So a lot of you who have watched the channel or even looked through it as a new subscriber will notice the numerous videos I have on the Hilltop House Hotel as well as hundreds of instagram posts featuring the place. Its safe to say I'm obsessed. We have been questioned about this over the years and I have never really fully answered it.
This can all be traced back to a young 6 year old Jaden. My dad had worked in asbestos removal for a number of years which meant working in abandoned buildings. As I got older my grandfather would take me into abandoned houses on the side of the road wherever we went and my great grandmother had this abandoned trailer in her backyard we checked out everytime we visited. Later on I took my inspiration from Dan Bell and started posting on Youtube. Before Youtube I knew Hilltop very well. My grandfather had worked there as a bus boy when he was about 16 or 17 and before that we made frequent trips starting when I was around 3 years old to Hilltop to sight see and eat. After it closed in 2008 we continued to go to see the view. We watched it slowly collapse over time and I can still remember going one day and then returning a week later to the first signs of vandalism as broken windows began to litter the facade as it drooped to eventual partial collapse.
When I started Youtube I hadn't been to the hotel in years. I constantly looked it up and knew it was abandoned but hadn't been. I convinced my grandfather to take me and it was the first time we stepped foot in the hotel since I was probably 11. After we left I wanted to go back again and again, and much to the laws disapproval I did, over a thousand more times. I went with people I was friends with, people I just met, and sometimes by myself. It wasn't until 2016 Brandon first stepped foot inside with me. We made so many friends there and it was the first time me and Brandon hung out together. In 2016 we spent every weekend there and sometimes several times a week. Running people out, tidying up things, documenting, hanging out with friends, and more were all a huge part of us and this place. It may have been closed down but Hilltop was far from lifeless.
Everything about this place is amazing. This place was full of life for over a hundred years and holds so many memories I'll never let go of. The left behind signatures on the walls, the rooms so many people passed through and slept in, the front desk long gone but watched millions of check ins. The carpet that Bill Clinton once walked across to get a nice meal in the open dining room with a mountain view.
Fast forward to 2018. I have not been inside the hotel since last summer and a lot has changed. Security now arrives at 6 and leaves in the morning, all the trees have been removed, renovations have begun, doors are no longer boarded up and instead padlocked for easy access to catch anyone inside, and a fine comes with getting caught. The risk has become too much to make it worth it. This with the newly added danger of how bad the building has really gotten. It looks worse everyday and is really ready to come down, with exposed anchor beams lining the side of the hotel where flat land is now gone down the side of the cliff. We are hopefully not far off from a new hotel taking the spot on the cliff and with it all those memories. We still continue to journey up to 400 E Ridge St. just for the fact that we still have memories to make with whats there. Those same travelers and tourists come up there to see the view and the hotel, and you might just find yourself caught up in a conversation with some random stranger about they're experiences in the hotel. I invite anyone who hasn't already to go up to that cliff on a nice sunny day and just experience it.
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