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

Ashlee Vance: What is it like to buy a ghost town? That is what we get into on this week's episode with our guest, Brent Underwood. A few years ago, he bought the Cerro Gordo Mine in California. It's near Death Valley or in Death Valley. It was a silver, and I want to say copper, Mine that ran for many, many decades. It had a ghost town, an old town that is remarkably well preserved. Somehow or another, Brent ended up buying this and has turned it into quite the pet project. He's been... Exploring the mines. There's many, many, many miles of mines to go through there. He's been restoring the old hotel that used to be the center of the city, and he's built a massive YouTube channel around all this. He's an author. He's just a cool dude, a really good hang. We went to the mine. And spent a couple days. I slept in a house from the 1800s. We used a Ouija board. And tried to summon some ghosts, but our intern ruined the whole process by not really getting into the spirit of things. That's neither here nor there. We talked to Brent about the history of Cerro Gordo, what it's like to buy a ghost town, what it's like to lower himself down into the mines and explore them and why he's doing this. And it was great. We had such a fun time when we were hanging out there. We'll have an episode on our main YouTube video channel, the Core Memory channel, about our time in Cerro Gordo. But here's our chat with Brent, and I'm sure you will love it. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Off to the ghost town we go. [music] Brent Underwood, how are you? I'm doing well. We are in a ghost town. We are in a old mining town. You live here. Full time. Full time. I think there's some people tuning into this who will know that you've got this mega YouTube channel about moving here. There's some people who will not have heard your story before. So we have this amazing setting. I thought maybe we should explain, explain how we ended up here.

Brent Underwood: Yeah.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, tell us, tell us where we are and a little bit of how we got here.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, so right now we are at Cerro Gordo, California, which back in 1800s was the largest silver mine in California. And it's a town that started around 1865 and ran all the way into the 1940s. So for a mine, it had a really long and active life. And the main mine here is 10 feet that way. That's the Union Mine. And out of that hole right there, they pulled Something like $800 million worth of minerals. And so this was kind of your classic Western boomtown. There was 4,000 people living up here at its peak. There was brothels, bars, saloons, you know, everything that you can imagine happening up here. The town eventually kind of went bust in the 1940s for a variety of reasons. They lost the vein. World War II shut down on all non-essential mining. And so the town kind of became a ghost town, you know, abandoned for the first time. It's been in private ownership since then, kind of like passing down from person to person. And I purchased the town in 2018 with the idea of turning into kind of a hospitality destination, you know, Airbnb, some cabins, have people come up and stay here. I was originally doing it from afar. I was living in Austin, Texas, kind of commuting back and forth. Then March of 2020 hits. The world starts shutting down. I decide what better place to spend the pandemic than in the middle of nowhere up here and moved up here in March of 2020 and never left. Yeah. So six years later, still here, still working to bring the town back to life, still kind of loving life up here.

Ashlee Vance: That was great. And there's so much to get into. We spent a couple of days here. You're kind enough to let us hang out. We're like living. I mean, we've been staying in, what's the name of our house? The Gordon House. The Gordon House, which I think was built in 1910.

Brent Underwood: Around 1910, yeah.

Ashlee Vance: And it's just a very nice, very nice house. It's still standing.

Brent Underwood: Yeah.

Ashlee Vance: And let's go back, let's go back a little bit. Like what were you doing before 2018?

Brent Underwood: Yeah, so I was living in Austin, Texas. I had a bed and breakfast in an old Victorian house from the 1800s. So I've always loved this idea of history and hospitality and kind of combining the two. My undergraduate degree was in real estate. And so I thought I would get into that, you know, but I've always loved hospitality. And then my grandfather used to watch Gunsmoke, the Western show, just like over and over and over and over again. And he had dementia. So he would just watch the episodes, the same one over and over and over. And I think something about that, like implanted this romanticism of the American West and So 2018, I'm in Austin. I have this bed and breakfast. I also have a day job, which is a company called Daily Stoic, which is about stoicism that I have with my partner Ryan Holiday. And so I'm kind of doing both of these, trying to figure out So when I got my next move, I had been in Austin at that point for about six years and I was kind of ready for the next chapter. You know, Austin changed a lot during those six years. And so I was looking for the next project and I was looking at different hospitality things around the country. Old hotels in the Catskills outside New York City that are kind of like dirty dancing, kind of like cool hotels. And I was looking at those kind of, and a friend of mine sent me this listing that said, you know, buy your own ghost town for under a million dollars. And he texted it to me at like two o'clock in the morning as a joke. He's like, hey, this might be your next thing. Ha ha. And I remember I woke up and started reading about it. I was like, man, this is it. You know, this is, this is cool. And so I flew out here. I met with the caretaker. I met with the- You flew out like the next day. Yeah, the next day. I was here. I was ready. I was like looking for something like this. And when it came up, I was like, oh man, this might be it. So I flew out the next day, met the caretaker, met the real estate agent, met some people that are involved with the property. And just, like, fell in love. You know, you just did the drive up, and so you know, like, as you're going up the road, it's like, the anticipation builds and builds. You're like, where is this town? Where is this town? It's twisting and turning. And then finally, the town, like, reveals itself. And you're like, whoa. You know, like, it's just, like, something cool. And I remember walking around that day, and I was like, I'm going to figure this out. You know, I don't have the money to do this yet, but I'm going to, like, figure out whatever I need to do to, like, Yeah, so

Ashlee Vance: you're not coming into this as like some .com tech millionaire?

