Page:Tioga Road (HAER No. CA-149) written historical and descriptive data.pdf/13

 Following its acquisition by the federal government, the Tioga Road received regular maintenance and occasional improvements. Storms in the fall of 1922 forced the Park Service to do extensive repairs.66 Fifteen culverts, ranging from 12"-36" in diameter, were replaced in October 1924. Twelve more were replaced in June 1925. In the fall, a number of short wooden bridges were replaced with culverts. More culverts were constructed along the road in the fall of 1927. Two new bridges were built over Yosemite Creek and the Middle Fork of the Tuolumne River (between Harden Lake and Aspen Valley) in 1928.67 New culverts were installed near Tenaya Lake in August 1929, and in September five more were built along the road, three replacing bridges and two covering open drains.68

John Andalice Meyer opened a lodge at White Wolf in 1927. The rustic hostel was a popular retreat within the park boundaries, and remained a separate inholding until the government purchased it from Meyer's family in 1951 for $26,500.69 The hostel was then leased to the Yosemite Park & Curry Company for operation. The recently reconstructed White Wolf Lodge continues to offer meals and inexpensive lodging for users of the Tioga Road.

By this time, increasing traffic loads and extensive maintenance requirements had influenced the National Park Service to reconstruct portions of the road to better accommodate users. In September 1928, Acting Superintendent E. P. Leavitt, NPS Chief Engineer Frank Kittredge, and Park Resident Engineer O. G. Taylor began inspections for a new road location in the area between Tioga Pass and Tuolumne Meadows.70

The National Park service landscape architecture division assigned Junior Landscape Engineer John B. Wosky to Yosemite National park at about this time as part of a program under which landscape architects would be sent to the parks during the summer seasons, returning to the San Francisco office in the off season to finish plans and drawings. Over the next decade, Wosky participated in a number of projects related to improvements to the Tioga Road. He reviewed the proposed new routes for the road in 1931, and later designed the Tioga Pass Entrance Station and Ranger Residence.71

Road crews began straightening and widening portions of the Tioga Road in the fall of 1929. At about the same time, state highway department crews began improving the Lee Vining Canyon grade east of the park boundary.72

Although the earlier proposals for a road from Yosemite Valley to the high country had apparently been shelved, in 1929 Dr. Donald Tressider of the Yosemite Park & Curry Company proposed a cable car system to convey visitors from the Valley up to Tenaya Lake. An engineer from the Adolph Bleichert Company of Austria made a study of the route, and suggested that two cable systems would be required to span the long distance and two steep grades involved. Another cableway was proposed for Glacier Point. The Yosemite National Park Board of Expert Advisors seriously considered these proposals, finding some merit in that the cableways would alleviate some congestion on the Tioga Road. But in the end the proposals were rejected on account of the inescapable high visibility of the system and a fear that visitors would find trams an unnatural attraction, rather than a means of transportation.73

The proposed route for a reconstructed road from Tioga Pass to Tuolumne Meadows was inspected again in June 1931 by Superintendent Thomson and engineers Harry S. Tolen and H. E. Alderton of the Bureau of Public Roads. The Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had taken control over major road projects in the national parks in 1925. Alderton and BPR engineer Karl E. Nisei conducted a formal location survey soon afterwards. That summer, Thomson and Wosky looked at a possible route along the Grand