After a busy and often monotonous work week, it’s good to get out on the weekends themselves. A joy of mine is visiting old ghost towns. It’s so eerie to see places where hundreds, even thousands, of people once lived that is now only some piles of wood and a collapsing structure or two. Nature so quickly reclaims these areas once humans have left. That makes me wonder what happened to these people. What were their stories? Why did they leave? The history of these places is just fascinating to me.
This weekend, James and I traveled to the Quicksilver Mines in New Almaden, CA. This is the site of mines built back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. There are the remains of camps and even school houses. It was quite a hike though. The site is up the mountain, and the only way to get there is by hiking, cycling, or horseback riding. As I’m not a fan of the latter two, I laced up the hiking boots.
I may have hiked 120 miles in Ireland (followed closely by a 6 mile canoe trip and 3 days running around Disneyland), but I most definitely am out of shape as the Quicksilver hike quickly showed me. Hiking in 85˚F weather is not recommended. Checking the weather report before starting the hike is. I should have taken my own advice!
Once to the top, we explored around English Camp. There is not much there, but it’s enough to be intriguing. Just the fact that 1,000 people once lived there is mind-boggling. I saw a bunch of old nails and broken glass around. It’s amazing to try to fathom what those nails and glass once belonged to.
As it was already 4pm and very hot, we turned around a bit after that site. Today, however, I saw a fascinating structure on the actual site of the mine, just a little ways from where we had been. Looks like I have another weekend adventure ahead of me!
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
No comments:
Post a Comment