Tioga Pass (Yosemite) Opening Dates

Posted In: Environment | Water

When does Tioga Pass in Yosemite typically open?

The graph shows the closing and opening dates of Tioga pass in Yosemite National Park for each winter season from 1933 to the present. Tioga pass is a mountain pass on State Highway 120 in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range and one of the entrances to Yosemite NP. The pass itself peaks at 9945 ft above sea level. Each winter it gets a ton of snow, but also with a great deal of variability, which really affects when it can be plowed and the road reopened.

Our family likes to go to Yosemite in June after the kids school lets out and sometimes Hwy 120 and Tioga Pass can often be closed at this time, which limits which areas of the park you can visit. So I often look at data on when the road has opened before and thought it would be a good thing to visualize.

You can toggle the labels on the graph that show the dates of opening and closing as well as the number of days that the pass was closed each winter. Hovering (or clicking) on the circles on the graph will give you a pop up which gives you the exact date.

Data and Tools
The data comes from the US National Park Service for most recent data as well as Mono Basin Clearinghouse for earlier data going back to 1933. Data was organized and compiled in MS Excel. Visualization was done in javascript and specifically the plotly visualization library.

tioga pass opening date




2 Comments »


2 Responses to Tioga Pass (Yosemite) Opening Dates

  1. Stacie says:

    Hi – Is there something going on for the 1939 data?

    • chris says:

      Hi, the opening date in 1939 wasn’t included in the data that I found online so it’s not shown on the graph.

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