Records amounts of snow in Yosemite National Park high country bring wonder and danger
The massive snowpack in the Sierra Nevada this year has done more than end California’s drought and boost the fortunes of Lake Tahoe ski resorts.The park’s world-famous waterfalls are thundering now as billions of gallons of melting snow cascade 1,000 feet or more down sheer granite cliffs.
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.
It even snowed slightly in Yosemite Valley, which is at about 4,000 feet elevation, on Tuesday, but the snow didn’t stick. Campgrounds and hotels are open. Patches of snow are still visible in Yosemite Valley’s meadows. But trails out of the valley remain covered with snow and largely impassible. Other than a shut-down during the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, it was among the longest closures for the park, which receives more than 4 million visitors a year, in modern history.
“These animals have evolved for hundreds of thousands of years with the ebbs and flows in snowpack,” Goehring said. “They have adapted to them.” In 2011, Ramina Badal, a 21-year-old University of San Francisco nursing student from Manteca, and her friends Ninos Yacoub, 27, and Hormiz David, 22, died after they waded into the strong currents of the Merced River near the top of Vernal Fall to take a photo and were swept over the falls.
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