Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park, one of America's most beautiful mountain highways, is likely to open this week over 9,943-foot Tioga Pass.
In addition, Caltrans tentatively has planned to open Highway 108 over 9,628-foot Sonora Pass at noon Friday.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 1OAT0S.DTL

Are any Lee Vining area campgrounds open ?

Great news, if it stays open. Historically, I thought an "early" opening was typically Memorial Day weekend. For some of you old timers, what is the earliest opening you remember for Hwy 120?

Between the late close and this open, this has to be close to a record shortest closure window.

Recent data for the Sierra Passes: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/roadinfo/clsdlst.htm

(Tioga Pass closed 1/25/2012)

Tioga Pass 1933-2011 closure dates:

http://www.monobasinresearch.org/data/tiogapass.htm

I'm not an old-timer yet, but it looks like the other time the closure window was this short was around when I was born.

1976: opened April 10th, closed December 29th, and opened again April 8th, 1977.

The small amount of consecutive days closed for the winter/spring of 2011-2012 will be right around record breaking, but the most notable number was the record breaking late closure date of January 25th.

The relatively early opening dates this year are interesting to me, but I still have to convince my wife that heading to the Sierra passes in a couple of weeks beats heading down the coast.


Edit: I just noticed that the monobasinresearch.org link currently lists the closure this winter as beginning January 17, conflicting with the caltrans link, and with details that I vaguely recall.

Palisades79 wrote:Are any Lee Vining area campgrounds open ?

Lower Lee Vining Creek campground is open

120 is scheduled to open Monday May 7th at noon

...and 108 (Sonora Pass) opened about 24 hours ago.