Marc's Public Blog - Hiking / Backpacking

After that, went to check out the Almaden Quicksilver Museum, a very interesting museum about mercury that was mined there, and used for a fair amount of things, including getting gold from gold ore:

Next was a good hike in the Almaden Quicksilver County Park:

mine entrance, but you can't go inside

got that picture

some ranger made a wrong turn :)

It had been a while since I last went, nice to go back up with friends:

weather was unseasonably cool, nice for hiking up

lots of butterflies

A few views from the quary, not the best bit

We were not in a big rush, so we got to the top in 3h40 (3h15 moving time) for 7 miles and climbing about 3000ft up

black mountain again, but this time we earned it

The picts from the top aren't bad, but they're better on the hike:

Then, what goes up, must go down, and it's gravely and slippery at the top, after that we got to some nice trails again:

we went down the other way, that's the PG&E trail that we took up

hummingbird

We then took a slightly longer trail down to the farm, it was more shaded and a nicer trail

Back at the bottom, a lot of people were looking up at a tree and we found why. An owl and its babies. That kind of stretched the zoom on my camera, but it worked:

All in all, it was a bit over 15 miles and just a bit shy of 8h, we took our time