Brent Underwood: No, no, not at all. Yeah, I didn't have any other money. But from my real estate background, I knew that I needed to put in a strong offer. And during the time in which I came out here, the press really got a hold of the property. Articles started coming. I was talking to the real estate agent. He's like, listen, it's becoming a bit of a bidding war, which is crazy for an old ghost town. And the price kept going up and up and up. And I'm talking to hard money lenders, you know, that like huge interest rates that'll like take out your kneecaps if you don't pay them kind of vibe. And I'm like, man, how am I going to make this work? I'm calling up friends, anybody that I know that has a little bit of cash. I'm like, hey, do you want to throw some money into this ghost town? If they ask you a question, I hang up. I call the next person, you know? Yeah. And... Finally scraped together the money. We close Friday the 13th, which felt very fitting for a ghost town. And I remember driving out here, stoked about the possibilities, but fully not knowing what I was getting into. And at the bottom of the hill, the old caretaker handed me this key ring with like 80 keys on it. And he's just like, good luck, you know? And I was like, all right. And so we came up, had a blast, you know, like, oh, it's like everything was new and exciting. And at the time, I was still living in Austin. So I was commuting out here on the weekends. I was like, well, I'll go out there. I'll do whatever I can. And then I'll go back to Austin and to my real life. And like I said, everything changed during the pandemic when I came up here at first. And I thought this was maybe going to be A couple of weeks, maybe a month at most, you know, I don't think anybody knew how long the pandemic was going to last. Right. You know, when it started. And so I was like, okay, I'll hang out out there for a couple of weeks. Then I'll go back to my normal life in Austin. Um, and yeah, six, six years later, I'm here. I've sold everything in Austin. I don't have anything down there anymore.

Ashlee Vance: You're, yeah.

Brent Underwood: Pushed all the chips in.

Ashlee Vance: You're definitely here. We could, we could tell, um, I mean, we'll have a video on this later. So people will be able to see what the town looks like and what we've been hanging out with you. So, so they'll have a, A picture for people who haven't had a chance to see that yet, or, you know, I want to paint, I want to kind of describe the town. You mentioned this drive. It is, it's really cool. It's like eight miles winding back and forth. It's a little cliffy in spots. And then, like you said, you really, you get up to the top and then all of a sudden, um, I mean, I've been to ghost towns before, so you never fully know what to expect in terms of what's left over and how well preserved it is. And you said this used to be a town of 4,000 people. So it would have had a ton, a lot more infrastructure. But yeah, so when you pull up, it reveals itself. And how would you describe what you found or what people would find today?

Brent Underwood: Yeah, I think, so when people would think ghost town, sometimes I think flat desert and a town in the middle of the desert with tumbleweeds and stuff. We're in the high desert. So the town's at 8,200 feet in elevation. And so during that eight mile drive up, you're increasing a mile in elevation during that. And the town itself If we were to look this way, we would see all the Sierra Nevada with Mount Whitney and they're all snow-capped peaks. And from the ridge, if you look the other way, you see Death Valley National Park. So just desert as far as you can possibly see. And so it's one where these days there's about 20 buildings left. Right now we're sitting in what's known as the Hoist House. So this is kind of the building

Ashlee Vance: that Built the whole town. It's like the temple.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, this is where it all began because the mineshaft right there that goes 900 feet straight down with 30 miles of mineshafts off of it was the economic engine of this entire town. And then beyond the hoist house, there's About four or five houses left, a couple different cabins. We have a general store that we've turned into a museum. There's an old mechanics garage that's now kind of a movie theater. And so there's a variety of buildings left that are all in various states of repair. And it's one that, yeah, I think is naturally very beautiful with all the geography around us, but then also very like historically exciting to me.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful. And one of the most iconic buildings that was here down in the town part was the American Hotel. And I know when, like you mentioned, when you first got here with your history and the breakfast and everything, it was like, oh, let's restore this hotel and make this the centerpiece. And then... A couple years into your adventure here, there's an electrical fire. This thing burns down, which I think some people might have then walked away from this or been really devastated. If you look out now, you guys have You've rebuilt this hotel from scratch and the hope is then that becomes again, the centerpiece for, for people being able to come and visit this place.

Brent Underwood: Yeah. Yeah. It's like, so when he first arrived, the crown jewel of the town very much was the American hotel. So this is a hotel that was built in 1871. There's all sorts of rumors of the infamous guests that have come through it, you know, from like Butch Cassidy to Mark Twain to all these different people. Um, and it was the center of the plans. It was a place where everybody congregated when they come here to town. You know, everybody would go there to hang out at nights. And it was kind of the centerpiece of the plan for the place as well. And then fast forward to a burning down an electrical fire, then it's suddenly like, oh, we've just lost the heart of this town. This was the center of all of our plans. And so...

Ashlee Vance: And you like watched it burn.

Brent Underwood: Yeah. And like there was four people here that night that had to like experience that as well, which is very traumatic of seeing a fire of that size and all that type of thing. And then you kind of sit back and you're like, you know, Where do we go from here? And one option, yeah, was to kind of put my tail between my legs, go back to Austin, figure out the next move, which probably financially would have made the most sense. At the time, I didn't have any idea of how much effort and resources would have to go into rebuilding the hotel, but I just thought, no matter what happens, it has to stand again. It just became like, it was deep in my core that This is not going to be the last chapter for Cerro Moro. And so we started rebuilding and it took a very long time. We're five years into the building process and you were just in the hotel and we still are just still down at the studs inside. There's nothing done inside of the building. Luckily the outside is there and you can still walk through the building now, which it feels like a building, which is very exciting after five years. But it's been five years of just kind of Two steps forward a step back you know over and over and over again for various reasons because again we're building this thing at the top of a mountain up an eight mile dirt road in California and so there's as many hurdles as you can imagine but to me For this town to continue on for generations to come, which has been my goal from the very beginning. We need that kind of heart of the town for people to congregate and come up here and stay overnight. And I'm hoping that in the next year or so that we get that done and that will hopefully open up a whole other set of people that want to come up here and learn the history here.

