The American West has always had pull. Gravitational in its power and strength on the human mind. It's a land of limitless possibilities, or infinite adventure, and untold riches. There's pull in the mountains, in its deserts, from the towering conifer forests, and dark, foreboding canyons. The West is where dreams live.
And where some die.
While countless cities and metropolitan areas have arisen from this often hostile, always stunning, landscape, countless more have seen themselves fall into disrepair, consumed by the deserts they once arose from, and expeditiously abandoned. Their riches either plundered, forgotten, or found wanting by those who once called them home.
Ghost towns, as they were, litter the landscape in places. And California is home to many of them, as I've personally witnessed. They spring up like hauntingly spooky oases, beckoning you in from miles away, wanting you to once again call them home. That siren call is hard to not hear, as Brent Underwood, the man leading to revive Cerro Gordo in the middle of the California high desert, knows. And he's attempting to revive the town with the help of his trusty Polaris Ranger side-by-side.
"Cerro Gordo, California, on the western slope of the Inyo Mountains about seven miles east of Keeler and thirty miles south of Independence, was the first significant silver strike in Owens Valley," explains Legends of America, adding, "Long before the area was developed, Mexicans had been crawling the mountain they called Cerro Gordo, meaning 'Fat Hill,' looking for silver."
Silver was indeed "In them hills," to paraphrase Mark Twain.
In 1865, silver was discovered in rich veins, and soon after, prospectors flocked to the tiny California valley, with a town sprouting up around the mining activity, as was so often done whenever someone discovered a mine in the American West. Water, like today, was a hot commodity, too, and most had to be hauled in via mule. Similarly, the ore discovered in Cerro Gordo was hauled out to Los Angeles some 250+ miles away via the animal, too. Los Angeles, as a whole, likely wouldn't be what it is today without the mine.
As with anything, however, things came to an end around the end of the 1930s, and the town that rose up from the sands fell into disrepair, and then into the ghost town it is today. But for Underwood, Cerro Gordo's legacy is too big to fall into the annals of history, which is why he's reviving the town, little by little, and using his Ranger to help restore the buildings and living spaces into somewhere where folks would want to go, stay, and live.
Underwood's been restoring and living in the town since 2018, when he purchased the 360 acres for around $1.4 million. And I distinctly recall his story ages ago, probably during the pandemic, when moving away from cities was all anyone wanted. Hell, I was lucky enough to do it myself. But since then, he's put in a ton of work to make the town livable and invite folks in, including Jeff Goldblum.
And after all these years, Underwood's still at it. Check out the video above to see more what he's up to with the Ranger, how tough those damn things are to survive the Martian landscape that is the California desert, and what his plans are.
