If you ever went down Smith Grade, you were familiar with this house.

              Just over the hill behind it, you'll find this:

Pardon this crude assemblage of snapshots. The tower to the right is the top of one of the drilling rigs Lonestar uses to bore their celebrated test holes. At the very low point of the pit, just left of center, there is a crushing facility (it is perhaps a mile from where this picture was taken) and around it are a bunch of trucks, probably too small to see here, but which are bigger than most homes. There's another one of the behemoth trucks on the first ledge down from the top, in the light on the very right side of the picture. It may be little more than a pixel dot on your screen, but in reality it's far too large to fit on a regular highway.

The area that Lonestar is currently planning on expanding into soon is the hill on the left. A bit of that area, which is part of an older quarry plan, extends past the edge of the photo. Smith Grade loops around just beyond that hill (check the map here), and a number of currently inhabited (dare we say still-inhabited?) homes are immediately over that hill. The home in the photo above was the Sola home, and like several others along the end of Smith Grade, it is vacant now. The residential properties where Lonestar is hoping to do more exploratory drilling are part of a different expansion scheme than the one on the left side of this picture.

Bonny Doon Road is just beyond the trees at the far right of this photo.

Click here to see an aerial photo of the pit.
 

Metro Santa Cruz ran an article about the quarry  expansion in its August 26th issue, quite a good one,  by Rachel Ann Goodman. Click on the cover image here, it's a link direct to their webpagewhere you can find that article.

NOTE: We have two HUGE maps you might really like to look at, from the San Andreas Land Conservancy. They are like aerial photos of the area, with overlays of the RMC operations, streams, roads, and so forth. 

At over 350KB each, they will take awhile for most computers to load (maybe you have DSL?). Click on these links, then go do something for a little while, and come back. They're worth it.