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More Action-Packed Mineral King Days

Last week in Mineral King, Trail Guy, 2 friends and I took a hike to a special place that I am choosing to keep secret. (You can ask me in private, but I’m not posting any details on the World Wide Web.) On our hiking day, we experienced fabulous wildflowers, tremendous views, hail, thunder, lightning and rain.

This will be a long post – might want to refill your coffee cup.

View back down toward Mineral King about 2.5 miles up the Franklin Lakes/Farewell Gap trail.

My favorite flower was out in abundance.

Explorer’s Gentian

It was a bit of a challenge to keep marching forward while surrounded by this.

Franklin Lakes – You can see one of them here, and sort of see the shelf where the upper smaller lake is above (if you know what to look for).

We got back home to great light, rain, and news that lightning had sparked a wildfire about 14 miles down the road (but on the other side of the canyon), called the Horse Creek Fire.

Big puffy clouds made for good photos at the end of the day.

The next day we only managed an easy sort of walk. Limp. Shuffle. (Me, not Trail Guy, so that would be the “royal we”.)

The East Fork of the Kaweah, near Cold Springs Campground.
Penstemon, possibly “showy penstemon”, but I haven’t learned the varieties yet. This is a close second to Explorer’s Gentian in my hierarchy of favorite wildflowers.

The annual Mineral King Preservation Society (MKPS) “Picnic in the Park” happened for the 33rd time. Our speaker was the wife of a former packer who worked for a private pack station, as a contractor, and later for Sequoia. She was outstanding!

The picnic was held by the Honeymoon Cabin, a little museum put together by the MKPS, and painted and drawn by me more times than I can remember.

The door is almost always open on the Honeymoon Cabin, AKA the “Point Cabin”, although I’ve never noticed any point, other than a museum is a nice thing.
‘Splaining things to the folks.
‘Splaining things to the ranger.
Listening, ‘splaining, knitting, chest beating? and watching the knitter

It was a day of much weather variety, sometimes in pounding sun, ending in large raindrops.

I drove down after dark that night, a different way to experience the road.

The Horse Creek fire as seen on Saturday, July 21, around 9:30 p.m. Doesn’t look very threatening, but one never knows. The Park has chosen suppression as the best method for this fire, and I am very glad they have.

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