Adventures in Mining, a Two Part Saga

This actually happened on two separate days, two weeks apart from each other. But they were supposed to all happen on the same day so we are going to pretend they did. 

It's Sunday morning, which means it's Get-Up-At-The-Buttcrack-Of-Dawn-And-Drive-90 Minutes-To-Hockey-Camp day. 

The good news is, there's no traffic at 6am on Sunday morning. 

Since we have to drive so far to get to Camden's hockey camp, which is only an hour by the way, we are going to take advantage and make it a family day complete with a lot of adventures, and (because it's South Bay in a stupidly hot Indian Summer), sweating. 

Hockey camp ends promptly at 9am. 9am! It's the beginning of the day! We have literally ALL DAY in front of us. And luckily, I did my share of Pinteresting and Yelping the day before, so I was prepped for a fun family day. 

First, we went out to breakfast. Because adventures requires fuel! I found a fun place in San Jose called "Scramblz", a breakfast joint that really seems to be into cars, and sports, and super heroes, and basically everything cool. And, if you call ahead (like we did), you can reserve the "bus" table. Which is actually an old actual Volkswagon van, gutted and fitted with an eating booth. 

After all, it's not breakfast if you're not sitting inside a Volkswagon inside a restaurant. 

After breakfast, we headed out to the New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Museum. This was a shot in the dark for me, after briefly reading about it being a cool destination in the area that involved mines. Other than that I had no idea what it was about. 

The museum was rad. It was completely empty, so the park ranger gave us an exclusive tour inside, teaching us about how the entire hillsides in this area are lined with hundred of miles of mine tunnels and how it was the largest quicksilver mining operation in North America at the time (1800s). 

Wait, you're telling me Quicksilver is an actual thing, not just a cool brand that my oldest loves to wear??

Get your pencils out and get ready for a lesson. 

So, this area ("this" being the San Jose mountainy area) is actually stupid rich with minerals, especially a mineral called "cinnabar". Cinnabar, after being crushed and lit on super fire (1700 degrees), released a gas, that when cooled, turned into a liquid (mercury, also called quicksilver). Liquid mercury was extremely useful when mining for gold, because when poured over a tray full of dust/rocks/sand/gold, it would attach itself to only the gold, then cool to a solid. Then, they would remove the mercury/gold, remelt it, and only the gold would remain. 

Learned a bit of something, didn't cha?

"minerals" the boys got to pick

Part of the "outdoor museum", Daddy showing how to turn the pipes so the furnace would get hot

So anyways, that's the long and the short of what the ranger told us. The museum was full of artifacts from the two main camps (English Camp and Spanish Camp) and 3D models of the working mines. The kids even got to pick their own bags of "minerals". We spent a good hour or two in there before heading out to see the mines themselves. 

Except, we didn't, because time was up and I had to work that evening, so we put the adventure on pause and saved it for the next hockey camp day, which was two weeks later no thanks to Labor Day. 

Fast forward to yesterday:

We drove straight to a trailhead in the Almaden hills to start what we didn't know (or we did know but didn't want to believe it) was a 3 mile hike up a mountain in 100 degree heat to the actual, real live mines. It was hot and we were sweaty and more than a little crazy, but the views were beautiful, and we kept telling the kids that it was training for walking 10 miles a day in Disney World ("if you can walk 3 miles uphill on dirt trails, then walking on flat paved roads at Disney is going to be a joke"). 

Our first stop was the humongous (I mean really) mining furnace. At the museum, there had been a 3D model showing what it looked like in operation. Now of course the sands of time have swept a lot of it away, but you could easily make out each important segment of the facility. It was fenced off so we couldn't walk into it, but it was fun to look at, and it was a good spot to stop and drink water before we kept going uphill....

Old mining furnace. 

Further into the mountains, we arrived at the San Cristobal Mine, an actual abandoned quicksilver mine entrance from the mid 1800s, which you can walk into (for a hundred feet or so before it's fenced off). 

(Note: normally, the mine is open to walk in a hundred feet inside until it's fenced off. But this time, of course, it was fenced off completely. And after promising the kids if they walked this far they'd get to go in a real mine, and since the fence had clearly been pulled up so people could go in, we decided to break a rule or two and let them walk in to the next barrier. For 5 minutes. Of course after Brad checked the stability of the mine before letting the kids walk in. Judge away baby.)

The crazy thing about this mine is how claustrophobic it suddenly gets, even just 100 feet inside it. The entrance looks further than it is, and the walls feel like they're closing in on you. We shined our phone-flashlight past the 2nd barrier, and the tunnel just keeps going and going into oblivion. Creepy, creepy stuff. And super cool. 

We hung out outside the mine for a while, the kids taking sticks and pretending they were pickaxes and mining quicksilver. Then we packed up and kept heading on down the hill, to the main mining camp, English Camp. 

On the way, on the side of the trail, I noticed a glimmer on a large boulder. There right in front of us was a vein of quartz! You know those rocks you break in half and they're all spiky crystally inside. There were even pieces of the quartz that had broken off, so the kids got to take some home. 

quartz out in wild!

We got to English Camp, which was a solid mile away from the Cristobal mine. English Camp was it's own little town at the time, with a school for children, stables, houses etc. They traded and collaborated with the Spanish Camp which was just down the hill from them. Now, there's only a few foundations left and an old equipment shed from the 1970s (when the mining camp was officially shut down), but it was still neat to sit and talk about how people lived in this time in the middle of the mountains.

English Camp!

We marched a couple miles back to the car and basked in the air conditioning. But it was a really an amazing two-part adventure that we not only got to do together but learned a lot about local history as well.