(Copies of the map should be in the slots at the trail board at the park’s Hacienda trail head). Last summer, Taich, Malone and their fellow Scouts in Troop 466 in Sunnyvale installed 15 numbered redwood posts corresponding to points on Taich’s map. I was on the phone with Ranger (Bill) Burr within that week.” “We both started looking around the Santa Clara County Parks Web site, and we stumbled on Almaden Quicksilver, and it just seemed like the perfect choice – mine relics and tunnels and not too far from San Jose. I wanted something meatier,” Taich recalls. “I didn’t want to, you know, make a bench for the church or something like that. When his first idea, a clothing drive at his synagogue, didn’t pan out, he turned to Malone – who has written books on the history of Silicon Valley and the rise of Apple and Hewlett-Packard – for advice. Taich latched onto the story of Almaden Quicksilver’s mines because he needed a public service project to become an Eagle Scout before he turned 18 last December. It wasn’t all progress: Mercury contamination makes it unsafe to eat any fish caught in the Guadalupe Reservoir at the park. It was the second-most productive mercury mining operation in the world. They held contests to prove who could pound a spike the deepest into a granite slab.įrom 1845 to 1976, seven New Almaden mines produced nearly 84 million pounds of mercury, Taich’s brochure notes. It’s a fascinating tale: Miners - most from Mexico but also from Europe and South America - came to the New Almaden mines, where they blasted chunks of cinnabar ore and distilled the “quicksilver,” essential for prospectors seeking gold and doctors taking children’s temperatures. The result of their work is a brochure that guides hikers along a 6.5-mile route taking in most of the major mining sites and telling the story of a time when men with picks and black powder extracted mercury from the rugged hills. Taich and Malone couldn’t do anything about the climb or the sites, but they could – and did – do something about the map. The map at the park’s trail heads is cryptic at times. The Santa Clara County Parks Department put up interpretive panels at a few sites, but not all. Even if you find them, you don’t always know what you’re seeing. The mining operations at Almaden Quicksilver pose two struggles for hikers: the steep slog up into the hills and the scattershot locations of the surviving remnants. Together, the Sunnyvale duo – the younger a Homestead High senior and the elder a longtime author and high-tech journalist – made a little history of their own: a first-ever guide to hiking through the rusty remains of San Jose’s mercury-mining heritage at Almaden Quicksilver County Park. Mike Malone, his mentor and assistant scoutmaster, thought the South Bay needed a trail celebrating the region’s history. Zack Taich needed to notch one more good deed to become an Eagle Scout. Writing about hiking: how to do it betterįrom the San Jose Mercury News, January 2008.How to guarantee your blog doesn’t suck.Guilford Courthouse National Military Park.
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