Intro

Have you ever got the itch to get out of the city really bad? Well, it’s not only you. Since April 2022 me and my wife adopted a little doberman and we love her sooo much! Though it takes a lot of our time - and mainly hers - to teach the little (then) puppy it’s a labor of love. This makes the „everydays” a little less feel like it’s a grind but sometimes I couldn’t separate a day from another and that’s when I know I gotta go. On the 23rd August me and my beloved little companion, Runa, took our chances to take her first ever real hike into a mountaineous terrain. Though she’s been to a hilly trail before but that was very close to Budapest so we met a lot of people there and not as much of the natural beauties as we can in the north eastern part of Hungary. So, once we got out of bed we hopped into the car in an hour so she can sleep and I can uninterruptedly drive to our first destination:

Telkibánya

Telkibánya is a historical town in the Zemplén mountains. It was mined for gold for a long time, it is criss-crossed with tunnels and adits and has some remnants of the past which you can get to know when you follow the paths. There’s a pretty good trail line called the „gold miner’s route” by which you can explore the mining history of different locations and what they were mining there.

I planned to go up to Mount Fehér (White Mountain) because I really like the site and had some awesome collecting trips there already. It’s a 2-3 km hike up to the mountain from the parking lot which is not much – even with all the mining tools I usually bring – but it’s a little more challenging for a 6 months old puppy. Nevertheless, we took our boots and hit the trail… The mountains were silent, we could hear the gurgle of the little stream from quite a distance, the wind moving the leaves and each step we took on the gravel. First we stopped for a water-break at an info table which sheds light on how the locals operated in the adits and processed the gold at that location. There used to be a little town right next to the adits but it’s long gone and only building remnants and millstones reveal the historical site…

/Remnants in the back, little geologist up ahead/

From there we brought ourselves up to our destination. The conditions were perfect for a rockhound – the temperature was cool, the sun shined, there was noone else around only some crows „laughing” flying above us. But Runa did not enjoy herself – she was too alert and stressed, plus there were a lot of annoying mosquitoes so I called quits after 15 minutes and headed back to the car to find a nice spot where we can spend the night…

/Runa in the foreground, the white rhyolite of Fehér Mountain in the background/

The next day...

... we headed to two other locations. One which are mostly known to Hungarian collectors only – Monok. This is a locality which used to produce a-mazing precious opals, fire opals and Hyalites as well. Unfortunately the upper few meters of the soil’s been already inspected so one needs a lot of persistence and luck to find something of collector grade. Runa’s a very friendly dog, she’s been socialized a lot in the city but at first she’s been afraid of the three collectors who got there before we did. She barked at them from a distance so we took our time to look around and by the second try of approaching the collectors she let go of her fear and started to enjoy the vicinity.

As the final location we headed to Rudabánya – also an ancient mining site which has been mined even in the prehistoric ages. In fact the Rudapithecus Hungaricus (prehistoric humanoid ape) was found here. The location offered some silver and gold but that’s been long gone until now and in the 20th century the locality was mined for iron ore. Fortunately though there were some copper mineralization too which yielded a lot of classic speciemens of Native Copper, Cuprite, Malachite and Azurite. Well, none of these did we find and till we got there the weather started to alter between rainy and dry. Once the rain stopped we headed to the closest open pit where I used to find Göethite, Calcite, Baryte and some fragments of Malachite but the rain came back swiftly and washed away all our chances to enjoy ourselves so we got into the car and safely drove back home.

Eventhough we didn’t find anything of interest and took no rock back home I really enjoyed bonding with my little companion and making her understand that eventhough we have to be careful and alert, still nature is a great place to be.