Published October 21, 2026 03:01AM
If you ever plan on riding out a pandemic in an abandoned mining town at 8,200 feet, there are a few things I’d recommend bringing: a four-wheel-drive truck, more than a few days of food, and at least some decent boots.
I brought none of these.
Instead, I arrived at Cerro Gordo, California, in the middle of a blizzard in March 2020, driving a base model Tacoma, and wearing white Allbirds, a few inches of ankle showing. A quarter mile from town, my bald tires slid off the road, the truck got stuck, and I walked the rest of the way in.
Six years later, I’m still here. I’ve traded my Allbird slippers for steel-toed boots and my Tacoma for a Tundra. And most of the things that once felt absurd—like getting buried in snow in March—barely register. My mailbox is an hour away and 4,500 feet in elevation below me. My driveway is an eight-mile dirt road that is almost never maintained. My bathroom is an outhouse where, on windy days, dust of questionable origin comes up through the floorboards. In the winter, sometimes I wake up to the thermometer reading 17 degrees. Indoors.
But the strangest thing about living here, after a decade of living in cities like New York and Austin, is how quickly it stops feeling strange at all.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Thousands of people have chosen to live in Cerro Gordo over the years. In the late 1800s, it was home to California’s largest silver mine, surrounded by hundreds of buildings and thousands of residents. There were at least five hotels, seven saloons, two brothels, three general stores, multiple restaurants, barber shops, and even doctors and lawyers—but no jail.
Then the ore ran out, the mines slowed down, and people started to leave. Major fires in 1877 and 1880 took most of the buildings. Time took a few more. Little by little, the desert began to reclaim the town and its stories.
I first heard about Cerro Gordo in June 2018. I was living in Austin, running a bed-and-breakfast, and looking for something bigger. I had recently turned 30 and, by most measures, had built a good life. But some part of me wanted a life a little less ordinary.
Around 2 A.M. one night, my friend Aaron texted me an article titled “Buy Your Own Ghost Town for Under $1 Million,” adding, “This might be your next thing, haha.”
He was joking, but I became obsessed. I read everything I could find about Cerro Gordo, flew out to meet the owner and caretaker, and started imagining what the town could become. Then, with more confidence than money, I submitted an all-cash offer to close in a week. The owner accepted.
So I scraped together my life savings, signed my life away on a high-interest loan, and convinced a few friends to chip in. A week later, on Friday, July 13, 2018 (also Friday the 13th), I became the owner of a ghost town with a vague hope of bringing the town back to life.
From afar, that seemed relatively straightforward: Fix up the remaining cabins, rent them out, use the proceeds to keep rebuilding. The centerpiece would be the American Hotel, built in 1871, that I imagined as a museum with people all over the world meeting, laughing, and exchanging stories.
In June 2020, it burned down in an electrical fire.
My savings, my plans, and some version of my future went up in flames with it. Even worse was the guilt. The town had lost countless buildings to fires over the years, but this one happened on my watch.
The day after, the previous owner of the town drove up. I thought he might yell. He might cry. Instead, he hugged me.
“You can’t change what happened,” he told me, “but what happens from here is up to you.”
Those became my marching orders.
I’ve been rebuilding the hotel ever since, but I haven’t done it alone. While I was snowed in that first spring, I started posting videos about my life here. People watched, and then they started showing up.
I still remember the first person who came to Cerro Gordo because of a video. Until then, views were just numbers. Suddenly one of those numbers was standing in front of me. Offering to help. Since then, volunteers have come from across the country and across the world. Some stay for an afternoon. Others have returned monthly for years.
I’m grateful, because every part has been harder than I’d imagined. We needed 80 yards of concrete for the foundation of the hotel. But concrete companies didn’t want to risk their trucks on our eight-mile dirt road, so a half-day job became months of figuring out how to haul 300,000 pounds of dry concrete up the road and mix it ourselves.
That’s Cerro Gordo in a nutshell: almost everything is possible, almost nothing is easy.
One of my happiest days here was when 20 of those volunteers came to help pour concrete. We were doing something objectively miserable because, for some reason, we all cared about the town. Now, hundreds of people can look at the hotel and say, “I helped build that.”
Somewhere along the way, the project stopped being mine alone. At first I thought bringing Cerro Cordo back to life meant restoring buildings. Now I think it means making enough people care about a place that it can outlive you.
Staying long enough to see that, though, has come with some costs. When I moved during the pandemic, it felt like everyone’s life was on pause. I assumed I could disappear for my grand adventure and eventually step back into the life I left behind.
Of course, the world kept moving. Friends got married. They had kids. People tell me they started watching my videos in middle school and now are almost out of college. I moved here in my early thirties. I’ll be 40 next year. The weight of that sometimes hits.
But then there are the mornings that feel like a dream I whipped up as a kid watching old Gunsmoke episodes with my grandfather. I wake up in a house built in the 1870s and out my window watch the first light illuminate Mt. Whitney, move down the Sierra Nevada, cross the dry lakebed of Owens Lake, and eventually hit town. Beneath me are 30 miles of abandoned mines, a city below the town, that I can spend my afternoons exploring.
I’ve found plenty of things here: old dynamite, Levi jeans, miner’s hats, newspapers. But the thing I’ve found at Cerro Gordo that stayed with me most wasn’t underground.
Early on, I found a tattered briefcase buried in the back of the old general store. After I unwrapped the blanket around it, inside I found the life of a man named Chet Reynolds, told through love letters and lawsuits, court documents and unpaid bills. Chet had come to Cerro Gordo in the 1930s convinced that something better was waiting for him. The next mine, the next claim, the next big break.
I understood his optimism more than I wanted to.
Chet never got rich. One bank stub shows a balance of $8.42. His letters home complained of long winters and snowbanks piling up outside. Then came the unpaid bills, lawsuits, bankruptcy, a divorce, and finally a move off the mountain.
I don’t know where his story went from there. For a few years, though, hope kept him here.
His briefcase is still here.
And so am I.