Ashlee Vance: And I see you around here. I mean, this is hard work. People should know. I mean, the conditions here are no joke. And you're a bestselling author. You've written a book about this place. Ryan Holiday, your business partner, is quite an academic. You guys are into the Stoics. You've got a bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. And Ryan, I always see him on social media, digging deep on all kinds of books. Were you wired more as an academic? Before or growing up? Like I see you doing, you know, you have to work on just about everything here from vehicles to buildings to just making things function. Was that in your nature or is this stuff you've all picked up?

Brent Underwood: Kind of both. So both of my parents are school teachers. So like, I think the love of history that brought me here was instilled by them. And they're very much into like research, school, all that type of stuff. But all my grandparents were very much blue collar. So my grandfather worked at GM his entire life. My other grandfather after the war, he owned a gas station. So he was fixing up vehicles the whole time. And so I would dip my toe into that with them kind of on summer breaks when I was visiting my grandparents. And at home, it was always about, you know, let's dive into this academic stuff. And so my work before moving up here was very much Academic basis, working with authors, working with online stuff. And I think coming up here, I was forced to start learning new skills and habits and things like that, that were much more manual based, like physical touching base. And it was very rewarding in a lot of ways. And I think that it's something very satisfying of building something, of using your hands, and there's this almost Deep desire to do that more. And since coming up here, I feel very blessed to be able to do both. So like half my days these days are, I spend it helping run the Daily Stoic stuff. I work on video stuff for Cerro Gordo. And way too many hours reading through historical archives related to Cerro Gordo to pull out any type of information that I can. And then I kind of come out here and start working on any project we have going on. I mean, if you look around this where we're sitting right now, you see 18 different projects mid-sentence. So there's, we have a sawmill outside that we mill lumber. There's lumber stacked up over there that we have. There's a hoist back there that always needs work. There's how many, 10 dirt bikes in here that always needs that type of repair. And so it's been one where I've been forced to learn all these skills. I mean, we're not running to the hardware store to figure things out. We're kind of having to figure out ourselves. And I think through this, I've been really fortunate to have a lot of local people that are really experts in those fields come up and help kind of on a volunteer basis. And so I've been able to You know, absorb some of their skills by osmosis. And these days I feel like my work every day is much more rounded maybe than it was before I moved here.

Ashlee Vance: I think you're such a cool person to be doing this because I'm always so impressed by the intellectual rigor you've put into this, learning the history of the place, gathering new history, both through you going down into the mines and finding things. From having your YouTube channel with people reaching out and bringing in new documents and you're serious about this. I think sometimes on YouTube, obviously it can reward being sensationalistic and just shock value and all these things. So I like that in your videos, you're bringing all that history to bear as you're showing people the projects you guys are working on. It must be rewarding, in a sense, to have had this channel blow up like it did, and then have this feedback of people telling you new things. They're like investigators for you.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, they'll dive into all the rabbit holes that we can. With YouTube, it's interesting, right? Because short-term, I think sensationalism is rewarded, but then long-term... It's not almost in a way. I feel like that's like very like fleeting audience. And at this point, six years in, the people that watch the videos have a really deep love of history of kind of like the American West and things that happened here. And so I feel fortunate to where One, I get rewarded for diving deeper into the history. Anything that I can like bring to the surface is satisfying for me personally, but also satisfying for the audience. But then two, suddenly everybody out there helps research on their own right. You know, maybe they had family I lived up at Cerro Gordo 100 years ago, and they can bring that information to me. Or maybe they just choose to go down a rabbit hole themselves and kind of send me the results. And so it's almost like a lot of research assistants on this giant project that is Cerro Gordo. And I think collaboratively, we've been able to piece together the clearest picture of Cerro Gordo's past that's almost ever existed. And that's pretty cool.

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Brent Underwood: brex.com slash Core Memory.

Ashlee Vance: You got a lot going on, man. You have to build this town. Making the YouTube videos is time-consuming. You put a lot of effort into them. Then do you start to feel a pressure? I guess it's good... It's decent financially, probably it helps the project. You and I've talked, I know it does a bit. And then you've got people coming to visit, so it's creating this energy and interest around the project. But then, yeah, do you feel this relentless kind of, now I have to keep feeding the beast and I already have enough to do?

Brent Underwood: Early on, I did a little bit more. I started YouTube as a hobby, right? I was bored during the pandemic. People started their own little hobby and I brought up a camera up here because I wanted to learn how to do astrophotography. I started making videos. They did good. I felt no pressure at all to create them because it was purely a creative outlet. And then shortly therein, I met a lot of other YouTubers. They started coming up and they're the ones that were like, You know, you need to be releasing a video a week. You know, they started telling me the YouTube best practices. And I fell into that for a while. I was like, all right, a video a week, you know, and then it switches a little bit more from like a creative outlet to more of a job, you know. And I found a lot of pressure during that time. These days I only put out a video a month. And so like I've had to figure out what works for me and it needs to be fun for me to continue doing it. And I've got feedback when I've switched to that schedule of like, Hey, we need a video weekend. I did see like performance, you know, drop, but at the same time it has to be sustainable because I'm six years into making the videos about the same town. And so, uh, I found that The relief of pressure of me is just making the videos that I want to make when I want to make them. And I've been lucky enough to find partners that support that, you know, and then also the audience now knows that I'm making a video a month, but I hope that I put so much effort into each video that they hope that like every video is a banger, you know, hopefully. And I think that's the cadence that I've fallen into. And it's, it's these days very much something that I enjoy doing.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah. While I've been here for a couple days, I don't know, man. I mean, it comes through in your videos, but people should know you're committed and you're nuts. You know, like this... This wide shaft over here, so it goes down 900 feet, I think, and it has these different levels you can get off at, and then it's just 30 miles of interconnecting, or not, but just different avenues you can go down. Obviously, it's like pitch black and cold down there, and you, I mean, we're walking around here, you're explaining it to us, there is an elevator, which is sketchy in its own right, and then you repel Down this shaft and you have at times stayed down there for like five days straight. Yeah. I love it down there.

