What They Left Behind At Cerro Gordo Was Worth Millions 

You are close enough to Los Angeles you could build and make that a spring or summer camping/concert venue annually.

I hope this becomes a daily operation for you and your guys Brent! this would be so fitting if it was one of the main incomes of the town again! just obviously as you know, be weary about extracting large amounts from your crumbling mines there, big love from England!

Man I’d love to have that coin, I’d put it up in a local mining museum near my area, I donate carvings and woodwork that’s mining related to them and I think they’d love to have the coin

Next you need to get a backhoe and dig down into those slag piles to verify that the assay amounts are consistent throughout the entire slag pile.

im excited!

@Vanilla Latte about two weeks ago there was a thread that got deleted that warned him about the hazards being around Cerro Gordo.

@@bonghungk7544 he has specifically mentioned the danger of spending time with lead. Also, I have seen him wearing a respirator mining the galena, though not in this video. The bottom line is, he is aware of the danger, but he loves it. We all make choices that effect our lives.

The chunks of lead containing ore just chucked in the backpack together with some bottles of water made me cringe. Don't know if that's a dedicated ore bag, or that the bottles were not gonna be used anymore, but eek. Just put it in a plastic bag in the backpack and things are a lot cleaner.

this, dont bare hand lead

Not sure if he is just doing this for the video and is doing safety off camera, but it is still hard to ignore since lead can kill people very easily.

Thank you Jason for unlocking this important part of Cerro Gordo! This is so important to the towns history and its so cool to see it being done today there!

Jason! my man!

You should sell him on some more modern equipment… at least a crusher…

very cool to see you there i enjoy watching your videos. I worked for meridian aggregates down in granite falls it was a gold mine back in the day when we mined the hard rock when we found ore pockets they would loaded it in trucks to process it

Thanks Jason! It was a blast having you up here as usual! Welcome back anytime

This is so true! I used to mountain bike in Texas in some very steep terrain with a lot of huge jumps. I filmed it one day and was so blown away when I got home and it just looked like some small hills with a couple of dirt mounds.

yesssss

but, throw the backpack up the ladder for it roll up it before you tell people it's going down, cause that's a cool effect!

Makes sense. During WWII, the tailings piles of lead and zinc mines in Oklahoma and Missouri were recrushed and sent through the smelter again. I forget what was retrieved, but it was in the neighborhood of 15 to 25% if my memory works.

True and also the refinement process was also cruder. But a good point to make is that it's not necessarily the highest quality first. It would have been the highest quality at the time of mining. As they mined deeper, they could have very much found higher quality veins than the start. Just due to the process of finding more veins. Obviously, the surface is still lowest as it would have been when the mine was failing, but lower doesn't necessarily mean better quality ore. But may mean more silver leftover. If you get what I mean

I will be watching it!! Cant wait

Sounds good 👍👍👍

"great great grandfather..." did you mean 1851 maybe not 1951?

@@GeoffRichards_GP Maybe he's 8 years old

@@evictioncarpentry2628 Maybe he's just a little older than that considering the account was made 9 years ago

Agreed!! Would be so interesting

Great questions, it’s those things that most all of us don’t usually think about and yet it’s a huge part of the history of it all!

I would say that likely that wood came from forests along the railroads at the time. In that same era, a large part of Missouri was clear cut for timbers. We often short cut it to say rail road ties as that was the largest demand at the trans continental rail road and then all of the spur lines were being built, but our logging and saw mill operations were massive and then loaded on rail cars to be sent along to the areas that needed it. I am sure it was much the same in other states. This was the era of railroad, mining, and timber barons just before the gilded age. Sometimes we tend to think of those old wooden sheds and shacks as "cheap" and "poor" buildings, but out in areas with no trees, lumber was as valuable as anything with shipping costs added on. Out there poor housing was adobe using local materials. Imagine what it cost to ship in cedar clapboard siding from the NW where those operations were making the products and everything had to ship by rail to the nearest depot and then by horse drawn wagon the rest of the way. Just the labor to load and unload the rail cars and wagons is astounding without machines and using block and tackle. The mine owner's house with all that fancy siding and trim boards was truly a mansion in it's day.

The diversity of people that worked in the mines. Recent TV shows depict majority asian cheap labor during those years.

@@jiml4987 while I'm sure there was "diversity" I wonder how some of those "diverse" people were treated by a certain percentage of those "diverse" people, and I wonder why you felt the need to bring that up? It's as if you're defending something or someone!🤔

I imagine your word "tips" is the same as what we (and Brent) call "slag."

@@PeterGenovese i think in uk a tip is the equivalent of a dump. Ie, where they dumped the slag.

Tips are dumps yes. Slag is slag

Colorado beetle?

@@PeterGenovese "tips" over the cliff..

I'd like to be a cook at the American Hotel.

Working on it! As we speak! Next week's video is all about the hotel!

I lived in the high desert for 5 years. I explored all over that area. The sad part of the story is, politicians killed this whole area and they stole these active mines. The people who couldn't cope with poverty became addicts . That's why people know Barstow as a place of drugs and corruption. Right now the are planning on stealing water rights .

You too huh?

Oh yeah . I am retired and would live to spend time doing that?

I'm from the UK and feel that drive haha x Love from Liverpool UK❣🇬🇧🇮🇪 Slava Ukraini ❣ ✊ 🇺🇦

@@quijybojanklebits8750 cool, I never knew how it wa supposed to be written. X

We typically do! We realized once we got down there that we forgot the respirators. We tried to be quick and wore them for most the process.

