The best MTB trails around Piekoszów

I was there and missed it ;)

Exposed fragment of the wall of a former quarry created as a result of extraction of Ordovician quartz sandstones. These rocks were already exploited in the interwar period and after World War II, primarily for the production of paving stones, which were used to pave, among others, a part of Wojska Polskiego Street and Plac Defilad in Warsaw.

Rest, good food.

The Piekło Cave under Skiby is 57 meters long. Where does this name come from? Apparently the locals gave it the name "Piekło" because devils were supposed to fly out of its interior. The cave has sculptures of devils made by Krzysztof Jasiński.

Currently (May) there are a lot of mosquitoes, you need to fill up your water bottles quickly;)

Piekło pod Skibami Cave - a cave located on the north-western slope of Góra Żakowa in the Zelejów Range, east of Gałęzice. The total length of the cave is 57 meters, of which the main corridor is 20 m long. Currently, the new name of the cave is "house of branches". Barti Urbański. The cave has a very poor dripstone consisting of several occurrences of calcite glaze. The cave, and in particular its narrow and difficult-to-access side corridors, are inhabited by bats, including the following species: the greater bat, the long bat, the gray long-eared long-eared bat and the western bat. Some species of spiders can also be found here.

The former quarry and the surrounding forest area have been protected since 1981 as the "Biesak-Białogon" nature reserve. The sandstones quarried here were used to produce paving stones that decorated many streets in Kielce. Thanks to mining works, a profile of rocks of marine origin was uncovered, representing two periods in the history of the Earth: Cambrian and Ordovician. Fossilized deposits of the Cambrian sea, over 500 million years old, are the oldest rocks visible in the reserve. Ordovician sandstones are younger than them and are approximately 480 million years old. They include inserts of greenish, soft rocks called bentonites - fossilized marine sediment mixed with volcanic ash. In the northern wall of the quarry there is also a fragment of the profile in which older (Cambrian) rocks lie on younger (Ordovician) rocks. This, in turn, is a record of ancient orogenic movements that led to the shift and inversion of the arrangement of rock layers. The landscape value of the reserve is emphasized by a small lake filling the excavation of a former quarry.

"Jeziorko Kamionka" - a former quarry flooded with water, towering spruce and pine trees reflecting on the surface, creating an extraordinary, somewhat mysterious atmosphere. "Kamionka" is hidden among the forests growing on the low slopes of the Posłowice Range of the Świętokrzyskie Mountains. Just above the water surface, also in the northern wall, there is a thin layer of bentonite - a rock formed in the sea from volcanic sediments. This is evidence that about 480 million years ago, there were active volcanoes in the area of the sea basin where the sandstones visible today were formed. And here's an interesting fact not only for "wine drinkers" - Bentonite has strong adsorption properties, it is an effective agent for clarifying wine.