My name's Dean Mullis.
I'm an engineering equipment operator for Wawona Roads.
I also work for the machine shop in El Portal.
This snow is just..it's so thick and hard
there's absolutely no way a actual truck plow could get through it.
So what we do is called pioneering, and we pioneer across the snow
taking off as much snow as required to get it down to cutting depth for the rotaries.
And you can get in some trouble real quick
if you don't pay attention to your surroundings.
[vehicle beeping]
[hard snow crunching]
KIM ORR: My name is Kim Orr and I'm an avalanche technician
and I work for the National Park Service.
This is my eighth year -- my eighth spring on the Avalanche Team.
And we basically come out
and assess the road for the road crew and look at the avalanche sites
look at the avalanche potential and make recommendations to the road foreman
on what we think is safe and not safe for them to plow through.
I got up at 2:15 this morning and I started work at 3:00 a.m.
[machine whirring]
JOE MENO: My name is Joe Meno and I work for the Trail Crew here in Yosemite.
And right now I'm working with the Avalanche Team
just to assist them 'cause I'm the new guy on the job.
Mostly for today
while they're cutting through this avalanche zone right here
I'm one of the guys who are watching on this side
and then Erin Anders is watching from the other side, you know, facing this way.
And then Kim is up on top of the slope and she's watching down there.
And we're mostly just watching the snow to see if we hear it crack or anything like that.
'Cause when they're inside the vehicle, you know, they're watching the path that they're plowing.
So we're watching everything else that's around them, you know.
This morning there was all this big chunks of granite on top of the snow
so as soon as he started pushing the snow out of the way the granite came down into it.
And so people were around just to spot and say, "All right, there's rocks here," you know.
So the rocks won't get clogged up in the rotary.
And then we ended up seeing one that was buried in there anyways.
[machine whirring]
[shovel scraping]
[machine whirring]
GREG LONIEWSKI: My name is Greg Loniewski and I work on the Search and Rescue Team.
And I come up and staff the ambulance
when they're plowing through avalanche zones.
Everybody on the road has to go through the Park Service avalanche training
or an avalanche refresher course once you've gone through the training.
KIM ORR: This is an avalanche beacon right here.
An avalanche beacon actually searches for someone else that has one on as well.
It receives and transmits and right now I'm on "Transmit".
The little red button right there is beeping
so that if I was caught in an avalanche someone else could go on "Receive"
and hopefully find me in the snow.
[machine whirring]
RANGER: The hardest part of the operation is quitting at the end of the day
because we enjoy doing what we're doing.
[piano music]