Brent Underwood: It's weird because when I moved up here, I had a fear of heights. So the idea of dangling on a rope with 900 foot of exposure below you is not one that my mind still like enjoys thinking about. No, we looked at it yesterday and I was getting nauseous. Yeah, it's terrifying. I mean, if you shine a light to the bottom, it's a terrifying proposition. But I think that like... My curiosity related to the town overweighs that. And so I'm like, well, I have to know what's down there, you know, because everything above ground was only built to surface whatever happened down there. And so I feel that like, A huge part of the history here happens down there. And how fortunate am I to be able to go down in this mine and explore it, you know, this historic mine that since it's closed, probably only a handful of people have ever been into. So I feel like fortunate to be able to do that. And yeah, I mean, I probably tow the line of like reckless, you know, many times when I'm down there, I'll admit that.

Ashlee Vance: Parts of the mine are collapsing.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, actively collapsing. In a hurry. 160 years ago with dynamite. So it's not structurally sound, but I do think that like by exploring it, I've uncovered more about the town. And that's just the way I like doing, you know, some people love riding dirt bikes fast, you know, and like they have their own thing in mind is like, Going down that hole right there and seeing what's down there.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah, but I'm super impressed. Like if you, if when I'm hanging out with you, you seem like a very chill guy, you come off, like I said before, I think more like on the intellectual side and, and like a thinker, you know, and, and the thought of you rappelling down there and just being off on your own for days, I would never do that. Yeah.

Brent Underwood: I sometimes, even to myself, I'll intellectualize it because I'll research deeply the level I'm going to before I go there. So then it almost feels like a research mission where I'm like, okay, they talk about this intersection at the 400 level where this event happened. So then I'm just like, I'm like, I'm researching, you know, I'm an investigator, kind of like you do in some of your stories where like, okay, I'm going down to the 400 level. No one's been here probably since whatever happened down here happened down here. And let's get to the bottom of it. And it's been really rewarding. I mean, there's recently, 200 feet down, there's the 200 level of the mine. And that's where the most infamous accident happened in Cerro Boers mining history. So in 1871, they were taking out too much of the ceiling and the rock collapsed on a number of miners and they died and they're still there. And if you look at the newspaper reports, It says between 8 and 30 people died. And as somebody that's deep into this, I was like, that doesn't make any sense. How do you just say between 8 and 30? And I think part of that was that they were Chinese miners, and those are the 1860s. There was an inherent racism that was happening at the same time. But I was like, surely there's a better answer than between 8 and 30. And then over time, I saw that number... And so I spent many months at the microfilm in the local library, like researching, okay, what are the actual reports from when this actually happened? What matches up? When did it become a game of whispers to go on? And I kind of zeroed it down that it was actually probably between Two to four people, not 30 people. Doesn't repeat so many times. And I think that's like, it's exciting to me. That's satisfying to me to be able to like actually tell the true history that happened up here.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah. And there's electricity up here. You guys did this massive project to bring water up here, but you know, it's, you know, there's Starlink. I mean, so Some of the bits of regular life, you still have to like haul all your food up here. Showers are probably a bit rarer than they would be if you were back in Austin. And you've just adjusted to this life. I mean, I've only been here for two days and I'm really looking forward to

Brent Underwood: going to a hotel. What's crazy is this is as comfortable as it's ever been in six years. When I first moved up here, there was no showers at all, no water at all. The only internet I could have was an AT&T hotspot. So it was like one megabyte per second up and down. And so like barely get emails out. It very much felt like secluded from the world. And I feel like we've made huge leaps and bounds by like having a shower at all, having a working sink. Starlink has obviously has been a huge thing to us, but I don't really notice it. Until I go back to a town, you know, then I go, like if I'm traveling, I was just on a road trip. If I'm at a hotel, I'm like, wow, you know, the sink just turns on and stuff like that. There's a baseline difficulty of living here that these days I don't notice. But I do think when people first come up for the first time, you notice it quite a bit.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah. But you're so committed now and into this, that doesn't get to you. Like, you're not just sitting around at night and just like, fuck this, dude, I'm gonna go order a pizza.

Brent Underwood: I don't really think about it at this point.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah, yeah. I meant to ask you to bring your book up here, and I should have brought it up, but I just love the way you open it, describing what life was like here and how hard it was for people. You mentioned it a little bit, but can you paint... A picture for... We romanticize ghost towns, the California Gold Rush era, and then everybody knows that it also came with a lot of baggage. Or not baggage, it's probably not the hardship. And yeah, I mean, life was pretty miserable for the most part.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, I mean, it's really... These days, people come up and they love to enjoy the peace and quiet and the beautiful nature. And even right now, we're sitting in this building, it's relatively quiet.

Ashlee Vance: Yeah, and I went out last night... At maybe like nine o'clock and everyone was already asleep, but you can, you can just hear like the entire valley, anything that's happening.

