When introverts go exploring
Venturing into the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve
We parked our car in the lot at Sydney Flat. We must walk the trail that leads to the upper lot, where most of the trails are sprouting from. Our trekking poles click in the dirt as we make our way up the exposed path to reach multiple trailheads.
We have never been here before, we aren’t sure which trail to take.
It’s about 11 am, and the sun is operating at an oppressive level.
We decide to hike toward the green; we want shade, and that way looks promising.
We start off on the same trail that leads to the cemetery, but we take a more exciting path, picking our way up the hillside and to the evergreens and manzanitas.
We are on the Manhattan Canyon trail. We climb about maybe 300 feet and are greeted with the glee-inducing smell of sage and another plant whose name I do not know, but smells like a spicy heaven.
We pass through rocky outcrops, names of a thousand other visitors etched into the walls. Are the rocks that soft? Many of the rock walls have carved footholds for climbing, but we are hot and not climbers. We hike on.
The sun is getting stronger, the day getting hotter. We climb up and up out of the canyon and toward Black Diamond Trail.
We stop in some shade under crooked and manzanitas, the bark a twisting red shape of brittle tree shavings.
We eat fruit and drink water.
It’s getting hotter.
We come to a decision, a crossroads (cross trail?), and decide to follow the Black Diamond Trail, and then veer left to the aptly named Chaparral Loop.
Traveling through the deceptively exposed trail, we see rock walls defaced with hundreds of names, these people who came here maybe once, yet their trace lasts for much too long.
I shrug off the annoyance and enjoy hiking in heat that’s consistently rising above 90 degrees; it felt good to sweat it out while imagining how this land must have looked like when the mines were still in operation.
We came to a clearing, with a view that overlooked the preserve, the golden grass glittering in the early afternoon sun.
After walking on the fire road for about a minute, we decide to take a trail to the left that leads us across grassland and under more manzanita trees.
We eventually find ourselves on another trail that I cannot remember the name of. After a few minutes of walking, we come across a family of 4 or 5, complete with a small dog and Disney princess tunes blasting from the man’s Bluetooth speaker.
On the one hand, that’s great if that’s what it takes to get your daughters outside. On the other, he’s now teaching a new generation that it’s acceptable to blast music in nature, while other people are trying to pick out birdsong, or simply enjoy a few hours “away from it all.”
Continuing on our way without a word, we make our way back down to where they hold tours during non-pandemic years. The mine tours have all been “canceled indefinitely” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the cold air that came blasting out from the long shaft feels just fine. Just fine indeed.
Swallows made their way through the now-closed mines’ bars, their small bodies paying no mind to the signs warning about COVID closures.
We make our back down, puttering around well after the trail peters out, basically hiking as far as we can until it gets obvious we will have to start bushwhacking to make any further progress.
So we turn around and are going to call it a day when we found ourselves watching a deer meander up the trail and eventually disappear into the shade as she rounded the corner.
We make our way back to the car, our spirits as high as the heat, and even though the half-mile back to the car was totally unshaded, we hike along happily, reveling in our find and dealing with the suck that is the heat.
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