REALITIES OF LIVING IN A GHOST TOWN (Cerro Gordo)

The last thing I want to do is throw a coin from the 1800s into a pile of dirt, never to be found again.

What is it?

Yesterday we drove four hours from Las Vegas into the mountains of California to a tiny, deserted ghost town called Cerro Gordo. It was a thriving mining town back in the 1800s, but after the silver mines dried up, the residents of the town moved away, leaving it abandoned, frozen in time, and decaying for over 100 years. That was until Brent spent his life savings buying Cerro Gordo in hopes of bringing it back to life. At the start of the pandemic, he moved here, where he's lived alone for the last 10 months, documenting his life and capturing the imagination of millions on the Internet. If you missed our last video, we spent our first 24 hours exploring the town and its history.

I feel like this is all stuff that I shouldn't get to touch.

And today we're going to you what it's really like to live in a ghost town.

Morning. No ghost last night, and we didn't freeze to death. Thanks to.

These two heaters.

It is cold out here.

It's February in the mountains of Colorado at 8,500ft, and this abandoned town that we're staying in doesn't have any heat, and it is 16 degrees.

There's also no running water. These are the realities of living in a ghost town.

Yes.

Coffee's on the heater.

Look at this. The water that we left on the stove was nice to turn into ice.

Couldn't find a bowl for my cereal.

I think the worst part about living in an abandoned town with no plumbing has to be the early morning trip to the bathroom. That's the outhouse.

It is just a toilet seat with a hole.

If you missed the last video, Brent, the owner, has set us up in the bunkhouse for the next two nights, which is this building right here. I'll quickly show you around. We don't go in this bedroom because he says it's haunted. There's bedroom number one. Down the hall, we have bedroom number two with a fireplace. Maybe we should have taken that one. And.

This is our room. Oh, it's so warm in here. How'd you sleep? Great. And then we have a kitchen and a dining room table. This is home for the next couple nights.

Heat and running water are two things I definitely take for granted.

So I feel like all we've done is complain this morning. But that's not the goal of this video. We just want to show the realities of what it's like to actually Live up here because I feel like it's easy, if you've ever seen Brent's channel before, to craft this really romantic version of what life would be like here. Getting to wake up each morning, work on whatever project sounds fun to you. All that is a reality, but it doesn't come without some discomforts and some sacrifices. So the goal of this video is just to give you a real picture of what it's like to be living in an abandoned ghost town while it's going through the renovation phase.

Did not see that chain.

Doing the dishes without running water is kind of a nightmare. So thankfully we made the right decision. Going simple for lunch. So I can make this whole peanut butter banana hot dog just using one utensil. Banana's kind of frozen.

We have an M&M's for lunch, no knives required.

So Brent has like a million different projects that he works on every single day, and we've asked him to put us to work. So this was the building where the miners would bring the silver and they would figure out how much it was worth. And then conveniently, right next door was the brothel. Today, Brent is working on rebuilding the brothel, and he has this hunch that there's some buried treasure in there. So in the process, we're going to be sifting through the dirt.

This is the treasure. So far, the most exciting to me.

Oh, there it is.

Very small piece of denim.

Nice.

So we might have a lead. This was found, like, really close to under this building. And you can see that all of the original notes from this building are square nails. So they stopped making those in 1890.

I like the story of this boot being this was a guy that got chased out of the brothel. Yeah. He didn't have time to put his shoes back on.

Pants or his shoes. So this building used to be all the way till you see the wood end over there. And these two parts of the building fell down. So my hope is to, like, level this part of the ground out and then put these joists back up. I think in the meantime, see how it's on all level. I've been sorting through the dirt just in the off chance that some type of treasure, you know, happens to appear before me.

I see a bone in here.

It's not glamorous work, but sweet.

Let's do this.

Come on. Treasure.

Vertebrae, not treasure. Been doing this for two minutes and I'm already addicted. Haven't even found anything yet. This is like real life treasure hunting.

What is it?

Is this denim?

Yeah. Woo.

Treasure.

The ultimate treasure.

That's, like, still blue.

Blue jeans were invented in 1871 by Levi Strauss. So all the miners here are wearing original Levi Strauss jeans. And those jeans, to denim collectors, are like the holy grail. And they'll go for, like, $100,000.

I'm holding at least a hundred dollars.

Yeah, exactly.

We should put it on ebay.

Good work, Nate. Treasure pile.

All right, so let's go ahead and decide. Are we gonna, like, split the 100k away?

The split is the real debate.

The last thing I want to do is throw a coin from the 1800s into a pile of dirt, never to be found again.

Oh, my gosh.

Look at this.

Is that a mouse head?

Yeah. That's pretty crazy.

You keep it. Yeah, that's crazy.

Lambert's pharmaceutical. Some kind of cream that was found in the brothel. I'll just put that in the treasure chest. Whoa.

That's super cool.

That's awesome.

That's a good find.

Yeah.

Good one.

So we found an old miner tag. Apparently, they would hang these on, like, a nail before they went into the mine so that they. They knew who was down there if they didn't come back up. You look like you've been working.

We found lots of fun treasures. These are definitely my favorite, though. This really cool old key. This is a label for a milk bottle from Lone Pine, which is the first town down the mountain. It says, wash your bottle and return it to Lone Pine. And apparently he hasn't found toothpaste anywhere else on the entire property, but he's found, like, 15 of them around the brothel. Let's try not to think about that.

