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Description

This is Tioga Pass, way up in the stratosphere, at 9,943 feet, one of the highest Sierra passes and the only one through Yosemite to Mono Lake on the other side. That’s Ellery Lake in the foreground, almost at the very top. Well how did Tioga Pass come to be…especially since the word ‘Tioga’ is …cough…an Iroquois word? Iroquois are from like Pennsylvania, right?, which last time I checked was a long walk from California.
The history of Tioga Pass. www.yosemite.ca.us/library/tio… It’s a Whitney project, which should surprise no one. Josiah Whitney, a Harvard geology prof, got appointed by congress to survey California in 1860, and he did quite a thorough job. He first proposed the original pass route at the upper end of Yosemite, getting a 600 foot lower crossing than the original trails that people had been using. This is not an easy road either to build or maintain though, so it took twenty years and a couple of silver strikes for the board of the Great Sierra Consolidated Silver Co. to get together a crew and actually cut a private road up through Yosemite, all the way back to where they had their mines. Apparently one of the mines was named Tioga by some ex-New Yorker who missed the Tioga River. Voila. The Tioga Mine Road becomes the Tioga Mountain Pass. Anyways a 160 man crew started work on the road, and were going at the pretty incredible clip of half a mile a day. Well they finished their road they intended to use it as a toll road. Then the mines all went bust. So it fell into disrepair, but it was still being used by everyone who wanted to get over the mountains there, because horses can jump over trees and such, etc. It was a useful road, if a little rough. In 1915, a guy called Stephen Mather did this huge song and dance to raise 15,000 cash to buy the road and then attempted to gift it to the government. The government refused. Mather bought it anyways, dedicated the road by smashing a champagne bottle of seawater on the highest part’s rock so that it would flow down into both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean (eventually?), he started talking about how great a sightseeing road it would be for the new ‘horseless carriage’. The government still wasn’t interested. Finally Mather wheedled a Senator and a Congressman to get the gift slipped into some appropriations bill. This is all very strange. Anyways, now the USG owned the road, even though it took some doing. Uncle Sam wasn’t as dumb as he looked though because Mather immediately turned around and asked congress for 75k to fix up the road. While he didn’t get it, slowly the park started to maintain bits and pieces and clear some of the fallen trees, and slowly slowly started paving it. That continued in dribs and drabs up until about 1957 when a 5.4 million dollar fix up of the road happened and it really became the road it is today. It’s the only drivable pass through the sierras between basically Lake Tahoe and Bakersfield. A rugged mountain range to be sure.
Anyways that’s the story of the pass.
Here’s a different story but in pictures .

Description

This is Tioga Pass, way up in the stratosphere, at 9,943 feet, one of the highest Sierra passes and the only one through Yosemite to Mono Lake on the other side. That’s Ellery Lake in the foreground, almost at the very top. Well how did Tioga Pass come to be…especially since the word ‘Tioga’ is …cough…an Iroquois word? Iroquois are from like Pennsylvania, right?, which last time I checked was a long walk from California.
The history of Tioga Pass. www.yosemite.ca.us/library/tio… It’s a Whitney project, which should surprise no one. Josiah Whitney, a Harvard geology prof, got appointed by congress to survey California in 1860, and he did quite a thorough job. He first proposed the original pass route at the upper end of Yosemite, getting a 600 foot lower crossing than the original trails that people had been using. This is not an easy road either to build or maintain though, so it took twenty years and a couple of silver strikes for the board of the Great Sierra Consolidated Silver Co. to get together a crew and actually cut a private road up through Yosemite, all the way back to where they had their mines. Apparently one of the mines was named Tioga by some ex-New Yorker who missed the Tioga River. Voila. The Tioga Mine Road becomes the Tioga Mountain Pass. Anyways a 160 man crew started work on the road, and were going at the pretty incredible clip of half a mile a day. Well they finished their road they intended to use it as a toll road. Then the mines all went bust. So it fell into disrepair, but it was still being used by everyone who wanted to get over the mountains there, because horses can jump over trees and such, etc. It was a useful road, if a little rough. In 1915, a guy called Stephen Mather did this huge song and dance to raise 15,000 cash to buy the road and then attempted to gift it to the government. The government refused. Mather bought it anyways, dedicated the road by smashing a champagne bottle of seawater on the highest part’s rock so that it would flow down into both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean (eventually?), he started talking about how great a sightseeing road it would be for the new ‘horseless carriage’. The government still wasn’t interested. Finally Mather wheedled a Senator and a Congressman to get the gift slipped into some appropriations bill. This is all very strange. Anyways, now the USG owned the road, even though it took some doing. Uncle Sam wasn’t as dumb as he looked though because Mather immediately turned around and asked congress for 75k to fix up the road. While he didn’t get it, slowly the park started to maintain bits and pieces and clear some of the fallen trees, and slowly slowly started paving it. That continued in dribs and drabs up until about 1957 when a 5.4 million dollar fix up of the road happened and it really became the road it is today. It’s the only drivable pass through the sierras between basically Lake Tahoe and Bakersfield. A rugged mountain range to be sure.
Anyways that’s the story of the pass.
Here’s a different story but in pictures .