Posted on 05/02/2012 2:30:41 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- After a winter of light snow, a major road in Yosemite National Park is set to open on May 7, nearly six weeks earlier than last year.
Officials say Tioga Pass Road will be cleared by noon Monday, allowing visitors to enter through the park's east gate.
Tioga is the main eastern gateway to the park, and a popular, scenic east-west crossing of the Sierra Nevada.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Some of you may or may not have passed this way.
I haven't .. yet.
NPS web site
Tioga and Glacier Point Roads Opening & Closing Dates
http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/tiogaopen.htm
Take Algore there and leave him.
He will be fine.
Its a hell of a ride on a Harley!
So is the North Cascades Hwy (WA SR 20). Last year it didn’t open until July. This year they expect opening in second week of May.
See the WA DOT site for progress reports:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Traffic/Passes/NorthCascades/updates2012.htm
This is early for Tioga. Time to get on the motorcycle and ride it......again. All the Sierra passes make for a great ride, especially at first opening. but Tioga is the best.
ping!
Wow, it’s early this year! We used to go to Yosemite every spring, when there was still snow in places. Glacier Point and other places were usually still closed. Tioga was never open, so we always went via Merced. I imagine that will be a beautiful ride this early in the year.
We did it on our Gold Wing. They were working on the road at the top and we were stopped for about 15 mins beside the lake and the year-round glacier.
Truly beautiful!
To accomodate two way traffic, there were intermittent holes carved in the rock that cars going East (down) had to use to let those going West (up) keep moving. In those days, cars going up were generally boiling over and stopping only made a breakdown more probable.
Crossing over at night was especially scary, and being on the edge of that road was especially scary.
If you look at the list of opening dates, they are often in May, and back in 1987 it was May 2.
It was still that way in the early 1960s when I had the most frightening driving experience of my life. The blown head gasket I thought had been repaired in Lee Vining failed again on the way up the pass. The car stalled at every hairpin turn and an eternity passed each time until the engine fired up again. Meanwhile it was heel on the brake and toe on the accelerator while I cranked the starter and prayed I could keep it all together to the summit.
After what seemed an eternity I finally reached the top. I parked in a secure place and literally hugged the ground and kissed it. The piece-of-crap car was an AMC Rambler manufactured by Mitt Romney's Daddy. Even writing about that experience all these years put me into a cold sweat.
Did you ever drive from Sequoia up to Mineral King? Talk about scary!!!
Yes, but what really scared us was the prospect of running into a drug grow ... :))
Yes. I wasn't driving. I was a passenger. On the way in, it was dark and we couldn't see what we were doing. We just took it nice and slow. On the way out when we could see, we all got nauseous. Amazing drive.
The scariest road I've ever been on (DH was driving) was the road from Shaver Lake up to Vermilion Valley Resort at Lake Edison (CA-Sierras). It's a one lane dirt logging road which hugs the side of the mountain and twists and turns continually. We prayed the entire time that we wouldn't meet a car coming toward us (not always room for two vehicles to pass so the car going downhill has to back up until there is room for two and that could be a pretty long distance-yikes) and thank goodness, we didn't. Amazing place - Lake Edison. I've never seen a sky so dark and stars so bright.
Tioga Road is my favorite part of Yosemite. Just outside the park on the east is Saddlebag Lake. At the far end of the lake is a loop hike that takes you by several gorgeous crystal blue lakes and to some high vantage points that rival Glacier Point. Great outing!
Because of the lack of snow, the waterfalls will probably be less voluminous and dry up quickly this year.
In ‘88, my wife and I were visiting California and decided we had to cross the Sierra Nevada. It was late April, 70 degrees and Sonoma Pass was right ahead.
Here we go with the minivan! Up, up and more up. Colder and cloudier as the thousand foot markers passed. Long story short, the summit was getting hammered with snow and we thanked the Lord when we finally got out of that nightmare going down the East side.
Lesson learned by an Easterner. Cross the mountains in late July next time.
Your experience on Sonoma Pass is similar to the one we had on Going to the Sun Road in Glacier Park (Montana) in mid-June. We had to turn around before getting to the summit because of the sleet and ice. Fortunately a couple of days later, we had a gorgeous day and drove the entire road.
We had a experience around Memorial Day in northern Yellowstone where we encountered snow and sleet.
Also around Labor Day, we were camping in the Sawtooth Mountains near Stanley, Idaho and woke up to snow on the tent and car. The mountaintops, which had been clean the day before, were capped with a fresh coat of snow. Beautiful.
You just never know what you’re going to get at those high elevations - any time of the year.
Yes Kaiser pass road. It is a beautiful drive. My son went up to the to White Bark summit last year and the snow was still at the top of the signs. In June.
Which model of Rambler?
My family owned 3 — 2 Americans and a Classic. Both the Americans were great — the ‘66 survived into the late 80’s, even after an altercation with a freight train.
The Classic was a remarkable POS. I spent a large part of my childhood stuck in it as my mother tried to get the transmission linkage unstuck in the middle of traffic.
Kaiser Pass - that’s the road. I couldn’t recall the name. I spent a lot of the time on the car floor during that one. Being from the east, we are not used to anything like that! DH made a few references to “tomatoes tingling”-LOL.
We were there in mid-Sept. for a few days to DH could try to catch one of those German trout (he didn’t). The people there were great and the restaurant was terrific. It’s a resupply spot for the Pacific Crest Trail, so you see a lot of rough and tumble people there as well as hard core fisherman and day hikers. They also do horse pack trips from there.
On our way down, it was the day they were driving the horses down off the mountain for the season. So we had to drive very slowly behind the horse pack for much of the way until they found a place where the herd could pull off and let cars pass.
For some reason, it wasn’t nearly as scary coming down off the mountain as going up. I’m sure that was because we knew what we were getting into, while coming up the mountain we didn’t know how long it would be and what would be around the next corner.
Definitely not for the faint of heart!
I’ve heard that there are some hairy passes in CO, but can’t imagine any worse than Kaiser.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.