The Florida man who bought a ghost town wrote a book inside the mines

When we last spoke with Brent Underwood in September 2020, he had just survived appendicitis, an earthquake, a hailstorm and a flash flood. A blizzard dumped 5 feet of snow, trapping the Florida native alone just after he arrived in Cerro Gordo, the California ghost town he purchased in 2018. Then a fire ripped through a century-and-a-half-old icehouse, home, hotel and saloon, nearly swallowing up the rest of the property Underwood was hellbent on saving.

That was just during his first six months as Cerro Gordo’s sole permanent resident. Wait until you read about the rest.

Underwood’s adventures, and the untold history of Cerro Gordo, unfold in his new tell-all book, “Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley.”

“My main goal here, from day one, has been to bring the town back to life and give it this new livelihood,” he said in a recent phone call, speaking from an elevation of over 8,000 feet in his Cerro Gordo home. “From bringing these stories, both the past and the present, I thought maybe we could do that.”

While the book aims to inspire readers to follow their own wild dreams, it also doesn’t sugarcoat Underwood’s experience.

“I am the luckiest man in the world,” he writes in the book’s preface. “I am also a prisoner of this place.”

An explorer is born

Millions of viewers follow Underwood’s life at Cerro Gordo across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. But before that, he was the cowboy-obsessed kid of two public school teachers, growing up in the suburbs of Hillsborough County.

Underwood went on to work as a marketer and investor, running a hostel out of a historic Victorian mansion in Austin, Texas. By the time he turned 30 in 2018, he sought deeper fulfillment. Then a friend texted him a listing for Cerro Gordo.

Once home to the largest silver mine in California, the town had been abandoned since the 1950s. Nestled in the Inyo Mountains, it sits smack dab between the highest point in the contiguous United States, Mount Whitney, and the lowest, Death Valley. The $925,000 price tag included mines and the homes of the men who worked there, a general store, a cemetery, the American Hotel and its bullet hole-pocked saloon and a brothel called “Lola’s Palace of Pleasure.” Underwood teamed up with some friends to come up with the winning $1.4 million bid.

“It was my life savings, and every single day it has cost more,” he wrote in his book. “It is the best money I have ever spent. The best thing I will ever do. On some days, it feels like the last thing I will ever do.”

Weaving together histories

“Ghost Town Living” is part history of Cerro Gordo, part autobiography. Readers will learn how the once-bustling town, home to nearly 4,000 residents at its peak in 1870, rose to prominence. They’ll follow Underwood’s move to a place both beautiful and dangerous. Instead of a chronological tale, the book weaves in and out through time and memories, organized into four sections: Earth, Water, Fire and Air.

“So much of my experience here has been tied to the elements in some way, like the fire or the snow when I first came here. Or the battle that I didn’t have running water,” Underwood said. “I think about things like that way more than I ever did, and I felt like that was the case since the beginning of Cerro Gordo.”

In the book, the town’s past and Underwood’s present-day explorations often collide. With no one to keep him company but some goats and kittens, Underwood found companionship by uncovering the stories of past Cerro Gordo residents. He wrote about discovering “a treasure of a different kind,” like a suitcase filled with one resident’s bills, court documents and love letters.

“It was clear with every item I touched that Chet Reynolds had come to Cerro Gordo with two very dangerous things: hope and a dream,” Underwood wrote. “Holding up to the light one of his bank stubs from Bank of America for $8.43, I could feel his hope in the faded outline of numbers that were far too small, even for back then. Could he have ever guessed, all these years later, a guy with a Bank of America account himself would be holding a record of his financial fate?”

Writing and recording around the ghost town

Underwood started working on the book about 2 ½ years into living at Cerro Gordo. Followers had been asking him to write down his experiences.

“As I thought through it more, I knew that I had a winter coming up, and winters can be very long and cold here,” he said. “I can’t film as much because there’s just not that much going on, so I started compiling my thoughts.”

While Underwood finished his final round of book edits in his parents’ Sun City Center home, much of the book was written in Cerro Gordo’s Belshaw House, where he lives. This home was built in 1868 by California miner Mortimer Belshaw, who hauled the first load of silver to Los Angeles. Belshaw controlled much of the town, and he also carved the treacherous 8-mile road visitors still use to get up the mountain. Underwood often thought of Belshaw as he peered out the window at the snow-tipped peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

“He was probably looking out the same window, thinking about the same logistical challenges,” Underwood said.

Underwood pored through his old YouTube videos. If readers feel like they are in the cold, dark mines with Underwood, it’s because that’s where he did a lot of his drafting. He wrote:

The mines twist and turn for more than thirty miles, buttressed by enough timber to build the Empire State Building out of wood a few times over. Deep enough to bury most of the Eiffel Tower. There are elevators and chutes. Bathrooms. Changing rooms. Trash dumps. Dynamite vaults. I am writing now from a little alcove off the main mine, where a foreman might have checked his paperwork before directing his men to drive the shaft at the 400 level another twenty feet to the south. There is almost no sound in here. There is no breeze. No animals to make a sound, save the occasional bat. I love being in the mines. My phone doesn’t work. Nobody can get ahold of me. The outside world disappears and I’m left to reminisce about the men who were here before.

Underwood even persuaded his publisher to let him record the audiobook alone at the 900-foot level of the mines. It took months to prepare the space, including bringing electricity and internet to the depths of the mines, but a producer was able to supervise the process via Skype.

The trip down takes a 45-minute elevator ride. So, Underwood built a miniature bedroom, complete with a bed and kitchenette, living in the mines for three days while recording.

“It’s maybe the deepest a book has been recorded underground, and that was cool because it helped me bring the stories I was telling about the past come to life,” he said. “I would read and then walk the levels of the mine and it really helped me put myself in the story a little more.”

Learn more about Brent Underwood and Cerro Gordo

“Ghost Town Living: Mining for Purpose and Chasing Dreams at the Edge of Death Valley,” written by Brent Underwood, is available now wherever books are sold. It was published by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House. To learn more about Underwood’s journey, follow him on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.

Underwood and volunteers are rebuilding the American Hotel, which burned down in June 2020. Donors raised over $123,000 already via GoFundMe. Underwood hopes the hotel will be ready for visitors by the end of the year. In the meantime, Cerro Gordo is currently welcoming guests. Email underwood.brent@gmail.com to let him know you’re coming.

This story uses information from the Tampa Bay Times archive.