If Angeles Crest Highway is the story of a road that keeps failing, Tioga Road is the opposite kind of story: a road that closes on a predictable schedule every single year, whether the weather cooperates or not. Highway 120 through Yosemite National Park is open right now, and it’s one of the best high-elevation drives in California. It also won’t be open much longer.
What the drive actually is
Tioga Road is the 59-mile stretch of Highway 120 that runs from Crane Flat, just inside Yosemite’s western boundary, east across the park’s high country to the Tioga Pass entrance station. The pass itself sits at 9,943 feet, making it the highest highway pass in California and the point where the road crosses the Sierra Nevada crest. Along the way it cuts through Tuolumne Meadows, one of the largest subalpine meadows in the range, and runs past Tenaya Lake, a granite-ringed lake that sits right at the roadside.
The road is currently fully open, confirmed through Caltrans and Yosemite’s own travel advisories as of this week. Good news for anyone planning a trip this year: Yosemite is not requiring peak-hour entry reservations for 2026, which removes one of the more annoying planning steps from recent years. Expect heavy, slow-moving traffic regardless, this is one of the most visited stretches of road in the Sierra, and the pace is part of the experience rather than something to fight.
The part that actually matters: this closes soon
Tioga Road closes for the winter every year once the first serious, permanent snow hits the high elevations, and the median closing date over the past several decades sits around November 3rd. The road reopens in late spring, typically late May or early June, after crews spend weeks plowing a route that can bury under dozens of feet of snow. This year the road didn’t reopen until May 15, and it had been closed since November 12 the year before, a fairly typical seasonal window.
That means the drive is open for roughly six more weeks from today, give or take, depending on how early winter arrives in the Sierra this year. Unlike Angeles Crest’s storm-damage closure, this isn’t a maybe. It’s a when, and the when is soon. If a Tioga Road run has been sitting on a list of drives to do, this is the point in the year to actually go do it rather than wait.
One thing worth knowing if you’re coming from the west: the closure only affects the eastern high-country stretch from Crane Flat to Tioga Pass. Highway 120 up to Yosemite’s Big Oak Flat entrance stays open year-round, so the western half of the park is always reachable. It’s specifically the high-Sierra crossing that shuts down.