Reporting from Yosemite National Park -- It's nearly summer, and swarms of cars, buses and RVs breeze through Yosemite Valley as if on conveyor belts of asphalt. But up here at 8,400 feet, along the snowbound solitude of Tioga Road, winter is still in control.
Three members of a National Park Service avalanche control team move out from their camp near Olmsted Point. They are here to bend nature's timetable and help clear the highest automobile route across the Sierra.
From a distance, they are ephemeral figures dwarfed by the eternal landscape — a steep, treeless mountainside loaded with tons of ice and snow just waiting for a trigger.
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It is shortly after 5 a.m. The temperature is in the mid-20s, and a blue dawn signals the sun's arrival. Time is short.
Tim Esquivel and Steve Lynds stop to load their backpacks from a sled laden with supplies — explosives, a spool of detonator cord, bags of charcoal, shovels. Both are in their mid-40s with ponytails and earrings, both strong as climbing rope.
Edward Canapary, 44, has climbed above them and is whaling on the frozen snow with a pick-ax. Ching-ka! Ching-ka! Chunks skitter down the hill and into the valley below.
He works fast. Spring in the mountains is a violent alchemy of hydraulics and gravity. Snowfields benignantly frozen at night awaken to the sun's heat. This windless morning's silence will soon be replaced by the ominous gurgle of percolating water lubricating the rock underneath.
Ching-ka! Ching-ka! The minutes tick by. The sky brightens imperceptibly.
When the holes are dug, Canapary calls to the men below on his radio.
"Bring the bombs up."
From the nearest patch of dry road, it's more than an hour by snowmobile to Olmsted Point, a sublime stage from which to view the grandeur of Yosemite National Park. It's also the most unpredictable and dangerous avalanche zone on Tioga Road, which bisects the park from east to west.
Each fall the road closes for the winter. Each spring the National Park Service, Caltrans and Mono County launch a monumental effort to clear it, more than 50 miles blocked by towering snowdrifts, uprooted trees and fallen rock.
Letting it melt at its own pace isn't considered an option.
Tioga Road — also known as California Highway 120 — is critical to the small-town tourism economies on both sides of the Sierra. Opening it as soon as possible is important to park managers, too. Most of Yosemite's 4 million annual visitors come between Memorial Day and Labor Day; without access to facilities and trails along Tioga Road, the tourist hub in Yosemite Valley would resemble the 405 during a SigAlert.
The contours of today's Tioga Road and its promise of a path through the Sierra's inhospitable maze has attracted travelers for millenniums.
Native Americans hunted along well-worn game tracks. John Muir herded sheep through the area in 1869. Chinese laborers came next, building a wagon road to service mines that didn't pan out. Then came stockmen and, eventually, tourists in horse-drawn wagons.
Finally, Stephen Mather, industrialist, conservationist and the first head of the National Park Service, arranged for the right-of-way's purchase, repaired the road and had it donated to the government. In so doing, he gave the road its modern mission — and changed Yosemite forever. A dirt throughway opened in July 1915 and 190 cars crossed over that year. Five years later, more than 1,000 cars a week did.
Early on, Tioga Road's opening and the steadily growing traffic counts garnered bold headlines in The Times. The newspaper teamed with automakers to sponsor "scout cars," whose drivers reported on early season conditions.
