The massive snowpack in the Sierra Nevada this year has transformed California’s most famous park, Yosemite. And the impacts are likely to last all summer, and perhaps even longer.
The park’s world-famous waterfalls are thundering now as billions of gallons of melted snow cascade 1,000 feet or more down sheer granite cliffs. Park officials say there is so much snow at higher elevations from the winter’s parade of atmospheric river storms that flooding in Yosemite Valley is likely between late April and early July, which could close the park at times.
“All of the water is a huge change from the previous few years,” said Cory Goehring, lead naturalist for the Yosemite Conservancy, a San Francisco nonprofit group that runs outdoor programs in the park. “The meadows are wet and lush. The Merced River is rising. It’s raging. And the waterfalls? They are so loud, they sound like an airplane taking off with how loud they are.”
Work to clear the Tioga Road into Yosemite’s back country began Monday, but this year it’s likely that the public won’t be able to drive there or to the end of Glacier Point Road until after July 1, the latest ever, park officials say.
Meanwhile, the High Sierra camps that are popular with backpackers and reserved through a lottery system will be closed all summer. And parks officials are warning hikers to be very careful on snowy trails, particularly near raging streams and rivers, which in past wet years have killed people as they were swept down stream.
“We always urge people to be careful, but especially this year,” said Scott Gediman, a longtime ranger at Yosemite National Park and the park’s spokesman.
On April 1, park officials measured the snowpack at Tuolumne Meadows at 15 feet deep — breaking the record from 1983 for the deepest April 1 measurement ever recorded, with records dating back to 1930. A few days later, it snowed 2 feet more in the area, which sits at about 8,600 feet elevation.
It even…
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