Expedition For A Lost Mine

Today I had the honor of participating in a hunt for a lost mine in the Buena Vista/Klau Mine complex in the Adelaida area of San Luis Obispo County.
The names have been changed to protect the innocent. I was accompanied by a caretaker we shall call Hephaestus as well as by a member of the Santa Lucia Rockhounds we shall call Indiana Murray.

We had old maps and the memory of an old man to work off of but no gps or modern maps.
This mine was old by the standards of the other mines in its vicinity as it was shut down and plugged generations ago and is now all grown over.
We did the Indiana Jones thing with machetes (less glamourously but more effectively Indiana used pruning sheerers) chopping our way through at times dense brush.
Unfortunately, at times, that included lots of poison oak.
I'm afraid of what is going to happen with my inevitable reaction to it.
At least I took all the precautions the moment I got home utilizing the full range of Tecnu products plus lots of showering and that included my little dog Tequila so we'll have to just wait and see what happens.

Ultimately, I believe we found the adit we were looking for although we might have found an old, plugged up exploratory shaft instead in which case that would probably place the adit further up the hill and buried in a thicket of poison oak and other overgrown flora.
Besides that expedition we did some cool rockhounding at various locations around the mine complex.
Despite the damage the EPA has done to the mine complex as part of the remediation process we still managed to find some bright red "hermes" ore along with some nice more metallicky (is that a word?) "meta-hermes" ore and some beautiful both white and lime-colored calcite and interesting marcasite and some pretty brecciated jasper, not to mention some small but sparkly quartz crystals.
We also got to see a beautiful quartz crystal vug bordered by massive calcite and a really nice cluster of calcite crystals right next to it but both were in a massive boulder and couldn't be collected.
All in all we didn't do too shabby.

Along the way we saw some beautiful wildflowers including shooting stars to go with the usual poppies and lupines.
We also saw some cool critters including a young rattlesnake warming himself in the sun as well as a mated pair of golden eagles effortlessly circling over us at one point along with plenty of cute amd fuzzy cotton-tail rabbits and even a flighty, semi-domesticated goat.

One other thing we did I neglected to mention is that we confirmed that indeed the correct location of adit #1 for one of the mines we were at was indeed misplaced and we confirmed the proper location for it.

I must confess I had a real hoot today and so did the other two gentleman I was with today and I hope we three do it again sometime.
Given how many hours we were out in the field and how much ambulating about we did I'm sure I lost a fair amount of weight today, something that I'm nowadays rather militant about doing on a consistent basis.

On behalf of Indiana Murray and myself I thank Hephaistos for inviting us and showing us around and keeping us safer than we would have been otherwise and showing us some cool sites and sights.
Fini