Brent Underwood: Any whispers anybody's doing around town, you hear the stars are out and it's very like, like you said, romantic these days, but like back in the day, This building that we're sitting in now would have been insanely noisy 24-7, 365. So the miners going 24 hours a day. That means miners were coming and going 24 hours a day on 12 hour shifts. So there's a day shift and a night shift. That means all the supporting businesses, the brothels, Everything related to that were going 24 hours a day. The mine itself, if you look at the newspapers, there was many, many, many, many accidents that claimed the miners' lives. Down in there, if they weren't dying from collapses, they're dying of silicosis. They're breathing in so much dust that their lungs basically became cement. So much to the point where they said a miner was old by the time he got to 30. So me sitting here at 37, I'm like, Ancient in mining terms. And so it's interesting to be in this town that was built by people that were all younger than me. And so if you weren't dying from silicosis, there was a murder a week up here that's in the newspapers. There's different, every building here has bullet holes all in it. There's disease that ran rampant up here. There wasn't running water. And so it was a town that was very difficult for the vast majority of people that lived here. You know, I think that every time we hear about these Success stories of the mine owner that went on to do this and that. There's a thousand miners that came up here for a better life and never left this place. Some are still buried 200 feet below where we're sitting right now. And it's just a reality of the place that, you know, isn't the most fun to think about or even that people want to think about as much. But I do my best, even in the museum, to show those different parts of Cerro Gordo's past just so people can kind of have a full picture of what happened here.

Ashlee Vance: But you don't feel like There's some curse looming over the whole, like when the hotel burned up where you're like, well, maybe they don't want me to

Brent Underwood: do this. Yeah, you can get lost in those types of thoughts up here easily. I mean, even within the people that quote unquote own the town, there's many of them that have just completely lost everything. You know, when I first moved up here, I found a briefcase. He was tucked away in this corner of the general store. And in the briefcase, there was just everything about this miner's life. So there was love letters, there was divorce settlements, there was bankruptcy, there was new mining claims, there was bank stubs. And through it all, he seemed to have just an absolutely miserable life. He was always broke. This guy, this miner I found, he was broke. His wife divorced him. He was sick. You know, later you find this journal entry that says, you know, lamenting for one more night up here. So there's something about this place that like draws people in, takes everything out of them, but they still want to give it more. And I've definitely felt that over the years here. I mean, two years into living here when we were full on in the hotel, it very much felt like I was giving it 16 hours a day. It was just Wearing me to the bone, and like, for what, you know, kind of thing. But these days, I feel like I'm on the other side of that. And I hope, you know, as every mindowner here, I hope that there's another life still for Cerro Gordo. And that's what kind of keeps me going forward.

Ashlee Vance: You found the briefcase in one of the houses?

Brent Underwood: In the general store, yeah. It was just left over? It was wrapped in this blanket shoved underneath the counter. I can show it to you when we go down there. Okay. And it's really cool because you... Through it, you can piece together his life, this miner, but also it's a composite of all the miners that were up here to kind of give you an idea of like what life would have been like for this guy.

Ashlee Vance: So even though the general store, because people had owned this property for decades after. And I tried to make like a hotel off and on that had just the general things were just sitting.

Brent Underwood: It was shoved in a corner. So the back of the general store was used for just storage. So when I got here, that whole area with all those display cases was just storage. It was floor to ceiling stuff. And we slowly went And then tucked away seemingly intentionally. I don't know that the miner left it there. I think it was a previous owner found it and intentionally put it in somewhere. And yeah, it says, you know, bank stubs for a paycheck that says like $3.48 and stuff. And like receipts from different mining companies. It's just a beautiful insight into life here and like how hard it was, but how devoted the people that are up here were.

Ashlee Vance: And so like in the, in 1865 ish, when people are first coming here, this is part of the gold rush, in this case, the silver rush. And so there would be people coming from all over the world, the United States to try to fight, to try to get rich before somebody had really taken control of like, like the mind we're sitting in right now, belong to an individual who was, had found the good stuff. So, so how, for how long, Was it a free-for-all? And then when did it turn into this?

Brent Underwood: Yeah, so the town was established as a mining cap around 1865. So originally there would have been a lot of people up here staking their own claim, you know, claiming their portion of the hillside, hoping that that part of the hillside led into a rich ore discovery. So there would have been many hundreds of individual miners here. And eventually some of those prospects paid off big time and some of them went bust. And so if you're a miner, If you were a year into your mine, you weren't hitting anything, eventually you have to think, hey, I got to make a living somehow. And this mine that we're in right now is called the Union Mine. And this was owned by the guys that had a lot of financing, the amount, the money to be able to sink a 900-foot shaft, to be able to build a building like this. So slowly, everybody started working for the main mine here. And the main mine was the Union Mine that we're sitting at now. It was owned by this guy named Mortimer Belshaw and his partner, Victor Beaudry. And they, kind of like a lot of mine now, they owned everything. They owned the road, they owned the general stores, they owned the mine. And they got fabulously wealthy. You know, they went on to do great things. But a lot of the miners ended up working for $3 a day for a 12-hour shift. And so it was one of those towns where, yeah, I don't know, difficult to be at.

Ashlee Vance: And do we, are those, did that generational wealth continue? Do those families still have money? Do they come back to this place or have any interest?

