Ghost Town Living

What would you attempt if the timeline for success stretched beyond your own lifetime—and the point wasn’t the payoff, but the person you became in the doing? In Ghost Town Living, Brent Underwood argues that an extraordinary life is more likely to be built than found. He contends that meaning arises when you commit to a hard, long-term undertaking that resists efficiency, survives catastrophe, and binds you to a community and a place. But to do that, you have to unlearn our culture’s shortcut mindset and relearn what miners, mules, and desert elders already knew: pick your spot, swing, and endure.

Underwood’s experiment is audacious. In 2018 he spent everything he had (and a lot he didn’t) to buy Cerro Gordo, a 19th-century silver camp perched above Death Valley. The town built Los Angeles, then died when the ore ran out. He moves in alone at 8,500 feet without running water, amid decrepit buildings and 30 miles of mines. Soon the pandemic hits, a blizzard strands him, floods erase the only road, and a 3 a.m. fire incinerates the American Hotel—the heart of his vision. Still, he doubles down. He rappels into collapsed shafts, learns heavy machinery, raises a global volunteer corps via YouTube, and—famously—airlifts nothing, instead hauling and hand-mixing 80 cubic yards of concrete with Heavy D’s crew to resurrect the hotel’s foundation. The book is a memoir of grit, a field guide to meaning, and a love letter to a ravaged landscape.

What This Book Claims

The core argument: Purpose isn’t discovered; it’s mined—layer by stubborn layer—through a long, absorbing project that stretches your skills, deepens your sense of history, and roots you in a place and people. Underwood echoes Albert Camus’s “happy Sisyphus,” insisting that the struggle is not a bug of a meaningful life; it is the meaning (Camus; also see Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning). Against our culture’s “move fast and break things,” he proposes “move deliberately and build things,” accepting nature’s veto power, the pain of setbacks, and the time horizons of masonry and mountains, not apps and quarters.

How the Book Proves It

You’ll see four recurring moves:

• Pick a mountain and swing. Inspired by prospector “Burro” Schmidt, who hammered a half-mile tunnel through granite over 38 years, Underwood shows how choosing a worthy, resistant project creates a rhythm of daily progress and a resilient identity.
• Start small, then go deep. He rebuilds a porch plank-by-plank in a blizzard, then rappels into Cerro Gordo’s truly subterranean city to grasp the mine’s logic—and himself.
• Walk the wash and find elders. With Tip—an austere desert sage—he learns to see terrain, history, and danger, turning the land into a teacher (compare to Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams on landscape literacy).
• Build community, not ego. After fire reduces the hotel to ash, he posts a raw video—crying on camera, then inviting help. Thousands respond. The project becomes a commons.

Why It Matters Now

We live in a snatch-and-grab era—strip-mined attention spans, growth hacks, exit plans. Underwood’s countercultural thesis lands with force: short-term thinking has long-term costs. He retells the draining of Owens Lake by William Mulholland’s aqueduct—the crime behind LA’s rise—to reveal that how we build matters as much as what we build (see also Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert). Whether you’re making software, schools, or a life, your methods write your legacy on the landscape and in other people’s lungs.

What You’ll Take Away

This summary tracks eight ideas: choosing hard commitments; the power of starting tiny; learning to see and finding mentors; going deep into history; respecting water, fire, and flood while thinking longer-term; building with community; managing burnout through rotation, awe, and gratitude; and leaving a mark worthy of memory. You’ll get vivid stories—Burro Schmidt’s tunnel; the 2020 fire; rappelling the Jefferson Chimney; the Buckets-and-Bobcats concrete pour; Tip’s final lessons—and practical ways to turn your own work into a mine for meaning.

Key Idea

“There it is, take it” built a metropolis but killed a lake. “Here I am, build it” can build a life—and maybe a better future.

If you feel a tug toward a life less ordinary, this isn’t a manifesto to burn the ships so much as a blueprint to sink footings. Underwood shows you how to trade speed for stewardship, spectacle for substance, and audience for community. The work will wound you. It will also make you whole.

Underwood opens with a patron saint of unreasonable commitment: William “Burro” Schmidt. In 1900, Schmidt started chipping a tunnel through solid granite with a pick, shovel, and sledge—one foot on good days, an inch on bad. After 20 years, a road made his plan obsolete. He dug 18 more anyway. In 1938, nearly 40 years later, he broke through to the other side of a cliff…and walked away. No ore ever passed through. Yet the tunnel remains: a testament to the power of choosing a mountain and refusing to negotiate with doubt.

