This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear weekday
afternoons on the Drive. Brent Underwood is a character. You may not have
heard of him, but he is the owner of Cerro Gordol, an original
Boomtown silver mine established in eighteen sixty five. He lives on a mountain above
Death Valley with no running water, seven cats, six goats, and at
least one goat, a ghost, and he has written a book all about
his experiences ghost Town living. Brent Underwood's so glad to have you along.
What got you to move out here to this desolate place in the first place?
Well, thanks for having me, And that's the question I've had a
long four years to think about. You know. I moved up to the
town in the March of twenty twenty, right at the beginning of the pandemic.
But I think it was just all love of his Growing up. My
grandfather used to watch gun Smoke that old Western shirt just over and over,
and so the idea that this town, you know, right out of the
American West, really was possible to not just buy but live in seemed pretty
uh, pretty good adventure. And I think I signed up for an adventure,
and I definitely got that. Well, how did you hear about in
the first place? Were you out there just exploring and came across it?
Did you look at it online or did you were you just did you come
across it by accident? Yes. So a buddy of mine actually sent it
to me. He was living in Los Angeles and he saw this you know
link that says a ghost town for sale, and he sent it over my
way because at the time I was I was living in Austin, Texas,
and I had a bed and breakfast in an old Victorian mansion, you know,
one of the two story wrap around porches, and I was running a
bed and breakfast out of that, and he thought, hey, man,
this might be your next hospitality project. He sent it more as a joke.
I don't think they. I don't think he thought it as a as
a serious prospect. He was more like, Aha, you know, this
is a funny link that I'll send to you because the town sounds about four
hundred acres. There's about twenty buildings from the eighteen hundreds on it, but
it's got no running water to the middle of nowhere, and there's a lot
of difficulty with it. But I just I don't know, it just it
caught something about me. I got very excited about it. I'll love I
guess. And yeah, I've been not there for about four years. What's
the elevation. We're at eighty five hundred feet. Okay, that's pretty high.
It's not. Yeah, it's the high desert too, so it's not
you know, there's very barren still and our road to the town starts at
thirty five hundred feet and so it's the dirt road that eight miles goes about
about five thousand feet in elevation, so it's a it's up there. Yeah.
So seroh, Gordo, How what is the origin of the name Fat
Mountain? Basically Fat Hill? Yeah, because you know, I guess back
in the eighteen hundreds it was so fat with silver. I mean, uh,
eighteen sixty five is going to established as a mining town, and if
you adjusted for inflation, they pulled about five hundred million dollars worth the minerals
out of the hill. So it was a very big boom count for California.
It was the largest silver mining California at the time it was operating.
And so this is the town with four thousand residents, hundreds of buildings,
and just all sorts of different things going on. And so, yeah,
I guess the original miners that found the place for Mexican miners, then they
decided Fat Hill is the name of the hill, and it still is today.
And this is in the Death Valley region. So do you look down
upon Death Valley. Yeah, we're at the ridge right about eight miles from
Death National Park, so I can see the whole park. Then if you
turn the other way, you see all of the Sierra Nevada and you see
Mount Whitney, which is the tallest in the Lower forty eight tallest mountain in
the Lower forty So it's an interesting contrast. You have the dominating mountains on
one side and then just the vast desert the other way. Brent Underwood,
author of Ghost Town, Living, Mining for Purpose, and Chasing Dreams at
the Edge of Death Valley. At what point did the town become a ghost
town? Yeah? They stopped mining around nineteen forty, which is actually a
very long active life for a mind. Absolutely, nineteen sixty to nineteen forty,
because usually that they thought these camps were going to last by maybe eight
years but it kind of had eight two eras that had the silver and lead
erat first, and then it had a zinc era for about another thirty years,
and so their mining a variety of minerals. Is there anything left of
the mine or there deep shafts or was it more of a strip mining operation?
Yeah, I was all underground hard rocks. There's still about thirty miles
of mines underneath the town. It's crazy to think about. And the main
mine shaft here goes nine hundred feet straight down, and off of that mine
shaft, there's about six different levels, and those levels just snake everywhere.
Have you been down in that, Yeah, I spent a lot of time
down there. Actually. Now I think it's fun. I think it's interesting,
and it's the history of the town, and so I've explored I would
say probably about half of the probably fifteen miles of mines maybe down there,
just looking for any artifacts or left behind things that the miners used to leave,
or maybe even so a little silver or there's a little bit left.
There's not enough to make a'recially viable, but I've refined down a little
bit of silver to make some rings and coins and stuff. Have you found
anything significant or has it. Because of the life of the mine, A
lot of that was already removed before you came along. A lot of it
was removed. They're still pretty heavy machinery that was welded in place that they
can't get out of the mine. So there's still some pretty serious winches and
different hoists that are down there. But I think that the thing, the
thing that mine explorers are always looking for our Levi jeans. That's the real
fine is Levi Strauss created the genes as we know them for California silver mines
in the eighteen seventies, and so you can find essentially like the first pair
of jeans as the world knows it, down in the mine. So that's
what we're always looking for. Now, tell us about your weather. I
mean we always hear about Death Death Valley and how dry it is and how
how how hot it is. But you're pretty you're up higher, so I
imagine your weather pattern's a little different. Yeah, well it's not as hot.
I remember a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago now,
Death Vally hit one hundred and thirty one degrees. I think it was close
to the hottest temperature every corn on Earth, and I remember somehow the Weather
Channel got my phone number. They called me and asked me what it was
like living in the hottest place on Earth. And I looked outside of the
temperature was only about ninety five. So we're saved from a lot of that
heat just because of the elevation. But on the flip side of that,
when it gets to be winter, you just get slammed. We've gotten you
know already. There's times this winter and we had five feet of snow across
the old town and so, you know, moving around becomes pretty difficult.
Well, all of California has been getting a lot of snow this particular winter.
Brent Underwood is the author of Ghost Town, Living, Mining for Purpose,
and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley. Your memoir, well,
I don't know if it's a memoir as much as meditation. Maybe.
Yeah, I think closer to meditation than the memoirs. This is the right
way to describe it. And so your book is about not just the town
itself, but about being alone and and what you have to do day to
day. Yeah, it's about my experience living up there the last four years.
Kind of some of the things that have happened, from the natural disasters
to the friendships that are formed, to exploring the minds, as well as
weaving in the history of the town the characters that were there in the past.
You know, it's just a very lively place back in the day,
and a lot of the history has been lost over time. So I try
to recall what I can from my research as well as weaving my own stories
over the last four years. But Cassidy Mark Twain were said to have come
through that town at one point or another. And you have a ghost,
can you tell us about it? Yeah? I have my one ghost story.
But the most popular ghost people see in town is a woman named Lola
Travis, and Lola was the owner of one of the brothels back in the
day. Lola's Palace of Pleasure was the name of it, and apparently she's
seen as the woman in the black dressed And my interaction with her was before
I was living there full time. I came up and I saw somebody in
the window of a building that was supposed to be vacant, and so I
ended up locking the door, turning off a light that was in there.
In the next day seemed that maybe she turned back on the light and kind
of movesing things around. My way of handling that was just to avoid that
building. I feel like there's plenty of buildings up there, so I finally
give them their space. They give you mind. Ghost Town Living Brent Underwood
is the author Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley.
I'd love to ask you more about what you've learned living up there and
what you've learned about yourself and about the world, but you'll just have to
read about it in Ghost Town Living. Brent Underwood, thanks for joining us,
of course, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Later with
Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive
Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and Ihearts Media Presentation