Cerro Gordo - the Ghost Town

The road to Cerro Gordo

“This road looks a bit sketchy,” I stated.

My traveling partner on this trip was our old friend, Paul.

“Nah, you got this,” he replied.

Just then a humongous propane tanker truck came down the narrow dirt track right in front of us and stopped.

“I don’t think I got this,” I said.

Nice view of Owens Valley from a steep incline

Being the courteous driver I am, I stopped and backed into a very little crawl space on the side of this mountainous road toward the ghost town of Cerro Gordo.

The driver of the tanker stopped, and yelled through his open window, “You’ll have to go around me. I’m too heavy and will topple off the dirt road to the valley below.”

The valley below is just east of Owens Valley, and was probably a hundred thousand feet straight down.

“I’ll get out and guide you,” Paul said. The truck door closing, nearly masking his statement.

I travel a lot. I sometimes get myself in situations that are not the best for me, or the particular vehicle I may be utilizing for this trip or that. This was one of those times.

I wasn’t sure what to do. So, I backed up, allowing the propane delivery vehicle to edge by me and take the spot in the tiny turn-out on the dirt road.

“You got plenty of room,” the driver yelled.

Plenty of room does not include the concept of not seeing the road from the driver’s window. All I saw was a steep drop off to the Owens Valley. The passenger mirror barely missed the end of the propane truck by the time I traversed this harrowing spot in the roadway. 

I applied the brakes and waited until Paul caught up with me.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he assured me.

“You weren’t driving,” I replied. “Heck, you weren’t even in the truck.”

“I was guiding you.”

“I should have guided you.”

Paul shook his head, “Nah, it is your truck. I wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for tumbling off the road and crushing it.”

The road to the tiny old mining town of Cerro Gordo is not for the faint of heart. It is eight miles of crooked earth, torturedly carved out of the steep mountain side in the White Mountains, just east of Keeler on Highway 136, which is off Highway 190 out of Olancha, which is on Highway 395.  

Welcome to Cerro Gordo

The history of the town though, is quite interesting and that made the white-knuckler adventure worth it.

Cerro Gordo – Fat Hill in Spanish – was named for the amount of ore found there through the years, beginning in 1865. And as with any mining town, that’s where our history begins. Pablo Flores found some rich veins of gold and silver and began processing it. Then, through the ensuing couple of years, others heard of the chances of getting rich and by 1868, the place was starting to get a pin in the map of next bonanzas.

The problem was, Native Americans living in and around Owens Lake didn’t like all the newcomers taking their ancestral lands and serious issues developed. To counter that, Fort Independence was built, and the United States Army explained to the natives living there that they could either go along with the mining operations or leave.

One of our darkest moments is history, they were generally expelled from their lands in favor of the mining operations when they complained. 

In 1868, Mortimer Belshaw came to town and began a partnership with another person in the Union Mine. The mine was the first to deliver a cart load of silver to what was then small town of Los Angeles, and the boom was starting for this high elevation locale in the White Mountains.

Belshaw was quite the entrepreneur. Not only did he own a large part of the riches coming out of the area near Cerro Gordo, but he developed, if we can call it that, the dirt path up the long and dangerous eight miles a toll road.

Part of what remains of Cerro Gordo

The road was known as the ‘Yellow Road’ for the color of the rock the road was cut through. He made a lot of moo-la-boola, with the ore he was sending to Los Angeles and the tolls for those willing to risk coming up the ‘Yellow Road.’

A pretty smart dude, that Mortimer Belshaw.

“Can you imagine driving a team of horses up and down the road we just drove?” I asked Paul.

“I can’t even imagine driving your truck on it.”

“You didn’t,” I replied, my white knuckles were still white as we approached the end of the road and into the town of Cerro Gordo. 

Almost pristine building in Cerro Gordo

The town is currently owned by Brent Underwood. Yes, ghost towns do go on the real estate market now and then, and Brent bought all three-hundred and sixty acres of the town in July of 2018.

A building under re-construction

In all fairness, I did email Brent a few times to see if we could meet in the town, but I never did receive a response. He’s a very busy man – he has a YouTube channel called Ghost Town Living, and probably has around five billion followers.

“Brent, it’s John,” I would have said. “Got time for an interview.”

“No interview for you,” he might have responded. “I’m a very busy man.”

Actually, speaking to the manager at Cerro Gordo, Brent seems to be a very nice and caring guy. He purchased the ghost town to restore it to its original design. And, that is going to be a lot of hard work.

“Brent wants to make this a go-to place for tourists,” stated the manager. In all transparency, I don’t recall the young man’s name. He was nice and very informative but my notebook was in the truck a hundred yards away, I was tired – it seemed a long walk to retrieve it, especially at such a high altitude.

Cerro Gordo Peak is over nine thousand feet in elevation, and the town of Cerro Gordo is nearly eighty-five hundred feet above sea level. Going back to the truck and grabbing my notebook would have acquired a twenty minute nap, and we were on a schedule on this specific day.

