CALIFORNIA ALBUM : On the Road Again : The opening of Tioga Pass into Yosemite is a rite of spring that awakens the little town of Lee Vining from its winter hibernation. Tens of thousands of tourists will pass through during the season.

Each year about this time, when the Eastern Sierra trout creeks swell with tumbling snowmelt, the stream of rental cars into town picks up.

Inside most often are European tourists, weary from the drive across the desert, yet in awe of the high granite peaks that cast afternoon shadows across the sagebrush. Their arrival announces the approach of a new season at the east gateway to Yosemite National Park.

Last week, the first wave of vacationers included the Joliffe clan of Britain’s Isle of Wight. They rolled into town and ran into bad news: The Tioga Pass Road into Yosemite was still closed for the winter.

To reach the park, they would have to negotiate a 300-mile detour.

“We couldn’t believe a road that important would be closed,” said Keith Joliffe, on holiday with his wife and two young daughters.

As it turns out, the visiting Brits were lucky. Tioga Pass opened on Friday, ending the months of hibernation that turn Lee Vining each winter into a near-deserted hamlet where few tourists pass through.

“If we had arrived a few days earlier, we would have missed Yosemite and been very disappointed,” Joliffe said after the gate across the road was thrown open.

The ritual opening of Tioga Pass Road is the defining moment of spring in the Eastern Sierra. Driving the 70 miles from Lee Vining to Yosemite Valley over the mountain corridor takes only about 1 1/2 hours, and each summer tens of thousands of travelers use it. Many stop here first to eat lunch, stretch their legs and take in the scenery, which includes a vista of Mono Lake. Once the road opens, the tiny town on U.S. 395 becomes a bustling international crossroads, it’s block-long main street of gift shops, motels and cafes crammed with Yosemite tourists.

Not surprisingly, Lee Vining merchants look forward with impatience each year for the highway over Tioga Pass--at 9,941 feet the highest drivable pass in the Sierra Nevada--to open.

“When the pass opens, it’s like the floodgates of heaven opening up,” said Grisel Saez-Traynor, a Lee Vining motel owner and co-chair of the Tioga Pass Council.

Frustrated by the refusal of the National Park Service to budge much from its traditional reopening date on the Friday before Memorial Day, representatives from a number of Sierra towns formed the council to lobby Yosemite to open the route earlier in years when conditions allow it.

This year, for instance, an early thaw left the highway virtually clear of snow by April.

The council--spearheaded by business people from Lee Vining and nearby Mammoth Lakes and including representatives from as far away as Death Valley--estimates that the region loses up to $700,000 each week that the pass stays closed in spring. Just one extra day of tourist traffic over the pass means a sizable economic gain for the region, they say.

However, Yosemite officials cite a variety of factors beyond the amount of snowfall for their reluctance to open the road to traffic.

Yosemite Park Supt. Michael Finley said his concerns range from potential environmental damage by visitors trampling on still-soggy meadows to possible damage to the old asphalt road itself, which he said needs several weeks to dry out after snow is removed.

In addition, opening the road earlier would require the park to deploy law enforcement rangers and other staff in the high country at a time when the park’s budget is already stretched, Finley said.

“It’s a park road, constructed by the National Park Service for park purposes,” Finley said. “We don’t deny that it’s used for trans-Sierra travel, but the impacts to the park are our paramount consideration.”

If the road must stay closed, say tourists and Sierra merchants, Yosemite officials should at least do a better job of letting the public know.

Merchants in Lee Vining estimate that by early May about 100 tourists a day drive through town thinking they are on their way to Yosemite, only to find that they can’t get there from here.

Many are visitors from Germany, France and other European countries who have been coming to this part of California in greater numbers because of increased overseas marketing of “fly-drive” package tours.

They often follow a standard route from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, north to Death Valley, over Tioga Pass to Yosemite, then on to San Francisco to catch a plane home.

Guides who plan those routes often do not seem to know about the annual Tioga Pass closure. Even worse, many California road maps either say nothing about it or else label the road “Closed in Winter,” leading many to believe they can cross by April or May.

Helga Marcelli and her husband, Michael, of Paris had planned to make the loop from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe and back through Yosemite, but had the misfortune to arrive in Lee Vining a week ago.

“We are very disappointed,” she said last week. “Nobody told us the road was closed. We lost time, of course, and it’s a long way to go back.”

Merchants in Lee Vining started asking tourists to fill out cards complaining of the inconvenience. The cards are forwarded to the National Park Service as part of the effort to persuade authorities to open the road earlier.

Lily Markus of Chicago complained on one card, “Please open it! You ruined a good time for us.”

Finley was less than sympathetic.

“I don’t like to inconvenience anyone,” he said, “but . . . I think people have the responsibility to call up Caltrans, the Highway Patrol or the National Park Service and ask, ‘When is this thing open?’ ”