It's the middle of June, and Yosemite's Tioga Road still isn't open to automobile traffic for its full length in the park. Those who need a little high country fix can drive from Crane Flat to Yosemite Creek, but the drivable road ends there.

Clearing the trans-Sierra route has proven to be a dangerous and slow process, particularly with the amount of snow that Yosemite received this winter.

Recently Mark Grossi of the Fresno Bee joined the maintenance crew that's plowing the road to learn about the hazards it faces and the progress it's made. To read Grossi's report, visit the Yosemite Association Newsroom by clicking here. (Photo by Mark Crosse of the Fresno Bee.)

Following our ample spring rainfall, California has turned into a remarkably colorful landscape with the abundant wildflower display that has resulted.

A beautiful, oversized book from the University of California showcases the state's splendid native plants in their natural settings--from foggy rain forests and rolling grasslands to high alpine meadows and parched deserts.

California's Wild Gardens - A Guide to Favorite Botanical Sites offers a close-up look at more than one hundred special sites in the state, highlighting their distinctive ecology, the rare and unique plants found in them, and some of their more familiar botanical treasures.

With its spectacular color photographs and lively writing by some of California's best biologists and ecologists, California's Wild Gardens is the perfect introduction to the state's remarkable botanical diversity.

The full-color book normally sells for $34.95, but it's available to our members for only $29.71 with their 15% discount.

The debate over the proposal to breach the Sierra's O'Shaughnessy Dam, drain the reservoir behind it and restore Hetch Hetchy Valley to its former natural splendor is apt to intensify this summer with the release of a California Department of Water Resources study on the issue.

But preliminary comments from the agency indicate two things: 1) the restoration is technically possible without disrupting water supplies to San Francisco, Modesto and Turlock, and 2) it will cost a lot of money: From $4 billion to $8 billion, depending on whom you talk to.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle looks into the issue and the positions of the key players involved.

Richard Rhodes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has written the first major biography of John James Audubon in forty years, and the first to illuminate fully the private and family life of the master illustrator of the natural world.

Here is Audubon exploring the wilderness of birds - pelicans wading the shallows of interior rivers, songbirds flocking, passenger pigeons darkening the skies - and teaching himself to revivify them in glorious life-size images.

Here is a revelation of Audubon as the major American artist he is. And here he emerges for the first time in his full humanity - handsome, charming, volatile, ambitious, loving, canny, immensely energetic.

The hardcover volume normally retails for $30, but Yosemite Association members are afforded a 15% discount and can buy it now for only $25.50!