Brent Underwood: I haven't heard from those families, but there was three main players at Cerro Gordo. So there was this guy named Mortimer Belshaw. And he brought the first wave of financing here. So he was tapped into San Francisco. And he knew this guy named Edward Judson, who owned the California Paper Company. And he got a huge investment from him and came back here and blew this place up from a sleeping mining camp into a mining boomtown. Then there was Victor Beaudry, who owned the general store here. And before he lived in Independence, which is just up the road, and he had a general store at the camp there, the military camp. And he saw this rich ore Brink coming into his town, and he set up camp up here. And then there was a guy named Remi Nadu. And Nadu is the guy that figured out transportation to and from the mountain. So he had 20 mule teams coming and going. He built stations all across the desert. And then he later serviced. All of the different mining camps around here. And Nadu went on to become very, very wealthy. He moved eventually to Los Angeles. He built the very first hotel with an elevator in Los Angeles ever, which was the Hotel Nadu. It's the one that where now the LA Times was for a very long time. And so he built that building after Cerro Gordo. Went on to become very much to the point where there's an old LA news article that says, That Victor Baudry, or Remi Ndou employs more people than any four men in the city. So he was employing half the city as far as everything went. He went on to do great. Victor Baudry, his brother went on to become the mayor of Montreal. And so they They're very, like, did very well off. Belshaw moved to San Francisco. He was involved with the Empire mine up there, which is a massive mining complex. He went on to retire in Antioch when he was very well off. And so, yeah, those guys did very well. That's why I think the contrast of those stories to the miners briefcase that I found, this guy named Chet Reynolds, you know, so like Chet, he got divorced. He had a bankruptcy. He had lawsuits for unpaid like tabs at the general store. It was like a good contrast to remember that not all the stories worked out in the way that those three guys did.

Ashlee Vance: Is there any one particular person's story that you've uncovered that's your favorite?

Brent Underwood: I like this, yeah, there's a guy named Porter. So Porter was kind of like not really mentioned in any of the main history books, but there's a woman whose great grandmother Was somehow involved with Cerro Gordo, and her and Porter had this romance. And so she, for her whole life, had dozens of letters from Porter that nobody ever had in the public. And so she compiled all these into a book, and she gave it to me. And in the letters, Porter's writing to her, and you can see his ascent through mining camp, which usually doesn't happen. So it starts off where he's basically just An employed miner here. So he's making $3 a day. He's complaining about like the working conditions, this and that. You know, a couple of years later, he's talking, he says, you know, Belshaw, the main owner, has asked me to build a smelter for him. I'm not sure if I'm going to do it, but like, that seems like a good thing. Then the next one, he's like, I'm now superintendent of all the mines at Cerro Gordo, and on and on. And then I eventually found his will when he died, and he had become so wealthy that he left money to Belshaw, the main owner of the whole town. So it's a guy that actually did have that success story that we talk about so much. Through these love letters, you could see his assent from $3 a day miner to he left Belshaw a few thousand dollars in 1890, which was quite a bit of money. And so he definitely... Kind of ascended through the ranks, which I thought was pretty cool.

Ashlee Vance: Do you think there's still a ton of stories to be uncovered or you've gone about as deep as you can go?

Brent Underwood: No, I think there's a lot because I think that there's, you might have 4,000 people living up here. There's so many more of them. The unfortunate part is the Inyo County Courthouse, the county that we're in, during the period that Cerro Gordo was its largest, it burned down twice and it got knocked down by an earthquake once. And so, so many of the records were lost over time. But every year somebody comes out of the woodwork with some type of original research and brings it to me. So I'm hoping that we can keep compiling that. And we try to make it all like public source. So we put it all on a website so anybody can review it. So that way maybe that one name in that journal rings a bell in that person's mind and we can kind of like weave together the whole story.

Ashlee Vance: This place is very much alive now. I mean, you know, just over this couple days I was here. I mean, it's, we're kind of like at the tail end of winter. So it's probably, yeah, it's probably not ideal tourism season, but there's people coming up all day to see you guys. There's people living here who saw your YouTube channel and decided to go on this journey with you. I think we were talking something like 8,000 people maybe over the last

Brent Underwood: Last year we had, in our logbook, we had about 8,000 people that came and visited the town.

Ashlee Vance: Right. So you really are. And then it's cool because I think when you first started, the locals were looking at you with the side eye of maybe you're just, you're not committed or you're just trying to capitalize on this hotel and not really... You know, be opportunistic. And then, so you've, I think you've proven yourself now. Yeah. Yeah. After all these years. And, and it's like, it's creating this new energy here. Yeah. And so let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, the, not to bum people out about California. I love California, but there's some, there's some issues. So like, If you look straight out from where we are, there's what should be like a beautiful lake and there's water there, but it's just, it's not the lake that it once was. So if I'm not, and I hope I don't butcher the history because we've been talking about this a little, people are probably familiar with the movie Chinatown because it's a classic and that is the lake that's been drained historically to give Los Angeles water.

Brent Underwood: Yeah. So, I mean, When Cerro Gordo was a booming town, below Cerro Gordo there was a lake called Owens Lake. And it was a massive lake, seven miles across, 70 feet deep. It had a lot of agriculture in Owens Valley. It was a very big part of this community. As Cerro Gordo developed, what's interesting even more is that when Cerro Gordo was at its peak, it was around 4,000 people. And at that same time, Los Angeles was only like 7,500 people. So they're almost like equal trading partners. And the demand of Cerro Gordo helped Los Angeles develop quicker because this was a mining town. We weren't growing agriculture here. We needed all these supplies. And Los Angeles was the closest port city. So the demand of Cerro Gordo kind of Forced Los Angeles to develop a little bit quicker. And then kind of in a cruel irony, eventually Los Angeles grew to the point where they're running out of drinking water. And so William Mulholland, you know, started thinking, how are we gonna solve this issue? And he came out here to Owens Valley and he saw this massive lake and he thought, you know, that's it. That's how we're gonna solve the issue. And so slowly Mulholland with the Department of Water and Power, which is the origin of That department is what Chinatown's based on. Slowly, Mulholland came out here. He had officers posing as ranchers, buying up ranch land under the guise of, hey, we're going to have these different things. Eventually, they owned enough land where they redirected the river that feeds Owens Lake, Owens River, into the LA Aqueduct and directed it 200 miles away to Los Angeles. And that's what supplied Los Angeles with the drinking water that it needed to prosper. Meanwhile, it slowly drained the lake below us, leaving a Dust Bowl that eventually became so toxic that the EPA sued them in like the 1990s where they had to mitigate the dust. And so now if you go out onto the lake, there's tons of Department of Water and Power trucks out there that are all responsible for dust mitigation. And Los Angeles spends something like $2 billion a year controlling the dust out here. But they continuously take the water away from here.

