The day's travel was modest for sure; I barely left the park. I wanted to explore the area to the northeast of Tioga Pass. Three fine campgrounds sit around alpine lakes just outside Yosemite, but I drove up to Saddlebag Lake Campground, at 10,100' the highest elevation car campground in California. I arrived mid-morning and it was already full. I chatted with the campground host, who told me she had lines of cars waiting each morning to fight for whatever first-come, first-serve site opened up. The campground had just been featured in some prestigious travel magazine and had begun attracting desperate vacation over-achievers. I wished her well and went back down the road a mile or so and grabbed a spot at Sawmill Campground (9700'), a walk-in campground that keeps the crowds down by requiring campers to walk a half-mile or more from the parking lot to the campsites.
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| Saddlebag Lake |
So on Monday night I was sitting in easily the best campsite I'd ever had, 360 degrees of mountain splendor. Snow patches remained on the hills - the 13,000' hills, that is. Glorious, really. Lee Vining Creek cuts an impressive canyon through red metamorphic rock. Lots of pines, a moon. Too good to be true I said to a fellow camper and I may have been right, as a fellow in the next site so liked the sound of his own voice he spoke as though he were addressing the Roman Senate. But the landscape was expansive and I took my camp chair far enough out of earshot and only had to suffer his pomposity during meals.
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| View from Sawmill Camp Site |
I found this area just east and north of Tioga Pass in Inyo National Forest to be more exciting and dramatic than any I’d seen in Yosemite. I learned that it was included in the original Yosemite National Park and then later removed, a fact that on its face I found very disheartening. But historic scrutiny tempered my regret. While John Muir had proposed making the entire Sierra Wall from Tioga Pass to Mount Whitney a huge national park, he went to bed the night before the Congressional vote clinging to the hope of a much smaller park and woke up in the morning with one that included the Sierra’s eastern wall all the way down to the Minarets. Historians can’t account for this miraculous turnaround other than surmising that the Railroad had pulled a fast one in the middle of the night, in exchange for who knows what.
But a park that size was too big to defend back then, not just politically but literally, and Hiram Chittenden, a credentialed fixer, took on the assignment of realigning the Park to a more acceptable scale. He reduced it to the watersheds of the Tuolumne and Merced Rivers, leaving everything east of the crest outside the park. Chittenden argued that the huge peaks wouldn’t really need protection, as their scale and power would absorb anything people could throw at them.
In fact, this area had already taken whatever hit mining was going to throw it. Miners arrived not long after the Mariposa Brigade and by the late 1870s silver mines punctuated the entire Tioga pass area. The Great Sierra Consolidated Silver Company was founded in 1878, consolidating hundreds of area claims. It established the mining town of Dana in 1880 and Bennettville in 1882. In the spring and summer of 1883 it built the 56-1/2 mile Great Sierra Wagon Road from Crocker’s Station east of Groveland to Bennettville, just east of Tioga Pass. Sawmill Campground was the site of Martin’s Sawmill 1882-1884, which provided timber for the company towns. By the summer of 1884 it had dug 1800 feet of tunnel from Bennettville but had found no silver. In July the company was out of money and the investors said no more. By 1888 all properties, including the road, were sold on public auction. In 1915 Stephen Mather bought the road for $15,500 and deeded it to the NPS.
So we are lucky that no huge mineral find attracted enough capital to wreck havoc in the area. If the company hit silver, says Giacometti, the trees from Tioga Pass to Tuolumne Meadows would have gone to lumber, and regrowth at this elevation would have been tough. But given that, Chittenden was essentially right. Some ruins remain, picturesque now, and some dangerous tunnels. There is a little dam and power plant, but for the most part the landscape is largely intact. Add in the fact that the National Park Service has gone through some phases of serious infrastructional development, and who knows what kind of facilities this area might have received if it had remained part of the national park?
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| Tioga Pass Highway |
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