The Road That Silver Built and Snow Shuts

The pass you are crossing sits at nine thousand nine hundred forty-three feet, making it the highest vehicle crossing in the state of California. Snow closes it every year, typically sometime in October, and it does not reopen until late May or later when road crews can clear the snowpack. For roughly six months of every year, this road does not exist.

It was not built to admire the view. In eighteen eighty-three, the Great Sierra Consolidated Silver Company graded this pass to reach a mine near the summit. The work was done primarily by Chinese laborers under conditions that provided no legal protections and no wages, only the right to remain employed. When the mine failed, the company dissolved, and the road fell into disrepair. The Chinese workers dispersed. Their names and the record of their labor are not in any current NPS interpretive program at this location.

In nineteen fifteen, Stephen Mather, the first director of the not-yet-existing National Park Service, purchased the deteriorating road from the mining company using his own money. He believed the Sierra Nevada needed a high-altitude crossing to attract the automobile tourists who were becoming the primary constituency for parks. He was right, and the road he bought was paved and improved over the following decades into the highway you are on.

The silver mine produced nothing commercially useful. The road it required to operate became one of the most scenic drives in North America. The workers who built the original grade in eighteen eighty-three have no marker here.