stay tuned. It feels like we're finally moving again. So, I'm hoping that we end the year strong. We can get that backfilled, we get these footers in place, we start working on this cabin,
13:34
Speaker A
and hopefully by then the permits come in to start on the inside of both. That would be a good, good day.
13:39
Speaker A
And this is what the inside of the hotel looks like right now. So, obviously we still have quite a bit of work to do in here. And with all of these different construction projects starting up again, Cerro Gordo has become a very expensive
13:54
Speaker A
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14:07
Speaker A
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14:28
Speaker A
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14:42
Speaker A
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14:56
Speaker A
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15:06
Speaker A
[music] My favorite thing up here, and I mean my favorite thing, is to throw myself down some historic rabbit hole that I've come across. You know, the mine explorations, the extended hikes, the building renovations, they're all on hopes of
15:23
Speaker A
uncovering some history that I can dive into and better understand. Because the better I understand the history here, the more I feel connected to it, and the more important this time up here feels.
15:37
Speaker A
You know, I can't even count the number of hours I've spent scanning digitized newspapers hoping to connect to the past. Because that makes it not just a building renovation, it makes it a continuation of a story, and that makes it all feel
15:53
Speaker A
that much more important. And of all these historic rabbit holes that I've been in, the ones that I like the best are the ones that humanize the history here. Sure, production reports are interesting, but I want to know what
16:05
Speaker A
life was actually like 150 years ago right here. And the stories of the Belshaws, the Gordons, the Nadeaus, the main characters of Cerro Gordo are interesting in their own right, but it's really the lesser-known stories that make up Cerro Gordo. You know, this
16:23
Speaker A
town is what it is because of the thousands of miners that made their way up here, went down that mine shaft right over there, and were mostly forgotten to the history books. And recently, I was down the main mine shaft right there,
16:37
Speaker A
and in a corner of the mine, I saw names carved from the 1870s, the 1880s, and the 1890s. You know, some men working 12-hour shifts by candlelight carving their names just hoping to be remembered. And it made me think of all
16:55
Speaker A
the different names that I've passed by on my explorations, looked at for a moment, and forgotten about. And so recently, I went back down into the mine to every single level of the mine to hopefully document and decipher all of the
17:10
Speaker A
different names that are left down there. And my hope with that is to maybe maybe connect to some of their living relatives.
17:25
Speaker A
All right, we're past the Jefferson now. And we're seeing our first graffiti. What you're seeing in front of us, that black soot, that's made from a carbide lamp. And so after a carbide [music] lamp burns, it leaves behind soot. So
17:43
Speaker A
this isn't spray paint, this is carbide. And if there's going to be graffiti in the mines, it's going to be places where graffiti is easy to make, meaning before they used carbide and they could leave stuff like this, they were using candles
17:56
Speaker A
back here. And if they're using candles back here, then they would have had to scratch their names into the wall like I've seen before. And so it's not surprising that a lot of the 86 level didn't have graffiti because
18:12
Speaker A
it was mined in the 1800s before [music] they had carbide. And so we're just getting to see our first little bit as they're punching past the Jefferson to try to get to something.
18:25
Speaker A
William something Chapman. This is the end of the line at 86, but that's our first clue.
18:33
Speaker A
And at the very back, this is probably where they gave up. But we have our first name, and that's pretty cool.
18:56
Speaker A
And now we're on the 200 level, the level that I never like having to sneak into.
19:04
Speaker A
But this level is boarded up [music] because it collapses a lot, and this is the level that in the 1870s [music] there was a badly collapse that trapped and killed an unknown number of miners.
19:21
Speaker A
And for that reason they boarded it up eventually. And so now we go back here to a level that very few people go to.
19:32
Speaker A
It's just [snorts] generally a very spooky level to be in given the context. Getting to the real sketchy part of the mine.
19:43
Speaker A
That's pretty interesting. [music] Here's the names or some symbols. They just say C P M A N Andy Should have left your last name, Andy.
20:01
Speaker A
Somebody spent their name a lot. A W B J W B J W B J W B Reno Nevada 29 L H and maybe Reno, Nevada and middle line [music] And now at the 400 level where I've seen quite a bit of carbon
20:33
Speaker A
graffiti in the past. Here's one of the more clear names. Theodore or Theodoro. I'm going to need help on this one. We need to get that one because that's a clear one.
20:46
Speaker A
He's spent a long time on that and that's a pretty good one. And this one's nice and clear.
20:54
Speaker A
Ed Chapman was telling us which way to get out. That's probably the latest that I've seen. That's 1950 maybe, 1951, 53.