Commitment Creates Identity

Schmidt’s tunnel gives you a blueprint for purpose: commitment gives rhythm; rhythm becomes identity. When Underwood clicked a midnight link—“Buy your own town for under a million dollars”—he saw a mountain of paradox: 300 acres of beauty and ruin; 30 miles of abandoned mines; no water; no people. He didn’t have a plan so much as a vow. Like Schmidt, he traded optionality for necessity. The hammer swing became his calendar (compare to Cal Newport’s “deep work” cadence and James Clear’s identity-based habits).

The Road Will Turn While You’re Digging

Schmidt’s road-to-nowhere became Underwood’s pandemic, blizzard, flood, and fire. In March 2020 he hiked the last mile in Allbirds as snow swallowed the mountain road. Weeks later, the world shut down. Then the American Hotel burned at 3 a.m., heat waves so fierce that poured water evaporated midair. Each upset is less a plot twist than the plot: external shocks are the curriculum; the project is the school (Taleb would call it “antifragility”).

Pick-Axe vs. Pitch Deck

You live in a culture that rewards talk (decks, threads, press) over swing (build, ship, fix). Underwood’s call is simple: start hammering. The men of Cerro Gordo weren’t doing TED talks on “disruption”; they were drilling twelve-hour days for $3 a shift. Underwood arrives as a digital marketer/hostel owner who “couldn’t tell a plumb bob from a pizza.” He learns a Bobcat, rappels 400+ feet in the Jefferson Chimney, fells trees, forms footings. The pick-axe turns him from “guy with a deed” to “the sort of person who does hard things.”

Happy Sisyphus, Modern Edition

Was Schmidt happy? Underwood chooses to believe yes—and that choice matters. Camus argued the struggle itself fills a man’s heart; Underwood tests it against frostbite, debt, and loneliness. He finds steady rewards: the first clean joist line, the sudden clarity of a mule trail when the light shifts, the shock of old galena glittering in a wash. These are small wins, but compound into a sturdy life (see Teresa Amabile on the “progress principle”).

Try This

Name your tunnel: one project so stubborn it demands daily swing. Set a 3–5 year horizon. Measure effort, not applause. Expect the road to go elsewhere while you dig. Keep swinging.

Schmidt’s tunnel isn’t a productivity hack; it’s a worldview. Pick your spot, swing, and let the work make you into someone who can finish. When the road changes, your rhythm holds. And when you finally see daylight, as Schmidt did, it might be into a canyon. That’s fine. The job was never to win the game—it was to become the kind of person who plays it well.

The snow is waist-deep, the road impassable, the town silent. Underwood hikes to Cerro Gordo’s forgotten Chinatown and finds a leaning shack with a rotten porch. Inside, he imagines the miner who once lived here—twelve-hour shifts underground, then a few stolen minutes on a porch looking across the valley toward a family an ocean away. That porch becomes Underwood’s first target. He hauls planks from the chapel, scrounges nails and a saw, and frames it in a cutting wind that razors his face. It’s a tiny win—but it unlocks everything.

Why Little Is Big

Waiting for perfect plans is how dreams die. Underwood confesses he spent two years in “poser mode” imagining a full-town renovation once he raised money and hired contractors. Nothing happened. Building a six-foot porch, by contrast, made the town real under his feet. It created momentum and a feedback loop: action → competence → ownership → more action (Derek Sivers: “If information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with six-pack abs”).

Borrowed Bricks, Local Specs

The desert teaches bricolage—making with what’s at hand. The chapel’s extra boards, the rusted nails in a coffee tin, the old Makita: these become a workshop. Underwood’s constraint turns creative: he sizes the porch to available lumber, not vice versa. He learns that resourcefulness beats resources (compare to Nassim Taleb’s notion of “via negativa”—solve by subtraction, not addition).

Stone by Stone Strategy

In the 1870s, Cerro Gordo materialized because someone threw the first shovel of dirt, then another. Underwood embraces the same cadence—porch today, ceiling tomorrow, floorboards after. He calls worksheets and investor decks “dreams without integrity” until boots hit dirt. The miner’s porch becomes a metaphor for any big endeavor: decide where to begin; shrink scope to today; accept that expertise follows effort. As Seneca warned, “Fools are always getting ready to live.”

A Philosophy of Scale

Fixing one porch also reframes the whole town. Underwood realizes Cerro Gordo won’t be restored by a single barn-raising weekend; it will accrete like stalactites—imperceptible most days, transformative in a season. This slow-scale lens calms anxiety (“Why isn’t the hotel done?”) and inoculates against boom-bust thinking that ruined past owners. It also honors the miners whose twelve-hour shifts bought all this wood with their lungs.