@@GhostTownLiving I know people may have busy schedules and all that, but you probably should've just returned to grab them and go back. Breathing in all that rock and especially lead dust is no joke. The ore will last forever but your health won't if you're not careful.

I coughed in sympathy ( i have copd and yeah prospecting was the kicker )

Only minus the normal greed that is behind most.

❤same

Than you so much for checking it out!

@@GratefulOverlander I always try to reply when I can?

@@GratefulOverlander you must be new. Brent has always responded to comments maybe not all but he does it, I'm sure he's a busy guy.

Only lead that can hurt him is moving 3,000feet/second

As someone that has worked in an underground lead mine, there are precautions that he should be taking. Every 6 months he should do a blood test to check his lead levels. If his lead levels become elevated, then he should stop the lead prospecting. No eating without washing hands. Wash himself thoroughly after going underground. A dust mask would be good, but not critical as he doesn't appear to stir up too much dust. Except when going up & down ladders - If he is going to travel those areas frequently, then he should wash down the dust with water. Generally speaking however, I am more concerned about what he does underground as he appears pretty oblivious to some of the dangers he puts himself in.

@@snaker9er 2 way range?

Dont worry its 100% organic lead

@@OneLeatherBoot Right? That lift that was designed in the 1800s? One bad footing and he's stuck for the ever ever

For sure. And with machine power and technology of today it’s a much different ballgame.

On the gold mining shows they always buy the small mines to go back through the old dirt from 50-70 years ago that people missed

I think the largest gold nugget in history was found just sitting outside an abandon mine entrance in Colorado...

Ahh yes... It's named “Tom's Baby”. It weighs 156 troy ounces

Yeah, I read somewhere that the Golden Triangle in Victoria, Australia, with modern extraction tech, they reckon they could pull as much gold out as they did in the 1850's gold rush.

Thanks! Hope you can make it up some time!

I'd hate to be told something I own is work xxx,xxx. What kind of currency is that? Crypto?

​@godhandsver 😂oh

I really hope he does. It's great that he did this but I'd love to see a larger sample size.

Agreed! I'd be down to repeat it a few times to make sure we're getting accurate and repeatable results. It could be historic!

The adventure could be part of the overall experience of staying and spending tourism dollars in your town..

That's awesome. I'll have to check that out some day!

@@GhostTownLiving While it's all good to earn your way to a hotel, can't do much if your health is being impeded by lead or celiac problems later on in your life. Get a health check-up your are skinny as it is. People want you around.

@@GhostTownLiving I love your adventures and wish you well.. but what do you plan on doing with your wealth? This world could desperately use more philanthropy. Please don't accumulate just for the sake of accumulating. Pay it foward.

@@Freshbrood Seriously? Let's see YOUR financials to see how much YOU'RE paying forward. SMH at ppl who have to run other's lives.

@@Freshbrood we all need to live that way

Thank you! I'll have to check out that town.

I can see Cerro Gordo looking like Kimberly's Big Hole Old Town one day 😁👌

A significant part of South African history was defined around mining towns which in their early days very much would have resembled Cerro Gordo. The South African equivalent of Belshaw started wars and moved borders to get control of the mines he wanted. Johannesburg is the largest city in the world not located next to a navigable body of water because it started out as a gold mining town. Now it is a city of ~6 million people. The mines are of course also a large part of the reason behind the darker sides of our history, but for the same reason it contributed to the uplifting part of the South African story. In fact, Brent, you might want look into Gold Reef City. It's an amusement park built around (and partially in) an old gold mine, styled to mimic the period of the Witwatersrand gold rush. While of course not the same as what you're doing up there in California, it might give some ideas as to the possibilities. I've always thought of it (and Cullinan, another diamond mining town like Kimberley) while watching your videos. With at least some of the miners at Cerro Gordo being immigrants from Europe, and with the period of the first silver rush coinciding with the diamond rush in Kimberley and the gold rush in Pilgrim's Rest, it's not impossible that at least some souls stood at some harbour, deciding between 2 ships heading to 2 different opportunities to seek their fortunes they'd heard about. History is intertwined in interesting and far reaching ways Interesting story, while Kimberley was beseiged by the armies of the Boer republics during the South African War, mining engineers built a cannon in the de Beers Mining Company workshop designed using only the manuals they had in the library.

@Juandre Interesting, thanks for the info!

There are a lot of old mines in the UK too.

@@Yo_Hahn yes. I’ve been in a few.

Why dream..visit..its not impossible

yeah i keep wondering if handeling all that lead is safe. I'd be wearing gloves but maybe he's doing all this on hard mode so he can appreciate the way things used to be done.

Yes! I'm not an authority however..,.. they threw this all away! It's worth billions. The land contains not only mineral but HISTORICAL data ..... Someone decades ago..... ? 100 YEARS +......…....…......NOW Decided it was worthless! Great for ?.... Is he protected? Not just health wise.... He's wealthy! This was one of earths discarded valuable resources! Great? He must protect himself..

It’s genuinely hard to understand that with all of the question marks, full stops, capitalisation.

I thought I was the only one who feels the same about the importance of hand pro

Aw he was hopeful that there was ore left behind.. some $$$$

Thanks!

For sure! It blows my mind how much had to happen to take this piece of earth and turn it into such a town.