Tioga Pass Road is Now Open

The Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) website can be found at http://www.dot.ca.gov/ , and the telephone number is 1-800-427-7623, which you can call at any time for current highway conditions.  To contact Yosemite National Park directly for information, call 1-209-372-0200.

If you’ve never been, it’s well worth the drive up and over The Pass.  The road meanders past stunning meadows, multiple granite domes and practically drops you into Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra.  The temperatures are typically pretty refreshing (at 10,000 feet elevation, they had better be!) and you can see the Tuolumne River near its headwaters.

Also worth a few extra hours before or after your Tuolumne rafting trip is a visit to Hetch Hetchy,(sometimes referred to as Yosemite’s Buried Treasure).  Take note - Yosemite National Park is open 24/7/365, however, the Hetch Hetchy entrance station is open only during daylight hours (ish). 

See for yourself why John Muir fought so hard to save it from forever being flooded from a dam.  Taken from his 1912 book, “The Yosemite”, Muir has this to say:

“Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, their brows in the sky, their feet set in the groves and gay flowery meadows, while birds, bees, and butterflies help the river and waterfalls to stir all the air into music—things frail and fleeting and types of permanence meeting here and blending, just as they do in Yosemite, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.”

The Hetch Hetchy Valley now sits under water behind the O’Shaughnessy Dam, which was completed in 1923 and provides water for the City of San Francisco.  However, the views are unforgettable as you peer into the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne and down into the Tuolumne River canyon.