Yosemite Reopens High-Country Road to Tour Buses

Just in time for the holiday weekend, the road through Yosemite National Park’s high country was reopened to tour buses on Thursday by park officials who said the soggy roadbed had dried out enough to support the heavy buses.

Maintenance crews had been checking a 6.5-mile stretch of Tioga Pass Road, where a high water table from winter snows and spring runoff had softened the roadbed. “When they felt it was dry enough and would not be in jeopardy, we planned to open it,” Chief Ranger Bob Andrew said. “We did check the road (Thursday) and determined it could be opened” to vehicles over 15,000 pounds, most of them tour buses.

Merchants in the Eastern Sierra, who had missed out on Memorial Day tour bus traffic because of heavy snow and who feared losing more of their heavy summer trade due to the ban, were jubilant Thursday.

“It looks like the tour buses will come through for the holiday weekend,” although it is too late for some to change their plans, said Rhonda Duggan, group sales manager at the Mammoth Mountain Inn in Mammoth Lakes, which had been losing about $100,000 a week in canceled tour groups, most of them European visitors.

Andrew said the reopening had nothing to do with an article on the bus ban in Thursday editions of The Times.

“The community of Mammoth has been told the road would open when we felt it was safe and wouldn’t cause further damage,” Andrew said. “If we had told them a date and then couldn’t have met it, they would have been disappointed.”

But Andrew warned that national parks officials are still considering long-term restrictions on the number of tour buses allowed to enter Yosemite.

Bus traffic has nearly doubled in five years, he noted, from 9,000 in 1989 to a projected 15,000 buses this year. “The big problem--and buses are just a part of it--is congestion. We’re not talking about just numbers of people and cars, we’re talking about the size of vehicles.”

For example, Andrew said, one popular view turnout has parking for 27 vehicles. “When you have that many cars, and then you add three buses and the some 100 people in them, you might as well be standing on a street corner in New York.”

Kessler reported from Independence, Calif.