Highway 120 into Yosemite National Park still closed, no estimate on re-open

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK (KFSN) -- Park Ranger Jamie Richards has spent the last month telling visitors that Highway 120 into Yosemite is closed while crews work to repair a 200 foot stretch of failed road.

"This road has been here since the 1930's and this is the first major issue that we've had, so what we're doing is we're going to re stabilize and put the road back the way it was."

The highway has been unsafe for travel since late February when storms saturated the soil under the roadway causing it to slide downhill.

Special tarps have been brought in to prevent anymore slides while crews excavate the area.

"The uphill slope hasn't been impacted so the uphill slope above the road there was not cracking there, it was from the road down the hill to the toe of the bottom of the slope," said Richards.

Weather permitting, crews are working 24/7 to rebuild the roadway-- however there is no time table to when crews will reopen it again to traffic.

"We're making significant progress as we continue to put in the drainage to bring it back. We really don't have an estimate at this point in time, it's too early in the project to tell," said Richards.

Michael Pieper is an engineer on the project-- he said crews still need to dig down another 20 feet so they can insert a special pipe that will be able to handle a large amount of water without compromising the integrity of the road during heavy storms.

"We still have not found the bottom yet, the bottom of the failure, so once we find that then we could start building back up and it's going to be a combination of a lot of big rock and a lot of drains."