Two speakers drive through the historic Cerro Gordo mining area, where Spanish miners first struck gold and Pablo Flores prospected before Beaudry and Belshaw built a boomtown. The 900-foot mine shaft is closed weekdays but opens for weekend tours. The property now houses an auto shop, storage, and a sawmill.
All right, we're driving through Cerro Gordo. And the name goes back— so the Spanish were here first, correct?
Yep.
And it— but it got named by— after— kind of like after—
I think the Spanish miners named it, right? Because that would make sense, right? For Fat Hill, you know? Yeah, that was— that was silver. Because originally, the first prospector that they give the credit for founding the town, this guy named Pablo Flores. So the story goes that Pablo Flores found the town, he got chased off by some from like native populations that were here for a while. He eventually came back. Beaudry and Belshaw came up, bought him out of a lot of his claims, and then kind of made it into the big boomtown that it is, that it became.
When you were in the bidding war for the town, who else was bidding?
Yeah, there's people that wanted to do all sorts of things. There's one person that wanted to make it like a weed-themed amusement park. And there's like, and the owner was like, pretty specific on who he wanted to buy it to. Yeah. And so, uh, my vision was pretty similar to like what his parents wanted to do, so that was helpful.
Um, fucking weird people. I know, I was never a weird person. Opportunists. So they were pushing the price up, but—
Yeah, nothing more. And the owner got in touch with me. He's like, listen, if you can just— I believe that they had a higher offer from a different company that wanted to do something else, but he just liked kind of what we wanted to do with it and stuff like that. And I had met the caretaker and the real estate agent, and so they all kind of like— we got along pretty well.
Do the people that come to visit, they get to come up to the mine? No. No. Not even the—
uh, Avery or somebody escorts them up here. Okay. Um, and so usually during the week this is fully off limits. On the weekends we occasionally do tours when somebody from our property will walk up here with them, just because there's a 900-foot hole in the ground up here. Yeah. So we want to keep it under control. And it's like, you'll see, it's not the most sightly because— because this can't be seen from town, we put all of our things that like we don't want seen up here, just our like junk. Yeah, yeah. And there's our vehicle Yeah, it's also like kind of our auto shop where we work on the trucks.
Well, yeah, you guys got some big stuff up here.
Yeah, we are. We got a sawmill, so we have some different things around and about.
