quicksilver

Ali and I went for a hike yesterday, the first time for her in years. We went along with friends on their usual weekend route. I had never been into Almaden Quicksilver park from the east before, the New Almaden town side. It used to be a mine, which is what “Almaden” means and is named for, a famous mine in Spain since antiquity. The hike is up a road grade, wide and even and well maintained. Mountain bikers (several passed us) and horses (didn’t see any) can use it too. These mountain bikers were quite polite, honestly the first ones since moving to California that I’ve met that followed the etiquette of announcing “on your left” with enough warning and “two more” as they pass. We saw a few other hikers too.

There were lots of plants, native ones like monkey flower and non-native ones like spanish broom, and toxic ones that we argued over the colors useful for identifying them like poison oak that is sometimes red and sometimes not, but “leaves of three, leave me be” and so on. And regular valley or live or some other kind of oak mixed in just to throw some of us off.

When we got to the top, I could see out over the part of the park that I had been to numerous times before,¹ the west side, the Wood Road entrance. You can see it in the photo below. We rested a while there, at the highest level that the trail (road) attains. There is a horse watering trough, and a picnic bench.

The road skirts the back side of the ridge for a bit, and while we were crossing the saddle, if it could be called that, a large turkey vulture crested the hill, barely higher than our heads, did a double-take at our unexpected presence, and continued over to the east side. Might have been the closest to one of those that I’ve been. They’re big! Especially with their wings open. For a moment it was one of those times when something that is usually just an abstracted concept of an animal becomes very real and detailed and a strong presence. Then it continued its aerodynamic path and receded back into the hypothetical and symbolic realm that turkey vultures and most other wildlife normally occupy.

The route down is past some of the mining ruins. They’re ok, I guess. It’s all kind of underwhelming for being the most productive mercury mine in North America. They extracted nearly 84 mega-pounds of it out of the ground over the life of the mine. So many people lived and worked and I’m sure died here. I don’t understand why these ruins don’t engage my interest as much as the desert ruins do. Those are often much smaller or much more wrecked. Much less likely to have produced much of anything. Maybe the fences have something to do with it, the more museum-like presentation. I shall have to ponder it some more.

But the landscape has lots of interest, and feels very close and intricate and there are a lot of very real things to see around every next corner. Birds and trees, and sticks and stones. Rocks are cool, man. Even the lost gouges in the ground, filled with old forest matter, are interesting and surprising when you find them; must be some forgotten mining things. The unprepared, the not set out, the natural as nature stuff, that’s what I want out of these tiny adventures. Unexpected birds that change rapidly from an idea to the incarnate and back just as quick into a symbol, receding over the saddle into the other valley yet still eyeing us over its shoulder.

A couple of other resources:

• Ronald Horii’s site on the park.³
• The Santa Clara County Parks page.
• Hidalgo cemetery, which is supposedly now empty, but I bet it has ghosts. I’d like to see that.

jg

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