Too much every once in a while. I'm reminded we were at 8,500ft. We didn't find any hundred thousand dollar jeans, but it is nice and flat. Approval from the boss. Thumbs up. We're taking all the credit, for sure.

All right, work is done. Now it's time to play. I'm not sure if treasure hunting can be considered work, but going to play.

Haw.

It's cold again.

No, it's crazy.

Why are you crying?

This is so much fun. It feels like these trails just go on forever. It's crazy how much nothingness there is out here. And we're just staring down into Death Valley. 360 views of nothingness.

A little cold.

Nope.

Wild woman's driving.

Here we go.

This thing is awesome.

I can feel you getting more confident.

We're just driving through Joshua trees.

It's hour number 72 at Cerro Gordo. The temperature's dropping rapidly.

So Brent has been kind enough to invite us over because this is the only shower on the entire property. Gordo, it's my turn to shower.

You don't want to take a shower. I know you don't want one.

And this is as close as Cerro Gordo gets to running water. There's a 55 gallon drum of water right here that then runs to this pump that is pumped up to the water heater. And this is. This is how you shower. I should also mention that all this is run by this exposed battery. And I'm very glad that there's a heater in this room because apparently it's to keep the water from freezing, but it's also gonna make the shower a lot less miserable than I expected. Good luck.

Oh, that is not warm. Oh, it's getting warm. It's getting warmer.

Yeah.

I was feeling sorry for Brent living it up up here. It's kind of like showering in the van, except with a lot warmer water.

We're doing a quick check in with Outside World. We're not completely disconnected up here thanks to this wifi hotspot. It's enough to check emails, get a little work done, but not enough to watch Netflix or get consumed by the Internet.

So it kind of works with the vibe here. Like it's kind of impossible to waste time on the Internet.

Brent's brought us up to his favorite sunset spot. It's pretty special because on this side, this is Death Valley, which is the lowest point in the U.S. then over here, that's Mount Whitney, which is the tallest mountain in the continental U.S. so by standing on this ridge right here, you have both extremes, the lowest and the highest point in the continental U.S. it's pretty crazy.

Cool. Yep.

That's the very fancy way we get the stove work.

A little more work than a gas stove.

A little bit makes more fun.

So we're at Brent's house and we're cooking dinner, and he has a gas stove so we could take the easy way out and just use that. But he also has this super cool old wood burning stove from the 1800s. Thankfully, it's pretty simple. I'm just making quesadillas, so we should be fine. Supposedly, it takes a little while to heat it all up. This one should heat up first. And apparently it just like goes from there, like medium setting low setting the further away it is from the flame. So simple.

We did cheat a little bit and cook the meat on the gas stove. Didn't trust ourselves with the meat on the wood stove.

It's Smoking does not feel warm at all.

Ooh, it's hot.

I'm cooking on a stove in the 1800s. This is so cool.

Look at that.

Quesadilla number one is done.

Quesadillas aren't cooking quick enough. Is there a smoke detector in this house?

There is.

Okay.

All right, last ones. How are they?

Great.

I don't think I broke the stove.

How hard to break a stove that's survived 100 plus years?

I feel like living in the van really prepped me for living without running water. Get in for all the heat escapes. Quick.

Oh, so nice.

All right. Night two in the haunted bunker house.

Stop that. I didn't think I believed in ghosts, but I sure am scared of the thought of maybe seeing one.

Brent didn't believe in him either till he saw one in this.

Stop. Stop talking about it.

I like trying to think about who she is.

No.

I don't know why. Stop. Just don't talk.

Maybe it was one of the girls.

Stop. You sleep through the night all by yourself, and I'll wake up 10 times, and I'm the one who has to deal with this.

You didn't sleep last night? No. Were you scared?

No.

Yes, you were. No.

I'm blaming on the elevation. Let's go to sleep and quit talking about ghosts.

Can we leave the light on?

Good night.

Oh, nope, nope.

There we go.

This is so weird. We're about to fall asleep, and a car came up to Cerro Gordo, like, really quick and parked by Brent's house and turns its lights off immediately. Somebody got out of the car with a flashlight, and we couldn't tell where they went. Brent said he was investigating. We're not gonna be able to go to sleep until we figure out what's happening.

Why? Ghost town just got real.

Apparently a volunteer who came early. Johnny Sorting it out now. What the heck?

So last night's unexpected guest turned out not to be a threat. Brent has volunteers up here from time to time to help with the construction. But before I learned that, I went and found this thing to sleep with beside the bed. But I think, like, all in all, it just brought back the reality of what it's actually like to be living up here alone. At least he had some other people up here with him last night. I don't know that Karen I were any help, but, like, what do you do?

Do you go, like, try to find the person, or do you just go to sleep and hope they go away? Like, who are they?

He's a braver man than I am.

The handle's really hot.

The handle that's enclosing the fire.

I thought maybe. I don't know what I was thinking.

I forget that they're cats and they can land on their feet. All right, you want to go get clean?

Kara's refusing to take a shower because she doesn't want her hair to get wet because she thinks she might freeze to death. Oh, this all looks very safe next.

To the.

Exposed wires by the water. You know, we do what we can around here. And this is the cat paradise. As you can see, they live the best life at Cerro Gordo.

Just.

Oh, my gosh.

Just. Just listen.

Nothingness. The only thing you can hear is Cara peeing behind this tree over here.

I need to stop drinking water so I don't have to go to the outhouse in a little.

Not me.

Oh, by go. You're coming with me.