Field Note

“A dream dependent on other people and perfect conditions has no integrity.” Turn wishes into the next physical action. Name it. Do it. Repeat tomorrow.

When you don’t know where to start, start small where you stand. The porch teaches you to love the work, not the fantasy of finished. It gives tomorrow a script: get to work. Once you’ve built one sturdy thing, the town—your company, your craft, your calling—stops being an idea and starts being a place you can live.

Things disappear and appear in the desert. One day you stumble on a perfect stone cabin; the next, you can’t find it again. Into this mirage-woven world arrives Tip Shields: 70-something, small, pale, half the weight cancer stole, fully the man the desert made. Tip teaches Underwood how to run a Bobcat, how to stand a building, and, most of all, how to see—the way time, season, and snow reveal hidden trails and how washes (the desert’s runoff veins) whisper the past.

Learn the Land’s Language

Tip’s first lesson is looking. “Turn your head slowly. Keep your eyes on the horizon. When you see something out of place, zero in.” A straight line of cribbing appears where you saw only scree. In winter, the first snow tattoos the mule track the sun had erased in fall. The desert is an archive, and light is its index. This skill reframes problem-solving: you stop forcing outcomes and start reading clues (compare to Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek on seeing).

Walk the Wash

Washes are a biography written by water. Walk up from the bottom and artifacts pool at your feet: jagged sardine cans opened by knife (not a safety wheel), tobacco tins, canteens with frayed straps. Each piece hints at a life lived here—woodcutter? Mucker? Blacksmith?—and deepens your empathy for anonymous hands. Prospectors traced “float” the same way—following heavy galena up washes to ore chimneys. Underwood, too, follows the wash into meaning: it shows him how to hunt for stories, not just silver.

Mentors Who Find You

Tip is a teacher of the old kind: few words, exacting standards, unlimited loyalty once you show up. He appears when Underwood needs him—after a fire, in a Bobcat, then the next morning, saying only, “Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. Bring water.” He tests for action, not eloquence. As their friendship deepens, Tip becomes the living bridge to the valley’s “sagebrush telegraph”—who to trust, which trails to protect, where history sleeps out of cell range.

Google Doesn’t Know Your Mountain

The modern reflex is to search a screen; Tip insists you search the ground. Google can’t tell you how to recover when your hotel burns down. It doesn’t know the secret stash of window panes in a shed or the mule-grade on the leeward side. Mentors and terrain do. Underwood learns that big projects need more than capital—they need elders. The right elder collapses decades of error into a sentence: “It’s just dirt. Don’t be so precious.”

Practice

Adopt Tip’s heuristic: when stuck, walk the wash. Follow the stream of clues your work throws off. Look for the heavy “float.” Track it up-canyon.

Underwood’s project becomes possible the moment he stops trying to be the hero and starts being an apprentice. Your own giant undertakings require this humility. Find the Tips who prefer to be alone, then earn their attention by doing. They’ll show you how to read the terrain—and how to belong to it.

Purpose strengthens when you descend into what preceded you. Cerro Gordo isn’t just a town; it’s a city under the town—30 miles of tunnels, timbered with enough wood to frame an Empire State Building of pine. Underwood starts in the old general store, excavating decades of debris. He finds Chet Reynolds’s briefcase: bank slips for $8.43, letters about worthless zinc, unpaid bills, a divorce citing “extreme cruelty.” Chet failed, by money’s measure. Yet his paper life electrifies Underwood’s resolve to understand the place he’s reviving.

Map the Invisible

A yellowed USGS report (1960s) sketches levels, veins, and a tantalizing note: the Jefferson Chimney—an ore body mined from surface to 900 feet—was “inaccessible.” To Underwood, that’s not a closure; it’s a dare. He packs MREs, water, headlamps, an airhorn, and descenders. Tied to a sagebrush, he drops into a black nothing where ladders rot and ledges appear out of gloom. Thirty feet down: a dynamite room with intact red sticks. Deeper: a chamber the size of an auditorium—the stope where the chimney widened. A Hercules box holds a 1913 newspaper. No footprints. No bats. He’s the first in 108 years.

When You Touch the Past, It Touches Back

Rappelling is fear-management theater—rope teeth snag your sleeve; you freeze midair above a “pit of despair.” But history pays in “holy shit” moments: a date scrap, a powder magazine, a line that completes a forgotten map. Underwood realizes he’s not just consuming history; he’s adding to it, documenting levels behind collapses, connecting stubs of report to reality. This amplifies meaning: he’s building a hotel on a system he now knows from the inside, literally (akin to an artist mastering influences before innovating).