21:05
Speaker A
W C R There was this company that went by Riggs that I know leased it possibly in the '50s. That might be from something Riggs who were kind of the last people to lease it and work it. If
21:20
Speaker A
so, that'd be kind of cool. Somebody who was trying to bring the town back to life.
21:26
Speaker A
Just like me. And right off the bat at the 500 we got names. Up at the top it looks like we got Jetson Reed.
21:44
Speaker A
Cameron W Vaughn V A Frank LaBelle maybe in 47. John Morin I imagine this is in '40s too. So 47.
22:00
Speaker A
Here we got Clarence [snorts] Garvin. [music] That looks pretty clear, right? And imagine them just sitting here. Maybe they're at the end of their shift. You know, they're waiting for the hoist to come over there.
22:16
Speaker A
And they decide, "Hey, today's the day we're going to put it down here." Well boys you're not forgotten. We're going to try to find you.
22:27
Speaker A
So, as I was dusting off these and I was really afraid that I might take off the carbide but it revealed all sorts of new names.
22:34
Speaker A
B Steel maybe? So, with that we're going to call it for the 500. Probably the most clear names we've seen so far. We go back to the hoist and down to the 700 level.
22:59
Speaker A
And I've spent a lot of time at this level because this is the only place in all of Cerro Gordo where there's known water right now.
23:07
Speaker A
Seems like most of the names here the 700 are right by the shaft. I'm not sure.
23:14
Speaker A
But, we still have one more level to go. The deepest level, 200 more feet down.
23:23
Speaker A
Down to the 900-ft Then we will have seen all of Cerro Gordo. So, I think for now, it's time to head down.
23:35
Speaker A
So this is the 900-ft level of the mine. And this is our final stop. Ooh, that's a good one.
23:47
Speaker A
Cool drawings down here. A red light can. That's cool. A lot of karma down here.
24:00
Speaker A
886 UCLA 27. That's really cool. Come up to the end of the line. Dale Butler.
24:22
Speaker A
So, that was it. All the levels of the Union Mine. And it was really cool to see all those names. [music] I think that I probably got at least 10 to 15 that are very clear. Maybe another five
24:34
Speaker A
to 10 if I really get good at deciphering them. And that should be plenty. And it just really helps me humanize the experience down here.
24:42
Speaker A
That's what I'm always looking to do. My hope with all of these names is to track down some of these miners' living relatives and invite them up here. Show them where their ancestors worked and maybe learn some stories that never made
25:00
Speaker A
it into the newspapers. And so, I'm going to list all of the names that I've been able to decipher so far on the screen here. And if you're out there, and you can help me connect any of these
25:09
Speaker A
names to somebody that worked at Cerro Gordo, I would be much appreciated. My email is just [email protected].
25:16
Speaker A
I think this could be a very cool and important project. [music] Today is a very exciting day because today, hopefully, we are going to uncover some history up here at Cerro Gordo to do something that I've wanted to do for many years, and that is use
25:36
Speaker A
ground penetrating radar and some other technologies to hopefully find a variety of things. We're up here by the cemetery right now, so we're going to hopefully see some graves, maybe get a count of how many of those there are. Later,
25:49
Speaker A
we're going to go down into town and see if we can find some old outhouses, and maybe even find some precious metals.
25:57
Speaker A
And so, I have Mark Harris here from OKM Detectors and Mark, what have we got?
26:04
Speaker A
Well, today, Brent, we're going to use our Gepard. It's a ground penetrating radar. Um and we're going to use [clears throat] that in combination with our EXP 7000. Both technologies are great at locating what we feel like may be some of the
26:22
Speaker A
graves up here. And um then we'll see we'll compare the two results that we get from both the EXP 7000 and the Gepard, and see what we've got. So, between these two technologies, we'll get a um hopefully, a pretty good picture of
26:38
Speaker A
what's up there. My hope with these scans is to uncover another piece of Cerro Gordo's lost history. As new technologies emerge, they continue to give us access to part of this town's story that were never accessible before. To identify graves 5
26:58
Speaker A
or 6 ft underground without having to disturb anything above them. And it was fascinating to watch a pattern begin to emerge with disturbances of roughly the same size and spaced out similar distances that suddenly stopped at the edges of the cemetery. And working with
27:16
Speaker A
Mark gave me a glimpse into something that I've been wondering about for years, but it also allowed us to chase down some more light-hearted leads like the locations of old outhouses which [music] have produced tons of antique bottles and other artifacts for the
27:31
Speaker A
museum in the past. And in the end we found a fairly clear boundary where the disturbances stopped in every direction and based on the spacing [music] and the size of the cemetery, we believe there's about 60 people buried there.
