Side Trip: Highway 120 / Tioga Pass

Side Trip: Tioga Pass / Highway 120 / Lee Vining Area

Eastern gateway to Yosemite National Park

Located at the junction outside Lee Vining, Highway 120 is the eastern gateway to Yosemite National Park.  Visitors will thrill at the stunning granite walls and precipitous drop-off to the canyon floor below, as the road climbs from 7,000 feet elevation to 10,000 feet elevation in twelve miles.  Winding past Ellery Lake and Tioga Lake, visitors will enter Yosemite National Park and the famed Tuolumne Meadows.  When I lived in Lee Vining during the late 1940’s as a young boy, I can remember being terrified driving up the then primitive road without guard rails.  In those days Tioga Pass road was paved, but in many spots it was a single lane.  Drivers going uphill would have to give the right-away to downhill traffic.  Backing down the road and around corners, with a sheer cliff and without a guard rail, proved too harrowing for some drivers during this time period.   My Uncle Loren Odell was the deputy sheriff in Lee Vining.  Every summer he would get a message from a traveling party that a car was stranded up on the pass. 

Stranded indeed!  The car would be operable, but the driver would just pull over to the widest part in the road and refuse to drive any further!  My uncle would round up Auggie Hess at the service station, and the two of them would head up the pass in the sheriff car.  Auggie would then drive the stranded party down the pass, and my uncle would go back on patrol.  It was not uncommon for these same hysterical motorists to head south on Highway 395, all the way to Los Angeles and then northwards on Highway 101 all the way back to Merced or Modesto, where they had started their visit to Yosemite Park.  The Tioga Pass road has been a pleasure to drive since the 1960’s, but I can tell you that my father had a sadistic sense of humor.  Driving the family car, an old Ford sedan from the 1930’s with running boards, my father would ease close to the shoulder so that his family passengers could only look straight down thousands of feet.   My old man obviously had some quirky disconnect when he was driving.  One family story tells of an episode where he was driving his mother, the first Mono County School Superintendent, to the Benton school in an old Model A Ford.  In those days the Benton Dips were really roller-coaster dips.  My father was driving too fast, and my grandmother was complaining loudly.  Suddenly, my father pulled the steering wheel off the column and handed it to her.  “Here, you drive,” he said. Before he could get the wheel re-seated over the bolt-like protrusion and have a good laugh, the automobile hit a bump and careened out into the desert running over sage brush in its bouncy course.  My grandmother was whacking him with her purse when he finally came to a stop, and my father jumped out of the Model A, threw himself down on the sand and laughed hysterically.

 I have combined both camping and fishing together for this 12-mile side trip to Yosemite.  Initially I was going to list the campgrounds in the order of their placement up the pass, but in the end I placed the fishing and camping entries in alphabetical order. Both Ellery Lake and Tioga Lake are outside the park entrance, as is Saddlebag Lake, Saddlebag Creek and Gardisky Lake, which may be hiked to from the trailhead on Saddlebag Lake Road.  Just inside the park boundaries, anglers can hike to Gaylor Lakes and Granite Lakes, along with the two headwater creeks that form the Tuolumne River in the famous Tuolumne Meadows.  Dozens of day-hike lakes may be reached by cross-country routes, but these hikes are not within the scope of this web site.

See sub-category Highway 120 Campgrounds from Lower Lee Vining Campground to Tioga Lake Campground

(Lower Lee Vining Creek Campground; Cattleguard Campground; Moraine Campground; Boulder Campground; Aspen Campground; Big Bend Campground; Ellery Lake Campground; Saddlebag Campground; Junction Campground; Tioga Lake Campground)

See sub-category Highway 120 fishing from Lee Vining Creek to Tuolumne Meadows

(Lee Vining Creek, Ellery Lake, Saddlebag Creek, Gardisky Lake, Saddlebag Lake, South Fork of Lee Vining Creek, Tioga Lake, Gaylor Lakes, Granite Lakes, Upper Tuolumne River, Dana Fork and Lyell Fork)

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