When Richard Elliott mentions his favorite hiking destination, most people get hung up on one word — “death.”Death Valley — peppered with geological names such as Hell’s Gate, Dante’s View, Furnace Creek, the Devil’s Golf Course and the Funeral Mountains — has a way of getting people to think the worst.But in the 66-year-old Manteca resident’s book — and he happens to be working on two of them — Death Valley in many ways exceeds the beauty of Yosemite where he got hooked on hiking 52 years ago as a teen.“First I tell people it’s a land of history and a land of mystery,” noted Elliott who is a retired Tracy School District warehouse supervisor of 23 years.But beyond the extensive mining history is something that Elliott values more than gold.“It is absolutely quiet,” he noted of hikes up desolate canyons and remote mountains. “It gives you about one of the best gifts you can have, the ability to think clear.”Elliott has found something more than expansive views to get him hooked on Death Valley since he started hiking there in earnest in 2009. He searches the seemingly endless landscape for mines put in place more than a century ago by fortune seekers lured by gold, silver, and other precious metals.“It’s amazing how they knew where to dig,” Elliott said.While mining in one year lured as many as 50,000 people to the greater Death Valley region including Rhyolite that boasted a population of 10,000, a $1 million train station, and several daily newspapers before fading to ghost town status, many of the mines that were dug often by muscle power and nothing else are elusive to modern-day explorers.