Ashlee Vance: And it's, I mean, good for Los Angeles, I guess, but it's a tragedy. I mean, this place is so beautiful. Like you said, you got Mount Whitney, right? I mean, like if we will show people later, you'll have to come see the video, but I mean, it's majestic. And then if there, I mean, that lake would be just amazing. And you would have, it was one of the downsides of this place is you have to truck water in. And so there's less wildlife here and you have to deal with. Bringing water in. I mean, this would be like one of the most idyllic spots in California, I think.

Brent Underwood: It'd be beautiful. The way I think about it though, is like if that lake was still there, I probably never would have been able to buy Cerro Gordo. It would have been such an expensive piece of real estate. And if you talk to a lot of locals, We have an interesting mentality towards it. A lot of the people locally say, you know, you either bring the water to the people or the people to the water. Meaning if that lake was still there, this would be like Lake Tahoe. It would be the vacation home for every single person in Los Angeles. It's stunningly beautiful already. And if that was a seven mile across lake, every single person in LA would have a vacation house out here. And the people out here kind of like the rural kind of remote nature to it. I don't know if that's just like a rationalization of what happened, but it's a deep seated issue that Way predates, obviously, my time here, but it impacts me every day.

Ashlee Vance: So you're bringing in 8,000 people last year. We're in the desert. There's not a lot going on out here, but there are some towns nearby that appreciate having visitors come spend money and stay in their hotels and eat in their restaurants. And then you've been working on this hotel. I cannot stress to people enough, first of all, you're in an old... Mining town where people did whatever the hell they needed to do to get stuff done. And it still feels like that here, but we're in a more modern time and you have to build your buildings to certain codes and things like that. But I mean, there is a craziness to you guys have been working on this hotel for years. People are putting up Roadblocks to you around nails and walls and permitting and all this stuff, even though you're clearly through your YouTube channel and the work you're doing here, you're obviously the hottest, the most promising thing. Some of this just strikes me as insane.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, it's interesting. Ed, you have to deal with

Ashlee Vance: just living here. They're adding this layer.

Brent Underwood: Baseline, it's tough to live here, as you're finding out after two days. Then beyond that, it's harder still to build anything here. And then being in California, there's another level of regulation that I think it's kind of like a joke these days. Like, oh, California is hard to deal with as far as business-wise. And you can never really appreciate it until you actually live here. You know, living before this in Texas and before that in Florida, you know, very different places. I wasn't We're prepared for kind of the bureaucracy that comes with it. And so, yeah, we still have to abide by both local code and state code. And I think in a small county like this, there's not a lot of infrastructure to make sure that those things happen quickly. We're five years into the process. And the most common question that I get from visitors or people online is like, what's going on with the American Hotel? As if like, I'm not working on it every day. And so I'm always pushing. It's just the permitting process here is so slow that it makes it just like a crawl. And it is frustrating. I think as far as the things I get most frustrated about six years into living here, it's the permitting process.

Ashlee Vance: It's fucking crazy, man. I mean, the headline is like, passionate, you know, possibly irrational man has decided to dedicate his life to building a cool thing in the middle of nowhere that bothers no one. Let him do what he wants to do. I mean, yeah, you want the building to be safe. So like, as long as it's...

Brent Underwood: Yeah.

Ashlee Vance: Save, like, let the man build.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, and what's tough with me is, like, it's not like I'm drawing up the architectural plans and I'm trying to push through. These are made by our architects, an amazing architect, that since we've been trying to build a hotel at Cerro Gordo has completed three hotels in Los Angeles. So that just shows kind of the difference in speed timelines. Our engineering companies, they're not, like, backwater engineering companies. They're all based in L.A. They're all used to building massive hotels. And so it's not for... Lack of sophistication within the plans. It's from just lack of resources in this small county to kind of see permits move quickly throughout it. And now it's funny that like, I've become one of the people that's like, California is so hard to deal with, you know, that you hear so many times, but I'm living it.

Ashlee Vance: I mean, I can tell it has not broken your spirit, but it broke my spirit a little bit. Yeah. So the, and the, all this stuff with the water, It feels like that's another, I know you like to get into rabbit holes and things. I get the sense that this is another, like an ongoing thing that you're looking into is what's been happening between Los Angeles and this place.

Brent Underwood: It's interesting. I think it's a deep-rooted history here, and there's been lots of strife throughout the years here, and it's something that I literally look at every single day. And for me, though, the thing that I take away from it is, It's kind of like the long-term consequences of short-term thinking, meaning like when Mulholland found the water, that was In many ways, it was an amazing engineering feat. The idea that you can bring a river 200 miles away to feed a town of now millions and millions and millions of people is insane. He probably didn't think or care to think 100 years later how that would devastate the local area. And so whenever I'm doing projects here, even if they're smaller projects like the type of material we're using on a roof, I try to think like long term just because I'm sitting in the shadow of this consequence of it.

