Blasting winter away at Yosemite
Yosemite National Park's avalanche control team has a particularly big job this year, blowing up mountains of snow along Tioga Road to clear the way for summer tourists.
By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2011
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.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-tioga-road-20110609,0,6656961.story