Yosemite: Tioga Road will finally open Saturday into park’s snow-filled high country, the latest in more than 90 years

Yosemite National Park’s famed Tioga Road — a 46-mile route through the park’s scenic high country — will open at 8 a.m. this Saturday to the public, the National Park Service announced Wednesday, providing visitors with new terrain to cover and relieving crowding in Yosemite Valley.

Due to massive amounts of snow this past winter, the opening date is the latest in 90 years, when modern records began. The previous record was July 8, 1933.

“Everything came together fortuitously and wonderfully in the last couple of days,” said Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. “We’ve are really excited.”

The road had been buried under more than 15 feet of snow and ice after a winter that saw the most snow ever recorded in Yosemite’s high country near Tuolumne Meadows.

As crews dug it out over the past few months, they began to discover major damage to buildings, including the store, restaurant and employee housing at Tuolumne Meadows, the main visitor area along Tioga Road.

Gediman said that roughly 30 buildings had been damaged, some of them aging structures whose roofs caved in from the weight of the snow and ice. The wastewater system at Tuolumne Meadows, along with power lines, a cell phone tower and radio repeater tower all suffered significant damage from the harsh winter weather.

Earlier this week, parks officials said they might not be able to open Tioga Road for another two weeks because so many visitor facilities had been damaged.

But in recent days, parks employees have been able to secure portable toilets and make enough repairs to damaged portions of the road that it can now open, Gediman said. But visitors should expect spartan conditions.

The Tuolumne Meadows Wilderness Center will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and a general information desk near the Tuolumne Meadows visitor center will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But the Tuolumne Meadows store, post office, restaurant, lodge, and campgrounds at Porcupine Flat and Tamarack Flat will remain closed for an unknown length of time while repairs can be made.

Still, the opening of the iconic Tioga Road is expected to relieve congestion in Yosemite Valley for the rest of this summer, as visitors now have another place to venture. On weekends since the weather began to warm up, crowds coming to the park to see raging waterfalls from the vast amounts of melting snow have sat in sometimes hours-long traffic jams, leading to requests that the park re-instate a day-use reservation system it put in place during the COVID pandemic to limit visitation.

Some of the traffic congestion was relieved last weekend, when road crews finished clearing and reopened Glacier Point Road, a landmark drive that looks down from the massive granite rock formations that flank Yosemite Valley’s southern edge.

One of the marquee drives in America’s national park system, the two-lane Tioga Road bisects Yosemite’s alpine center, passing through subalpine meadows and forests of lodgepole pine and juniper. It runs 46 miles from Crane Flat to Tioga Pass, where it crests at 9,945 feet in the highest highway pass in California.

The road typically closes every winter in November. Then it usually reopens in mid-May. It is a key route not only for tourists, but for local residents who need to cross over the Sierra Nevada.

The route for centuries was a footpath for Miwok Indians, upgraded to a mining road in 1883 during a brief silver boom, and then a private toll road that charged $2 per horse and rider.

In an unusual act of philanthropy, it became public and part of the park in 1915, when Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, bought it for $15,000 with his own money and donations from the Sierra Club and the Modesto Chamber of Commerce. He sold it to Congress that year for $10, hoping to bring more tourists into the park.