Context Makes You a Steward

Plenty of modern founders start with the exit in mind. Underwood starts with the ancestors in mind. He reads Belshaw (the toll road baron), Beaudry (the merchant), Gordon (the zinc man), and the nameless Chinese laborers who built a town within a town. He contrasts this lineage lens with the disposability of today’s “move fast” ethos, which bakes obsolescence into design. If you situate your work inside a lineage, you inherit obligations: accuracy, humility, durability (see David Brooks’s distinction between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues).

Rope Rule

Every deep project needs a guide rope into history—archives, elders, artifacts—and a practice of documenting what you discover for those who’ll descend after you.

Going deep reorders your motivations. You stop building for clout and start building for continuity. The mine reminds you that people died here for pennies. That reframes your schedule, your tone, your standards. Stewardship beats spectacle.

The desert’s first law: water rules. Its second: fire and flood collect their tolls. Underwood learns all three.

Water: From Theft to Stewardship

Cerro Gordo looks across at the corpse of Owens Lake—once a 100-square-mile inland sea teeming with birds—drained by William Mulholland’s early-1900s aqueduct. “There it is, take it,” he said; LA bloomed, the lake died, and a century of dust and lawsuits followed (see also Chinatown’s Noah Cross). Underwood frames this as a parable: short-term fixes (steal water) seed long-term disasters (toxic dust, $2B in mitigation). He wonders: what if LA had invested in desalination a century earlier? The lesson travels: how you source “water” for your project—attention, capital, labor—echoes for generations.

Finding Water Underground

Tip knows of a pool at the 700-level of the Union Mine—water seeping through rock into a carved basin. Underwood assembles a “water crew”: Craig (electrician), Dave (NAPA owner/mayor of Lone Pine), John Bowden (Tip’s partner), and Cody (LADWP crane operator). They resurrect the century-old hoist, coax the rusty cage past warped rails and loose timbers, and descend with tools, bolts, a Sawzall…and a couple of Coors Banquets. They find the pool—six feet deep, 15 feet long—and a tired pump that might live again. They ride up giddy; the town has a heart.

Fire: When It’s All Gone

At 3 a.m., heat slams Underwood awake. The American Hotel—built 1871, the town’s soul—is a torch. He and friends sprint jugs of Crystal Geyser; water vaporizes in midair. By the time volunteer engines claw up the road, the hotel and Crapo House are ash; the Gordon House is singed but saved. Underwood films a raw video through tears, promises to rebuild, and invites help. The internet shows up: thousands watch; hundreds volunteer; enchiladas and a loaner Bobcat arrive. Fire, the book argues, is part of Cerro Gordo’s DNA—1877, 1880, 1912, 2020—and can become a crucible for community.

Flood: The Road Will Disappear

In 2022, a thousand-year storm turns the Yellow Grade Road into a riverbed. Boulders sit where asphalt was; nine months of rain fall in three hours. County crews are slammed; ten weeks to help. Underwood borrows a $400,000 SANY excavator from Heavy D, rents a backhoe for Red (an “old lizard of a man”), and starts carving a passable line—like Buddhist monks who sweep away their sand mandalas to begin again. Acceptance precedes action: “It’s just dirt.”

Operating Principle

Think in decades; plan for disasters; build so your grandchildren don’t curse your shortcuts.

Respect for water, fire, and flood isn’t romantic; it’s operational. Honor nature’s veto power and stretch your horizon. Your choices—how you power, fund, and pace your work—become someone else’s air. Be the ancestor you wish you had.

After the fire, Underwood could have retreated. Instead, he pressed record, cried, and said, “We’re going to need a lot of help.” That public vulnerability converted spectators into co-builders. Then came the heaviest lift: how to pour an 80-yard monolithic concrete footing for the new hotel on a cliff road that can’t take concrete trucks. Enter Heavy D (Dave Sparks) and his crew—Diesel Dave, a CAT 340, a 6x6 off-road mixer, two ex-military five-tons, a Bobcat, a loader, cubes of water, and a mobile home. Not helicopters. Not excuses. Logistics.

The Impossible, Engineered

Quikrete agrees to mix 80 “supersacks” (1 yard each, ~3,000 lbs per bag). A logistics firm hauls 240,000 pounds to Keeler. The five-tons shuttle six bags per trip up eight miles of off-camber washboard. The crew lifts sacks over the mixer’s hopper; water gets dosed; the truck rumbles to trenches Underwood dug by headlamp. A mini-excavator can’t quite clear the wall, so they park it in the bed of the five-ton to gain six feet. Flats, wind, dust—then a rhythm: pour, vibrate, trowel, repeat under floodlights until the last corner sets at dusk.

