Mineral King -- a hidden secluded Gem

If you plan to visit Mineral King, do not take your camera, because every minute you spend adjusting and taking a picture, you will be seeing that minute less of the beauty of nature. If you think this is an exaggeration of expression, I will wait for you to visit Mineral King and say " you know what dude! you were right". One more piece of information, I took my camera and it has a 4GB memory card, and my memory was full in first hour of my visit. Mineral King is a valley in the Sequoia National Park. Its closed for all of the winter ( from Nov 1st to June). The drive to Mineral king is torturous, the mineral king road is a single lane road with countless hairpin bends. Since I was enjoying the beauty of Mineral king road, it took 2 hrs for me to drive the 25 miles. The dense trees on the road make you feel you've been transported to some tropical location. I took numerous stops to enjoy small water streams, big sequoia trees, some chirping of birds and occasional deer spotting. A midst all this drive and hiking at the valley, I hardly saw 15 people, in total, believe me on that. Even the Park Ranger station had no people there. On the hike infact, I was alone. In the middle of the valley, which has a sign board " Active Bear Area", I was alone, a little apprehensive, but what the heck, I cared less, because I was enjoying the beauty of the valley so much. On the beauty of the valley: I was trying to search for some phrases that can describe the valley, "Rendezvous with Nature", "Forget-Yash-chopra-song-location" etc etc. but truly speaking, all these will not make any sense till you visit the valley. The only regret you can ever have, after visiting Mineral King, is of not having spent enough time there.