Attentive readers may recall that I purchased my first-ever Mammoth Mountain season pass earlier this year -- thereby guaranteeing one of the driest Decembers on record in the Sierra Nevada.
My bad! Sorry!
The upside is that the National Park Service reopened Tioga Pass Road to the Yosemite National Park high country on Dec. 19 -- a very rare move. The road is usually closed from early November until late spring or even early summer.
That means people can get to Tenaya Lake and go ice skating (not encouraged by the Park Service, but they won't stop you either). I found this video of a couple of folks passing a puck around and there's a bunch of other videos on YouTube of people skating on the lake. Such as this one:
It's a big deal because the vast majority of Californians who play hockey never get to play outside. And if you're going to play outside, you may as well do it in Yosemite -- pretty much the prettiest place in the Golden State.
If the road remains open, I have to get up there and have my own personal Winter Classic, even if I only play with myself (ha-ha-ha). The National Weather Service doesn't have any snow in the forecast for Yosemite and the Mammoth area for the next week, btw.
Here's what Tenaya Lake looks like un-frozen -- I took the pic in 2010.
photo copyright Steve Hymon
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