27:47
Speaker A
And it's the most accurate estimate [music] we've had in decades and it feels meaningful. It feels like the first step towards properly recognizing the miners and the families that are buried there, many of whose markers and names have just been lost to time.
28:03
Speaker A
And up here people have died from mining accidents disease violence and dangers that came from living in such a remote place.
28:12
Speaker A
And back then if something went wrong, you were pretty much on your own and the odds weren't good and 150 years later Cerro Gordo is still the same. You know, we're still at the end of an 8-mi dirt
28:24
Speaker A
road and we're more than [music] an hour from the nearest clinic on a good day. And so this month we took another step this time towards being better prepared for the people who do come and visit today.
28:37
Speaker A
Today is another exciting day this month because today we are doing our wilderness first responder course which is medical training specifically designed for people in the back country.
28:48
Speaker A
It's a 60-hour course. There's five days of in-person that we're doing, and the whole team up here at Cerro Gordo is doing the training along with some long-term volunteers. And that's just going to give us, you know, some of the
29:01
Speaker A
confidence to deal with some of the situations that I've had already deal with living up here for 6 years. And so, uh today we're going back to school.
29:09
Speaker A
Yeah, so move this down a little bit and then we're going to fold this.
29:13
Speaker A
Oh gosh, no. Like, okay, and then move your arms. You want to kill me?
29:18
Speaker A
1 2 3. It's [laughter] Yeah, mine is looking a little ahead. It's perfect. Yeah, but we didn't have We didn't actually tie all the way to the head, I guess.
29:26
Speaker A
you did, that'd be great. [laughter] You know? All tied. Wow. What are you doing there, Stephen?
29:33
Speaker A
I am uh practicing CPR on an infant. And now the team is certified. We are all wilderness first responders. And I got to say, more than anything else, I think it's just a level of confidence that we have now
29:52
Speaker A
that when these situations inevitably come up, we'll at least have the foundational understanding to take care of them. And there's some comfort in that. And after a month of looking for names, looking for old graves, and preparing for
30:10
Speaker A
the worst days up here, we also had the best day up here this month. And that is because for the first time in a very long time, or at least as long as I've been up here, Cerro Gordo
30:24
Speaker A
hosted a wedding right up here on the saddle overlooking Death Valley. And it was a wedding from my friend named Buddy, who I met right after high school, and we stayed in touch, became great friends, roommates later. And over
30:39
Speaker A
the years, Buddy visited. He ran in our foot race every year. And one day he brought up a girl named Britney and you just kind of knew. And so when earlier this year they asked if they could have their wedding up here, I of
30:54
Speaker A
course said yes. It felt like an honor to be trusted with such a special day and I remember after saying yes, there was that wave of anxiety because we've never done a wedding up here. I don't even know what goes into a
31:06
Speaker A
wedding. Um but after a little preparation we pulled it off and right here a ceremony happened.
31:15
Speaker A
Come back. Never been more ready for anything in my life. I like that. Are you going to write your vows?
31:21
Speaker A
We're going to wing it. Vows are in the heart and heart's coming with me.
31:25
Speaker A
Here we go. First wedding at Cerro Gordo. Oh my gosh. It's good. [music] Thank you for this day. Thank you for this family, buddy.
31:50
Speaker A
You may kiss the bride. [cheering] [applause] [music] [music] What a day. What a day.
32:13
Speaker A
We done did it. We done did it. Wow. We're here. This is what it is.
32:26
Speaker A
Sorry, dogs. Get in [music] here. Wow, natural. Wow, look at this. Natural. That's good.
32:41
Speaker A
Hello there. I'm Winton George Wilkes the fourth, [music] married man. And I'm taken. [music] [music] Can't believe it's been about 6 years that I've been coming up here to look over the Sierra, watch the sunset, and just make sense of another month up here at
33:19
Speaker A
Cerro Gordo. And this month had a lot of progress, and it also had a lot of [music] trying to remember the past. You know, the names that are carved in the wall, the graves that were dug yet never marked.
33:35
Speaker A
And there's another thing up here that I confirmed this month. Something left from the past, a secret, if you will, that was told to [music] me by a late mentor, and that I've held close to me for years,
33:55
Speaker A
[music] and only recently confirmed. A very spectacular thing that is only just down there that I'll take you guys [music] to now, and share something that is one of the most cool things up here at Cerro Gordo.
