McAbee Road Entrance

June 10, 2015

In our two earlier visits to Almaden Quicksilver County Park, both in March, we had focused on the southeastern portion of this 4,152 acre park. Today, we returned to the northern part of the beautiful park. The McAbee entrance does not have a parking lot, but street-side parking is available in the neighborhood. You can reach this entrance from Camden Ave and then turning right on McAbee Rd.

For Apollo’s sake, I had decided to keep this a 5 mile-ish hike, given the hot, humid, tropical weather pattern we were experiencing. A quick walk from the McAbee entrance crossing a circa-1924 bridge will get you to the park entrance. We started at Senador Mine Trail, a wide dirt trail. In about half a mile, you will come across the remnants from the Senador Mine itself.

We continued our hike by Guadalupe Trail. The initial segment by this trail offered some excellent views of the green hills in the distance contrasting the dry grass bordering the trail.

Further ahead, the trail borders Guadalupe Creek for a good portion and at one point is right by the creek. This is a nice spot – shaded with a picnic table by the creek. 

From here, the trail continues further to the Guadalupe Resevoir, which was standing at less than 60% capacity today. Apollo was happy to wet his feet in the reservoir, although I was not ready to let him off-leash into the lake (banner image).

We continued further on Mine Hill Trail and Cinnabar Trail to connect to New Almaden Trail. New Almaden Trail is a single-track, shaded trail, much like our earlier experience hiking a different portion of it. Except this one mile segment, there was reasonably heavy traffic today, especially for a weekday!

We wrapped up our hike, connecting yet again to Mine Hill Trail and reaching the trail head. 

Our 5.4 mile hike today took us little more than an hour and 45 minutes. And involved some 800 feet of elevation gain. I suspect with one more trip, we’ll be done with most of the trails in this park, though not the entire 34 miles of it!

Here is the complete album of photographs from our third hike in Almaden Quicksilver County Park.