Digging out
Crews begin work clearing Sonora, Ebbetts passes
Workers with Caltrans District 10 began work Monday to reopen Ebbetts Pass on Highway 4 and Sonora Pass on Highway 108 by May 21.
Each winter, Caltrans workers on both sides of the Sierra Nevada range close the high mountain passes and the paved roads that lead to them for as long as six to seven months.
This past winter has been described by state water authorities as dry, critically dry, and below average for snowfall and snowpack. Current snowpack in the Central Sierra as of Tuesday was 56% of normal for the date.
Ebbetts Pass at 8,730 feet and Sonora Pass at 9,624 feet have both been closed since Dec. 15.
Tioga Pass on Highway 120, which is on the east edge of Yosemite National Park and at the Tuolumne-mono county line, has been closed since Nov. 5.
The National Park Service says that clearing of Tioga Road, the agency’s name for Highway 120 in Yosemite, begins on or about April 15 each year and usually takes one to two months.
Predicting when Tioga Road and Tioga Pass will open is not possible, even in late spring, because weather in April and May can affect plowing progress significantly, according to the National Park Service.
Caltrans District 10 communications staff this week did not estimate how soon they hope to have Ebbetts Pass and Sonora Pass reopened.
The state agency’s goal each year is to get all mountain passes open no later than the Friday before Memorial Day weekend.
Bob Highfill, of Caltrans District 10, added that workers hope to have Highway 108 cleared for motorists to get to Kennedy Meadows for Fishmas, the official opening of trout season in Tuolumne County, which is typically scheduled the last Saturday in April every year.
Workers at the Caltrans Long Barn Maintenance Station and Camp Connell Maintenance Station could not be reached for comment.
It’s true that reopening the highest paved routes over the Central Sierra each year is a ritual. It’s also among the most dangerous road work jobs in the Golden State.
Clearing steep snowbound roads in avalanche-prone switchbacks and at the bottom of steep chutes that tower hundreds of feet overhead is serious, life-threatening work and workers have been killed in the past.
The 2007 book “Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite” by Michael Ghiglieri and Butch Farabee lists two deaths related to maintenance on Tioga Road.
The most recent was June 13, 1995, when Barry Lee Hance, 43, a National Park Service employee and a resident of Groveland, was operating a bulldozer 400 yards east of Olmsted Point when a snow avalanche collapsed and buried him and his machine. An autopsy showed Hance died of major blunt force trauma to the chest which caused rapid suffocation.
On May 17, 1984, Sammy Lee Smallwood, 52, a National Park Service maintenance worker for 30 years, was with a crew using dynamite to move rock at Little Blue Slide on Tioga Road one mile east of Tuolumne Meadows. Smallwood was wearing a helmet when he was struck in the head by a large flying rock. Smallwood died in a helicopter during airlift to Modesto.
Farabee spent more than 30 years as a field and searchand-rescue ranger with the Park Service in places including Glen Canyon, Death Valley, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, assisted on more than 150 fatal incidents, and in Yosemite served as a deputy coroner for two counties.