Ashlee Vance: So if the hotel gets finished, we got to walk around it yesterday. I think it was seven rooms or six in the main building and then, and then kind of an ADU. Um, and then you would like to have some cabins in the hills and then maybe like a tent, like glamping. Yeah. So people could have this, this mix of experiences and, and so that's, that's the current. Vision is to really, you would come here, you get the beautiful views, you would get the history, you get to like hike around. And so this would just be this nice little oasis in the desert to come hang out.

Brent Underwood: Yeah, well, I've always wanted to make it a place where people could come and stay overnight. You know, I think it's one thing to come for the afternoon and look around, but then like you guys, you know, like the sunsets and sunrises here are beautiful. And so we'll hopefully have Accommitation for people overnight, whether they want to stay in the hotel, they want a cabin, or even if they want to just like pitch a tent on some dry campsites, I want it to be accessible for anybody, basically. And so that's the hope, just to also just to feel the town alive again, you know, to kind of hear the buzz of people enjoying the area. Yeah, that's what I've been working for, towards for six years, and that's what I kind of keep pushing towards.

Ashlee Vance: And how will you know when you, you're what, 37? Mm-hmm. Are you going to be 77 living here?

Brent Underwood: I hope. People often ask me, they're like, when will Sarah go to be done? And I don't know if there's ever a moment where you put a feather in the cap and you're like, and now it's done, you know? But I hope to be working on this project for the rest of my life. I don't think that I'll be living here full time in the same way for my whole life. It is very difficult to live here. Winters can be pretty cold. And being from Florida, you know, I still have a little bit of love of warm weather, but... I always want to spend a good portion of my year up here. I just think it's exciting. I get to go on all these crazy adventures. And I just enjoy seeing the town come back to life.

Ashlee Vance: What was the closest you ever came to walking away? Or did that not happen?

Brent Underwood: Probably like... Two years in, when I was working on the 16-hour days, I had just fried myself. I had lost like 35 pounds that I didn't have to lose. I was like sick all the time. And probably when I was having a permit battle with the county, I was like, what? What are we doing? But at the same time, I try to zoom my timeline out where it's like, this is a project I'm going to be working on for decades. And if you look at a project over the course of decades, it's comforting where you don't get so caught up in month-to-month growth or year-to-year growth. It's so popular, I think, in startups. I can kind of relax myself where I'm like, it's all right. We'll get through it. And you kind of keep just chipping away at it.

Ashlee Vance: To you, I mean, I can tell you still enjoy talking about the place because, you know, you've dedicated your life to it. But I mean, it must get annoying. Idiots like me show up and you got to go through all this stuff.

Brent Underwood: No, I love it. I enjoy it a lot. We get a lot of visitors, as you've seen, like 8,000 visitors throughout the years, a lot of people coming and going every day. And I love talking about it because everybody has their lens on whatever I'm saying, you know? So you'll ask different questions about it than other people do. And I don't know, it's cool. It's cool the resonance that the town has had with people. The fact that people come up here at all is mind-blowing to me. And so, no, I'm here for it.

Ashlee Vance: Okay, wow. Mostly I want you to be careful, man. I think going down to that mine, that freaks me out. I can't believe you do that solo. It's been, this was such a cool experience. It was quite different, I guess, than I pictured in my head in some ways. Because I've been to ghost towns before, mostly Bodhi, which is kind of manicured and it's like what, a state park. So it's well taken care of. And they had quite a few preserved buildings. Yeah. But I mean, I hadn't, when I, I did not know I'd be staying in a 1910 house that like, I mean, you really just feel the history in your bones immediately. And then coming in here, I mean, this really is like a, to me, it feels like a temple of sorts to some other era. I mean, it's like hard to even wrap your mind around. Yeah. But, well, super thankful. You let us come hang out here for a couple of days. It seems like you have a nice crew of people who all that, that struck me too. They all seem, um, like dedicated. Yeah. Like, and really, um, and then it was cool to hear some of the visitors like, oh, what can I bring up? And, and I mean, some people were just tourists and then some people seem like they're trying to help too. So, um, but you could tell. Like you said, I guess your lowest moment was just two years into the project. Like things feel very on the up and up now and you get sense like I can see the future.

Brent Underwood: Yeah. I hope. That's the hope. It does feel we're in a good place and like a lot of people care about it these days, which gives me confidence that it'll stick around for a while longer because how many people have such a resonance with the town. But yeah, I've appreciated you being up here. I love showing people around. And I hope when you come in the future that we've made progress on the hotel and you can see it kind of progressing along. And maybe someday soon we'll have a beer in the hotel or something.

Ashlee Vance: I would love that. I'm coming back no matter what. When you guys finish the hotel, I want to bring my wife and kids up here. And then I think, I mean, David Nicholson, who works for Core Memories, like our Co-founder and lead cinematographer. He used to be a treasure hunter on the side and has some ground penetrating radar. I think we might we might have to do an episode where we. Yeah, we come dig in.

Brent Underwood: There's a lot of stuff underground here, and if we could figure out how to find it,

Ashlee Vance: I'd be stoked. Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, thanks so much for for doing the podcast. Thanks so much for letting us come film. And I don't know which is going to air first. I suspect the podcast might come out before the video. But anyway, I'm sure there's links up in the screen people can click on right now for more of the story. But yeah, thanks so much, man. Of course.

Brent Underwood: Thanks for coming.

Ashlee Vance: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together. It is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland. And the show is edited always by the Thank you so much to Brext for all your support and thank you most of all to everybody for listening or watching. We love you. Please leave us a like, a review, a subscribe, all those tremendous things. Thank you and we'll see you again.