Leadership as Service

Underwood isn’t issuing boss orders; he’s laying rebar, handing coffees, troweling imperfections at midnight. He learns a crucial founder shift: your job isn’t to be impressive; it’s to make it possible for impressive people to do their best work safely. He trusts locals (Scotty, Phil), asks the county for permission to repair the road himself, and turns a YouTube audience into a volunteer ecosystem—truck owners, cooks, electricians—each staking a claim in “our” town. It’s community, not clout.

Be Your Own Light

The day of the fire, the New York Times ran a glowing feature on Underwood. Cosmic joke. He could have hidden. Instead he filmed grief, named a goal (rebuild by the hotel’s 150th birthday), and asked for hands. The response proves a law of human nature: we are drawn to people giving their all to something that matters (see Jordan Peterson’s “make yourself useful” or David Senra’s observations in Founders). Vulnerability didn’t weaken the mission; it recruited co-owners.

Community Rule

Trade audience for participants. Tell the truth in public, give people a job to do, and share the credit. Concrete becomes culture.

By nightfall the footings gleam. Heavy D says it’s one of the best weeks of his life. Underwood—bone-tired, trowel in hand—agrees. The pour isn’t just engineering; it’s covenant. A hundred hands made the American’s foundation. That’s how durable things get built—and stay built.

Big projects don’t just test skill; they test the self. Two years in, Underwood is burned out—weight plummeting, joints on fire, migraines, anxiety, stalkers, and a social-media “contract” demanding endless content. A doctor diagnoses deficiencies; friends threaten to kidnap him to a hospital. He resists leaving the mountain, fearing momentum loss. Then he stumbles on a WWII book about frontline rotations: eight days at the line, four in reserve, four at rest. Too much time at the front makes soldiers useless. The metaphor lands.

Rotate to Stay in the Game

Belshaw had homes off-mountain. Gordon split his time. Underwood finally leaves—showers shock him, golf feels obscene and healing, sleep returns. He realizes rest isn’t betrayal; it’s maintenance. When he returns, he’s stronger—and clearer that Cerro Gordo 2.0 must not be a town of extraction that extracts him. He adjusts scope, pace, and boundaries (think of it as the creative’s version of Deliberate Practice with rest cycles).

Awe Is Oxygen

Twice daily he rides to a rock below the ridgeline to watch first light over Death Valley and last light over Whitney—highest and lowest in the Lower 48, framed in one gaze. In the still air you hear chipmunks’ footfalls, your own heartbeat. Awe miniaturizes problems and magnifies connection (Dacher Keltner’s research shows awe reduces stress and increases prosocial behavior). Sympatheia, the Stoic sense of interconnection, becomes visceral. He belongs to this place, and it to him.

Gratitude, Practiced Now

As volunteers white-knuckle trucks up the Yellow Grade with 36,000 pounds of concrete, Underwood stands in the cold purple dawn and names what’s true: none of this happens alone. Gratitude here isn’t a private feeling after the fact; it’s a public acknowledgment in the moment that binds a team. He thanks Hans, Elliot, “D,” Scotty, Red—aloud—then grabs a shovel. Gratitude becomes glue.

Make a Mark Worth Remembering

Tip dies. They bury his ashes on the hill beneath a pinyon, near places his hands repaired. Underwood hikes a wash Tip told him to walk and finds a bristlecone pine improbably growing where botanists say it shouldn’t. He pockets a seed, returns to the hotel site, and plants it 20 feet from the card room window. Elsewhere, deep in the mine, names scratched in carbide—Juan with a duck, Karl with elegant cursive, George from Bakersfield—remind him: symbolic immortality matters. Underwood’s mark will be the hotel, yes—but also the people and trees and practices that outlive him.

Longevity Rules

1) Build rotations into your calendar. 2) Bake awe rituals into your day. 3) Voice gratitude while the concrete’s still wet. 4) Choose legacies that grow after you stop swinging.

The book ends in a half-built barroom where Underwood runs his hand along a new-old counter, practicing Doc Holliday’s Chopin and sliding imaginary root beers down freshly sanded planks. Outside, engines idle and visitors mill. Some will snap photos and leave. A few will hear the call. Either way, Cerro Gordo is no longer a ghost town; it’s home—first to Underwood, increasingly to anyone ready to mine for purpose.