Rockslide closes Big Oak Flat Road into Yosemite Valley
A rockslide that happened Tuesday evening during the recent wet weather has temporarily closed Big Oak Flat Road inside Yosemite National Park, cutting off Highway 120 traffic from reaching Yosemite Valley.
Crews working on blasting boulders and clearing the slide were hoping to have the road patched and reopened by Thursday night or Friday morning, a park spokesman said Thursday afternoon in a phone interview.
A park webpage stated Big Oak Flat Road, the continuation of Highway 120 from Groveland, was “closed due to a significant rockslide east of Foresta.”
The slide happened about 6 p.m. Tuesday evening, just east of the lowermost tunnel, Scott Gediman, a spokesman for the park, said Thursday.
“The rockfall, as we speak,
crews are working to clear the road,” Gediman said. “The trail crews are blasting. They blasted this morning. Now we’re removing the smaller size rocks. We will patch the road. We’re hopeful to get the road open tonight or tomorrow morning.”
The slide included boulders and trees landing on the road, an administrator for Yosemite Incident Feed posted online Thursday morning. The volume of the boulders is about 75 tons. The rockfall was triggered by rain, which turned to snow overnight.
Motorists coming from Tuolumne County on Highway 120 can still enter the park and visit Crane Flat and the Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias, Gediman said.
Until Big Oak Flat Road is reopened in the park, the only open roads to the valley are Highway 140 (El Portal Road in the park) and Highway 41 (Wawona Road in the park).