“We have plans to make the town exactly what looked like during its heyday,” the manager stated. “We have a lot of people driving up here and wanting to spend some quality time, just enjoying the serenity of the place.”

Standing on the wood porch in front of the visitor’s center, I knew why a person would want to come up this steep mountainside. The views of the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range to the west were spectacular.

Interior of the visitor's center

Cerro Gordo produced a lot of rich ore for the miners and owners in this desolate location. It is estimated that over seventeen million dollars’ worth of gold and silver was mined between 1865 and 1949. That is about a hundred billion dollars in today’s money.

“Wander around a bit and take in the scenery,” the manager said.

We did.

There are houses, buildings, and the like, that are still standing and being renovated for guests. Brent has an eye that Cerro Gordo will become a great destination for those willing to drive up a very narrow and often nerve whacking dirt road to see what a real ghost town was like.

Remains of a cart rail

I did ask the manager if there is any mining still going on.

“No, we explore them, but there is no active searching for minerals at this time.”

From some research, I discovered that Samuel Clemons – Mark Twain - actually spent some time in Cerro Gordo. He happened to be residing in Aurora, another small mining town to the east in the state of Nevada, and spent time in both places.

“I’m not sure which town I like best,” the master of words might have mused. “I think Aurora. It doesn’t get those dastardly easterly winds.”

But, during the winter, temperatures in Cerro Gordo can drop to a chilling ten or more degrees below freezing and receive somewhere around twenty-four inches of snow. And that’s not including the wind chill factor which can be drop the thermometer at least a hundred degrees, or so it feels.

That is cold in anyone’s world – unless you are filming in the Yukon which can drop to more than a million degrees below zero.

Paul and I wandered the ghost town, and it really is a place to visit. Residential houses are being re-done, but only to the time period they were built. Buildings are being shored up, and the whole town will soon be a location for those who want to spend a night or more in the past, in a very secluded but beautiful spot across form the Sierra Nevada’s.

Future Airbnb?

“What’s the draw?” I asked the manager.

“To visit, and experience what I see every day.”

“And that is…?”

He smiled and pointed west. “The sunset over the Sierras. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I’ve been here a year. Each day is like the first.”

Looking past his outstretched hand, I had to agree. The location of Cerro Gordo is gorgeous, but the drive is not for the faint of heart.

Weighing beauty versus safety, I sighed deeply and we got down the road before the sun dropped below the range to our west.

The Ghost Town of Bodie, truly worth the visit

 

John R Beyer - ready for some visiting

According to Ranger Jake, the ghost town of Bodie is truly haunted.

“Well, I’ve never had an encounter with any real ghosts or stuff like that,” he stated. “But, the state rangers who reside in the town itself says there are some really strange things that go on after dark.”

“With the staff, or the ghosts?” I asked.

Being a ranger, Ranger Jake didn’t see the humor in my question. “No, with things they cannot explain.”

Bodie, which is part of the California State Historic Park system, was known for all sorts of things in its heyday – a mining boomtown, violence, drinking, violence, gambling, violence, and more of the same.

A section of downtown Bodie

The state park is located about twenty miles south-east of the town of Bridgeport. It’s an easy drive, suitable for any vehicle. 

Just east of the tall and beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountain range, the drive to Bodie is beautiful any time of the year. Highway 395 is always a great route to take, and the thirteen mile easterly drive along Highway 270 to Bodie is paved all the way, excepting the last three miles. But, those three miles are hard packed making the journey relatively easy.

Except in winter, when a snowmobile or a bunch of Huskies dragging a sled should be the mode of travel. They get a lot of snow in this part of California.

In fact, one of the original discoverers of the gold in the area was W.S. Bodey, who perished in a fierce snowstorm in November of 1859, while bringing supplies back to the small mining camp from nearby Monoville to the west. 

His friends decided to name the town after him, but the name was misspelled when a sign painter in another mining town, Aurora, mistakenly painted ‘Bodie Stables’ over a horse stable. The spelling stuck.

Though gold had been discovered in Bodie in 1859, it was years before the settlement went from a few tough and stubborn miners to its boom years.

It wasn’t until 1876, that the Standard Company found a large and rich vein of gold-bearing ore. Almost overnight, the sleepy little town of Bodie suddenly found itself on the verge of becoming one of the largest towns in California.

With all that gold, there has to be a bank vault

By 1879, the population had soared to nearly ten thousand folks and two thousand buildings, which consisted of houses, saloons, hotels, meeting halls for the miners, fire stations, schools, and so much more that makes a town a town.

According to some research I did, Bodie, at its peak had 65 saloons just on Main Street, which was a mile long. That is a lot of places to wet one’s whistle, and all in walking distance.

But, as I stood overlooking what was left of Bodie, it didn’t seem that large. Sure, there were two to three streets with homes, businesses, a church, and a school, but not much more to hint that ten thousand people had resided here at one time.