34:13
Speaker A
So, this secret was first told to me by a man named Tip, who was a mentor of mine, and he was sitting not even a mile from here, dying.
34:27
Speaker A
[music] And when he was there, he was trying to pass on all of the different things [music] he could about Cerro Gordo and this area.
34:36
Speaker A
And among the last things he ever told me was to walk this wash. Generally, [music] to walk a wash if I was ever in need of an adventure or something fun to do, [music] but then also specifically to walk this wash
34:53
Speaker A
that I'm in right now. And I remember shortly thereafter I slipped and fell and bumbled my way down this steep wash.
35:05
Speaker A
And I believe that I found what he was telling me to look for. And over the years I was wondering if maybe I had just wanted to find what I thought it was.
35:24
Speaker A
Because this is a very special something, something that is not documented to be down here. Not this far south, not in this area. And so over the years I always questioned myself.
35:39
Speaker A
But recently I scrambled down here and I took some photos and uploaded them for a botanist to confirm.
35:51
Speaker A
And they confirmed what I'd hoped all along and what Hip and what Tip had been telling me.
36:00
Speaker A
And when he confirmed that these trees, this little pocket here down below my favorite sunset spot were the great bristlecone pines.
36:11
Speaker A
The oldest living organisms in the world. You know, some of these bristlecones are older than the pyramids. They're older than Rome. They were alive when woolly mammoths were walking the earth.
36:27
Speaker A
And there's a famous forest of these trees about 70 miles north of here, up by Big Pine by And there's never been a reported bristlecone this far south down here at Cerro Gordo until now.
36:48
Speaker A
This tree right here is in that class of bristlecone pines. You can tell by in a few ways.
37:00
Speaker A
As you get close the cones themselves have bristles on them. There's these little pointy bits at the end that you can see where they get their name from, the bristlecone.
37:19
Speaker A
Then you have this bottle brush like leaf and stem that's on it. And you have the little sap flakes that are all throughout that.
37:36
Speaker A
Almost like a dandruff. There's a bristlecone story from the 1960s where this researcher found a really old tree and he wanted to figure out exactly how old that tree was. So he took a core sample, brought it back to
37:51
Speaker A
the lab and determined that the tree was 4,900 years old. The oldest living tree on earth that had seen the pyramids, Jesus, the Roman Empire and everything since.
38:04
Speaker A
And by taking that core sample, that tree died. He had killed the oldest living organism on earth. And if you know, if you look around me right here this tree you can see the [music] chops and the hacks of the miners that cut
38:21
Speaker A
some of these down back in the day. And it's easy to scoff at that and think, "Pff, why would you do such a thing?" But, they say that leisure is the mother of philosophy, and I think that means that these miners
38:34
Speaker A
didn't have the time to sit around and navel-gaze and think about a world without bristlecone pines. You know, they were hungry, they were cold. They were just doing what they needed to do to survive. [music] And these trees that did survive around
38:49
Speaker A
me, they saw those miners carve their name in the wall. They saw some of them die and be buried in the cemetery, and they're still standing. And over the years thinking about it, I think [music] that Tip was trying to
39:03
Speaker A
leave me a lesson in a way that great teachers do. He wasn't coming out and saying it outright, but he left it for me to discover and interpret in my own way.
39:13
Speaker A
And I think that these trees are not beautiful and unique and so long-lasting despite [music] the environment. They are that way because of the environment.
39:31
Speaker A
You know, there's so many other trees that that grow down at normal elevations that [music] grow quick and beautiful and easy that aren't a tenth of as interesting as all these trees that are around me here.
39:43
Speaker A
And I think in some ways, it's a mirror to the life that I had before Cerro Gordo [music] one that was much more comfortable, much easier to go through. Um but, this harsh terrain that I've planted myself in up
40:00
Speaker A
here at Cerro Gordo has developed [music] me into a much slower, much more deliberate, and I think much more interesting person in a way that [music] bristlecones are, and you know, a Christmas tree growing in a field never
40:14
Speaker A
could be. And I'm sure there's more lessons that these trees [music] want to give me.
40:21
Speaker A
And so I'm just going to sit here and watch the sunset and think about Tip, these trees, and the last few months here.
40:29
Speaker A
But as always, I very much appreciate you guys checking out these videos. You know, that's meant everything to me for the past 6 years. And [music] so, I hope you get out there and check out some new things.
40:41
Speaker A
And until next time, I'll be here, you'll be where you are, and I'll see you guys then.
Topics:Cerro Gordoghost townabandoned mining townwell drillingexplosivesAmerican Hotelmining historyground penetrating radarwater accessrestoration

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