Enriquita Mine

The story

Back in 1859, quicksilver was the liquid engine of the California Gold Rush—without mercury to bind to gold ore, the state's wealth stayed locked in granite. The Enriquita Mine was opened that year in the New Almaden district with grand fanfare; painter Alexander Edouart even immortalized "The Blessing of the Enriquita Mine" on canvas to mark its Catholic inauguration. But beneath the official pomp was a gritty, hazardous settlement where miners carved out a 550-foot crosscut adit into the hill to reach rich veins of dark red cinnabar.

The camp quickly picked up a reputation that went beyond industrial extraction. On June 4, 1864, the notorious California bandit Tiburcio Vasquez and his cousin Faustino Lorenzana were spotted drinking and gambling in the camp cantina right near the Enriquita mine shafts. When geologist William H. Brewer hiked through around the same era, he noted the site was oversaw by a "Dutch superintendent" and running at a breakneck, dangerous pace to chase quicksilver profits before the ore started giving out.

Today, the mountain has swallowed most of the operation back up. What wasn't buried by nature was remediated by park officials to contain the heavy metal toxicity left behind by decades of processing cinnabar. The underground tunnels are capped and fenced off, but if you trace the old dirt grade through the brush, heavy iron remnants of 19th-century machinery still sit abandoned along the trail like forgotten bones.