Inyo County's Cerro Gordo sits 8,200 feet up in the White Mountains above Owens Lake, reachable only by an eight-mile dirt road that's rarely maintained. In the 1870s it was California's biggest silver operation — thousands of residents, five hotels, seven saloons, and famously no jail. Then the ore ran out, fires in 1877 and 1880 razed most of the buildings, and the desert took the rest.
In 2018, an Austin bed-and-breakfast owner named Brent Underwood bought the whole town after a friend sent him a link titled "Buy Your Own Ghost Town for Under $1 Million." He closed on Friday the 13th, July 2018, and moved in full-time in March 2020, arriving mid-blizzard in bald tires and white Allbirds — and walking the last quarter mile. Six years on, he's still there, waking to indoor temperatures of 17 degrees and collecting his mail an hour away.
The plan was simple: restore the surviving cabins, rent them out, and rebuild the 1871 American Hotel as a centrepiece museum. Then, in June 2020, an electrical fire burned the hotel down, along with his savings and his original blueprint. Instead of quitting, he leaned on an audience that had grown from the videos he'd posted while snowed in. Volunteers started arriving — first one curious viewer, then hundreds from around the world, some staying an afternoon, others returning monthly for years.
Rebuilding has tested that devotion. When concrete firms refused to send trucks up the road, the team hauled 300,000 pounds of dry mix up the mountain and mixed 80 yards of concrete themselves — a half-day job that took months. Twenty volunteers showed up for the pour. As Underwood puts it, almost everything there is possible; almost nothing is easy.
Why does a traveller care? Because Cerro Gordo is becoming exactly what he hoped: a place worth caring about, slowly returning to life with people who can say they helped build it. It's a rare chance to watch a ghost town wake up — and, for the handy and hardy, occasionally to take part.
The town has layers beyond the restoration, too. Under the surface lie 30 miles of abandoned mines, where artefacts like old dynamite, miner's hats and period Levi's jeans still turn up. One of the best finds was a briefcase in the old general store belonging to Chet Reynolds, a 1930s hopeful who chased his fortune here, never got rich (one bank stub reads $8.42), and eventually left. His letters, lawsuits and unpaid bills stayed — a reminder of everyone who bet on this mountain before.
Visiting isn't a casual day trip: bring a high-clearance vehicle, supplies, and respect for altitude and weather, and check current access arrangements before you go. But if you're drawn to living history and high-desert solitude, few places in California offer a story like this one — a town being rebuilt not just with concrete, but with people.
