Hacienda Entrance

March 16, 2015

Apollo and I were out for our second hike at Almaden Quicksilver County Park, a park with 34+ miles of hiking trails and a depth of history. This time, we used the Hacienda entrance located off Almaden Road / Almaden Expwy in San Jose. Parking is free and there is plenty available in this lot as well.

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.  English Camp trail runs close to some high voltage transmission lines for about quarter of a mile. It was a steady climb of ~1000 ft. before we reached English Camp, one of the historic sites we visited today.

Apollo couldn’t have enough of the place! He checked out Church Hill, the school site, and more as he picked up a couple of ticks in 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). 

Following this, we passed by Spanish Town. Unlike English Camp, this historic site had all traces completely removed in the 1930s. From here, we took Hidalgo Cemetery Trail. The cemetery trail was a dead end (no surprise there 🙂 and we turned around, but not before enjoying some great views of the valley as we walked 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.  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.

At 5.7 miles, this was shorter than our previous hike in this park, although we visited several historic mining locations. We ascended some 1100 feet in the first 3 miles and gave it all up on the return. 

I am sure we will hike this park again given how much fun it was this time.

June 20, 2015

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 more hiking companions, Ethan, Farhana, and Sridhar. We did a slightly different loop from what I had 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 back to 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.

Here is the complete album of photographs from our two hikes from the Hacienda entrance of Almaden Quicksilver County Park.