 “You have to understand that Bodie, like many frontier towns experienced numerous fires,” Ranger Jake stated. “It was like a plague for these places built out of wood.”

In fact, so many fires occurred in this town that only five percent of the structures remain to this day. The last major fire was in 1932, which pretty much wiped out the downtown district of Bodie.

As I wandered through the town, I wondered how it would have been to live here during the great mining days. Bodie was a twenty-four/seven sort of town.

Nine large stamp mills crushed the ore dug up from the ground around the clock from the thirty mines located in the area. The echoes from the machinery must have been loud in this town built in a valley. The gold bullion was shipped to Carson City, Nevada and each shipment had to have armed guards since robbery was something Bodie had to deal with.

With mining booms, no matter where, lower social elements usually arrived to take advantage, and Bodie was no exception.

Robbery, gun fights, stabbings, opium dens, gambling halls, brothels, were an integral part of the life in Bodie. In this incident, integral is not to be misunderstood as something positive – nope, not positive but just a fact of life for the towns in the Wild West.

A horse drawn hearse, appropriate for Bodie

As with any mining district, there is the beginning and eventually the ending. Bodie saw the population start to dwindle starting in 1880 when other ‘promising’ booms were reported in places like Butte, Montana and Tombstone, Arizona.

With miners leaving, so did much of the rougher crowds which meant the remaining citizens of Bodie were families. In 1882, the Methodist Church was built, and still stands today. Then a Roman Catholic Church was built, followed by a school house, and more properties suited for a more genteel population.

The Methodist Church in Bodie

The ore was not good, but not bad either, and families were able to make a living in Bodie. With new technology in the 1890’s though, more ore could be found using a cyanide process, which allowed miners a chance to go through the old mill tailings and extract the gold and silver just lying there.

I’d explain the cyanide process, but I don’t want to sound too scientifically nerdy.

But, things eventually turned south for Bodie and according to the U.S. Federal Census of 1920, only one hundred and twenty people resided there. The post office officially closed in 1942, and by 1943 only three people were on hand to keep the town from being looted and vandalized.

In 1961, Bodie was designated a National Historic Landmark, and in 1962 it became the Bodie State Historic Park. With nearly one hundred and seventy buildings still standing, the town has become known as California’s official state gold rush ghost town.

It was early, being the first tourist there, I wanted the place for myself – the park closes at six p.m. during the summer, and though I had planned to spend the night there to see if any ghosts or goblins walked the streets, no overnight stays are allowed – unless you are one of the ranger residents.

As I wandered here and there through the dusty streets of Bodie, I could almost hear the mills thumping away in the nearby hills. The sounds of people laughing seemed to be floating along the slight breeze heading east along Main Street. 

Bodie is referred as in a state of arrested decay, which gives the illusion of people just getting up and leaving their abodes.

The houses, businesses, and the rest which remain today have heavy metal screens over the windows and doorways for good reason.

Looking in through those windows is such a strange sensation. Dinner tables with dishes, utensils, and drinking glasses set around empty chairs. In an accountant’s office, there are ledgers, ink pens and a pair of reading glasses on a desk. In the schoolhouse there are desks with text books resting on them as if the children are simply out for recess.

It's as though the family will be returning

      

A tailor shop, waiting for customers in Bodie

It is a haunting experience to walk the streets of Bodie.

Prior to the anti-theft measures put up by the state, visitors would often take ‘relics’ or ‘souvenirs’ with them when they left the town.

So much so, that the Bodie Curse was invented by a ranger at the park. Legend has it that if an article is taken from Bodie, then bad luck will surely be upon the thief and their family.

When news of this was made public, all sorts of things were mailed back to the park with notes such as: ‘Hey, didn’t mean to steal the shoes from the schoolhouse but now I have two noses.’

I met up with Ranger Jake during a tour of the Standard Mill, and after a great and interesting hour long tour, I asked him more about the paranormal sightings in the park.

“Like I said,” he stated. “I have never had experienced anything out of the ordinary but those rangers who live here say they see shadows going across doorways. Perhaps, voices where no one should be. It seems that in the evenings is when spirits, if there are any, tend to come out.”

According to some other ghostly research, there is a woman with a large basket in her hand, wearing a white hood and wearing a black and white dress, who comes out at midnight and walks a bit before vanishing. Another is a tall figure carrying a light who enters the mines and wanders there until dawn.

Just before the last folks left Bodie, a man murdered his wife and then three men killed him for the murder. Later, the killer returned and yelled at his killers – those three other men died of diseases shortly there-after. Now, these four seem to visit the town or the cemetery from time to time.

Is Bodie haunted? I don’t know, but walking those lonely streets with houses, businesses, and other establishments as though people just stood up and walked away, is creepy enough.

It’s as though, at any moment, a door will open and a family will descend onto the street wondering what activity may be awaiting them.

I didn’t see that happen, but in Bodie, it seems anything could.

A haunting view, east of downtown Bodie