Almaden Quicksilver County Park 2015-03-16

Apollo and I were soon back at Almaden Quicksilver Park, a park with 34 miles of hiking trails and a depth of history. This time, we tried out the Hacienda entrance located off Almaden Road / Almaden Expwy in San Jose. Parking is free and there is plenty available in this lot too.

Almaden Quicksilver Park was home to mercury mining from the late 1800s until 1976. In fact, San Jose Mercury News owes its name to this bit of valley history.

The sky was cloudy when we started and it stayed that way through our hike. A half mile hike on Mine Hill Trail took us to English Camp Trail. This is the closest I've come to high voltage transmission lines - English Camp trail runs close to it for about a fourth of a mile. It was a steady climb of ~1000 ft. before we reached English Camp, one of the historic sites we visited. 

Apollo couldn’t have enough of the place! He checked out Church Hill, the school site, and picked up a couple of ticks along the process that I had get rid of.

Continuing on Castillero Trail, we stopped by Rotary Furnace, the second historic site in our chosen path. There was a nice description of the process of extracting Mercury from cinnabar (Mercury Sulphide ore). Unlike English Camp, our next historic site stop, Spanish Town, had all traces completely removed in the 1930s. We made our way to Hidalgo Cemetery Trail - a dead end, apparently!

There were a couple of spots providing great views of the valleys on this trail.

On the return, we took the Yellow Kid Trail to reach English Camp again and continued on Deep Gulch Trail to the Hacienda parking lot. At 5.7 miles, this was one of our shortest hikes. We ascended some 1100 feet in the first 3 miles and gave it all up on the return. Our route today was Mine Hill Trail -> English Camp Trail -> Castillero Trail -> Hidalgo Cemetery Trail -> Yellow Kid Trail -> Deep Gulch Trail from the Hacienda parking lot trail head.

There is plenty more to explore at this park - and at its neighbor, Sierra Azul Open Preserve. Although the scenery in these two neighboring places is similar, each trail provides its own unique charm.  After a break, we will be bound to explore more trails at these two locations.

Update 2015-06-20

Apollo and I were back at the Hacienda staging area and did about 5.5 miles this morning with my friend Shubho Nag and three of his friends, Ethan, Farhana, and Sridhar. We did a slightly different loop from what I'd done earlier and made our way to English Camp by starting off on Deep Gulch Trail and connecting to English Camp Trail. From English Camp, we took Castillero Trail and turned around at Mine Hill Rd towards the Hacienda parking lot.

Our early morning hike was at a leisurely pace and interspersed with conversations on various topics from workplace diversity, gender equality, regulated monopolies, and sharing stories of my SF Bay Walkabout and hikes with Apollo.  

More pictures from the hike.

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