Images of Sequoia National Park, Mineral King Valley – Central California, taken in September 2018.

The Mineral King Valley is located in the southern section of Sequoia National Park and is far from the Generals Highway where your average tourist types fly around from overlook to park highlight spot. This is wilderness area, tough to get to with no services and only a log cabin visitor center signifying that you are indeed in a national park. In fact when I checked Mapquest it said that my trip would be 41 miles and take 2.5 hours!!! WHAT!?! How can that be? Well it didn’t take me long to find out, as soon as I turned off of California 198 onto Mineral King Road the reason was evident. A one lane road with several hundred curves of which about 70% were blind corners. And I say one lane when in fact there are spots where even that is an exaggeration! There were places where the road had washed out and was dirt and even some of the paved areas were quite rough. It was quite the road, a driver’s road to be sure. Get this, of the 41 mile trip the first 17.2 miles were on normal California Highway 198 where I could go 60 MPH almost the whole way, slowing down for towns of course, and I did that in less than 30 minutes. So the remaining 23.8 miles took just over 2 hours…that’s an average speed of less than 12 MPH! So I can’t overstate the wilderness aspect of the area.

But then that’s what made it special; it was truly wild passing through Sequoia Groves and ending up looking directly into the mountainous Mineral King Valley. The day was overcast and a bit drizzly at times but I had my trusty throw-away Walmart rain poncho so nothing was going to stop me today. After spending some time hiking around the end of the road I doubled back to hike into the Atwell Sequoia Grove on the Paradise Ridge Trail. The hike was steep to say the least, in fact this grove is particularly noteworthy because it grows on an unusually steep slope for Sequoias and is one of the highest-elevation groves on earth. Even though it rained on and off I really enjoyed the solitude of the area which made it easy to connect with nature on a level that you couldn’t possibly attain in the more crowded areas of the park.

And wilderness often means the possibility of running into wildlife. On the way up the road I came upon a deer and her fawn which blocked the road for a short time as they didn’t want to yield and leave the bush on which they were feasting. Later it was a grouse and a quail. But on the way out of the park I rounded a corner and saw this large object flash in front of me. I hit the brakes; NO WAY! It was a cat…a BIG cat; a cougar darted across the road in front of me and disappeared down the slope to my left. I immediately stopped, grabbed my camera and got out to see if I could see any movement in the canyon below the road. Nothing. It was still. I hung out there surveying the area for about twenty minutes before an SUV with two ladies came along and asked if everything was okay. I said, “I saw a cougar cross the road”. The drivers reply was something to the effect of how lucky I was. I agreed but knew that if I had really been lucky I would’ve also gotten a picture of it!