10/30 Leaving Yosemite

It was a very cold night, and as usual, furnaces were pumping out warm air all night.  I woke up to find that the temperature outside was 21 degrees and that my lights were dim because my coach batteries were almost dead.  To make it worse, my generator would not start.  That did it.  I decided that I would come back to this place sometime when it was warmer and more sunny. 

One thing I wanted to take pictures of when I drove in was the rockslide on U.S 140 that I was told occurred in 2007 and has still not been repaired.  The main "all-weather highway into Yosemite follows the Merced River for 15 miles.  The whole side of the mountain slid down and blocked the highway.  They have put up two one-way bridges and transfer traffic, one direction at a time, to the old roadway on the opposite side of the river. 

Here is one of the bridges transferring traffic to the other side of the river.

You can see a bit of the buried roadway in this picture. The landslide is to the right.

Here is a broader photo showing how much of the mountain slid down.  It is not a matter of just bulldozing the rock out the way because if you tried it, more would come sliding down.  Hope no one was under this.

You can see the roadway emerging on the right of this photo. Apparently, they are going to build a tunnel under all of this, but I am not sure how.

I posted a few days ago that I had had a rough trip into Yosemite.  The problem was NOT the mountain roads, but the county roads I had to drive on for 20 miles. This route was about 40 miles shorter than driving all the way out of Hensley Lake and then back, so I took it, per my GPS.

Can you believe the patches?  In fact, it is pretty hard to find any original road!  Everything in my motorhome rattles on regular roads, so you can imagine how bone-jarring this stretch was.

 

Ah, this stretch was MUCH better.  Somebody has spent some money on this part.  (Some politician came through on a promise?)  One funny thing was that in 20 miles of driving through these hills and passing a lot of big ranches, only two vehicles passed me.  There were NO oncoming vehicles at all!  Can't imagine why.

As I got closer to the lake, I stopped right in the middle of the road to take this photo of the snow-capped Sierras in the distance.  Pretty, but I prefer a nice sunny, warmer place.

  

My coach batteries charged during the drive, and my generator started right up once I got set up in my campsite.  I knew I would have power here, so I don't really need the generator anyway, but it was good to know everything was working again.  I assume it was just too cold this morning in Yosemite.