Road’s End for a Long, Hard Winter

Forget the calendar. It was still winter here Thursday, high in the Sierra, at the back entrance to Yosemite National Park. The mountains were covered with snow. The tiny lakes were half frozen. A thunderstorm rumbled overhead, and the creeks ran hard and full.

The little coffee shop here--a standing-room-only madhouse during the summer--was all but empty. Bob Agard sat at the counter, making notes to himself and reflecting on a winter seemingly without end. After running the Tioga Pass Resort for years, Agard and his wife, Claudette, bought the place in May, a month generally associated with spring. There was no spring this year, however, not in the Eastern Sierra. It snowed from November through late June.

The worst was March, and Agard looked chilled as he recalled that month. “It wouldn’t quit,” he said. “You’d spend three days digging out a cabin, and as soon as you were done another storm would come and bury it again. After awhile, it didn’t seem worth it.”

As the innkeeper spoke, the two-lane highway in front of the rustic establishment was quiet, devoid of traffic--another sign of the season. This was the Tioga Pass Road, which when not made impassable by winter snow, connects towns along the Eastern Sierra to Yosemite National Park. That it still was closed “for the winter” on this, the next to last day of June, was the stuff of almanacs--a guarantee that the June 29 record for the latest pass reopening would be eclipsed.

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Along the Sierra’s eastern flanks, people who live in towns such as Lee Vining and Bridgeport watch Tioga Pass each spring as eagerly as little children watch fireplaces on Christmas Eve, anticipating Santa. Theirs is not a passive wait. The merchants push hard for the earliest possible date, badgering park officials, lobbying politicians, donating money and snowplows--anything to hurry along the grand moment when the barriers come down. It’s almost never soon enough to suit the “east side people,” as they call themselves, and their laments about lost business have become a perennial sound of the Sierra spring.

“Well,” said Edna Nicely, who for decades ran a landmark Lee Vining coffee shop, “it’s a short season, and every day does make a difference.”

With the reopening, which typically occurs in early May, the towns emerge overnight from a long hibernation. Cars and tour buses stream across the pass by the thousands each day, headed back and forth between Yosemite and desert destinations like Las Vegas. Along the way, they dump millions into local economies built around the delivery of clever T-shirts, semi-authentic tribal trinkets and clean motel rooms.

This year the annual wrangle took on a sharper edge: Two weeks ago, a Yosemite snowplow operator clearing the road was buried under an avalanche and killed. Work on the pass was suspended for an investigation, and the most strident east side advocates of early openings found themselves under attack for indirectly contributing to the tragedy.

“There is a faction on the east side,” said Agard, “that always says to the park that at all costs--and now we have paid the ultimate cost--get this road open, now. In a reasonable year, I would agree with that. But a winter like this is different. Yes, money is tight. Everybody is hurting. I basically have lost the entire month of June here. But it is not worth a life.”

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Not all were chastened. The further delay irritated some business owners. “It’s unfortunate that a man died,” one told the Fresno Bee, “but what does someone getting killed have to do with keeping the road closed?”

Down in Lee Vining on Thursday some old-timers were saying the death was the unhappy result of Yosemite officials lacking the expertise or equipment to operate their own road. They muttered about the park’s inability to comprehend how crucial Tioga Pass traffic is to the east side. And the park position that safety alone dictates the reopening date, this they dismissed as bureaucratic cover. They preferred their own theories.

“They don’t want us open,” one merchant suggested sourly, “because they want to keep all the business for themselves for as long as they can.”

Such was the talk of Thursday, winter talk. Late Friday afternoon, summer came to the pass. A road worker rolled up in an orange pickup, unceremoniously pulled away the roadblock. A long line of waiting cars fired up and, horns honking, headed over the mountain. Winter was finished at last, and the squabbling over Tioga Pass now would subside for a few months. In the late autumn, the first snows typically come--and the east side starts pushing for the pass to be kept open as deep into winter as possible. Who said California doesn’t have seasons?