Groveland Never Retired Its Original Road, and This Saturday Proves It

Saturday morning, somewhere between 9 and 11, a stretch of pavement outside Moccasin will fill with orange cones, volunteers in reflective vests, and trash bags instead of trucks. Old Priest Grade closes completely for its annual cleanup, a partnership between Tuolumne County Public Works, Visit Tuolumne County, and the Yosemite Climbing Association. For two hours, the road that has connected the valley floor to Big Oak Flat since before California had a state highway system goes quiet.

Anyone who lives here already knows to take New Priest Grade that morning. Nobody needs a map for it. What's easy to miss is what that detour actually reveals: for a couple of hours, every car, pickup, and delivery van headed up or down the hill funnels onto the newer road, and the newer road was never really built to carry all of it comfortably. Groveland didn't retire its original route up the mountain in 1913. It just built a second one and kept both.

A Hill With Two Answers Since 1913

Before either road existed, there was Priest Station, a mining supply store established in 1849 near the base of what locals now call Grizzly Gulch. Miners and pack animals climbed a rough trail on the gulch's south side to reach the gold camps at Big Oak Flat and a settlement then called Garrote, later renamed Groveland once Yosemite tourist traffic started rolling through in the 1870s. That trail was so punishing that Tuolumne County chartered a replacement in 1859, a toll road called the Grizzly Gulch Wagon Road. It's the same road drivers now call Old Priest Grade.

Here's the detail that surprised me most in tracking this down: the wagon road wasn't the problem that eventually got fixed. The automobile was. By 1901, early steam cars could occasionally muscle up the grade, but gasoline-powered cars of the era mostly couldn't. So in 1912, the communities of Big Oak Flat and Groveland pooled local donations and hired a surveyor to lay out an easier route along the gulch's north side. That project became New Priest Grade, finished in 1913 and folded into the state highway system by 1915. It's been part of State Route 120 since 1934.

The two roads sit across the gulch from each other, close enough that drivers on one can watch traffic crawl or fly by on the other. They're built for opposite instincts:

• Old Priest Grade: roughly 1.8 to 2.5 miles, drops close to 1,600 feet, with grades reported between 17 and 20 percent in the steepest stretches. Trucks, buses, motorhomes, and trailers are banned outright, capped at a 7,500-pound weight limit.
• New Priest Grade: about two and a half times longer than Old Priest, threading through more than a hundred curves at a steadier, gentler grade in the range of 4 to 5 percent. No weight restrictions. Built specifically so the vehicles Old Priest can't handle would have somewhere to go.

That split hasn't changed in over a century. Groveland didn't tear out the old road once the new one worked. It kept the wagon route running, weight-restricted it for safety, and let the two roads split the traffic by vehicle type instead of by preference.

Why Locals Still Take the Steep One

If New Priest Grade was engineered to be the safer, easier option, you'd expect it to be everyone's default. It isn't, at least not among the people who drive this hill regularly rather than as a once-a-year trip to Yosemite.

Talk to anyone who splits their errands between Groveland and the valley floor and a pattern shows up fast. Drivers in pickups and regular cars often still choose Old Priest Grade, because it's shorter and saves ten to fifteen minutes over the New Priest climb, and because New Priest's more than one hundred curves come with their own frustrations: a double yellow line that permits no passing for the entire descent, heavier RV and trailer traffic funneled there by the weight restriction on Old Priest, and a reputation for drawing more attention from the California Highway Patrol, in part because the straight, sightline-heavy overlook near the top gives patrol cars a clear view of the whole climb.

In other words, the road built to be the safe, modern replacement ended up carrying the slow-moving, heavily loaded, more closely watched traffic. The road built for 1850s wagons became the quicker option for people who know how to drive a grade and own a vehicle light enough to legally use it. Old Priest Grade isn't dangerous nostalgia. It's a functioning shortcut that happens to require good brakes and low gears on the way down.

That's also why the road demands real respect rather than casual use. Wet pavement and rockslide risk are documented hazards on the grade, and the county has invested in guardrail and repaving work over the years specifically because of the steep drop-offs. Old Priest rewards drivers who already know it. It punishes anyone treating it like a scenic detour.

What Two Hours Without It Actually Tests

Which brings the story back to Saturday. From 9 to 11 a.m. on September 12, Old Priest Grade closes entirely for the cleanup, and New Priest Grade becomes the only way up or down that stretch of the mountain. It's a small closure on paper, two hours on a weekend morning, but it's a useful stress test for a question locals rarely have to answer directly: how much of Groveland's daily traffic does the "old," bypassed road actually carry?

Quite a bit, based on how often it comes up. The cleanup happens every year, which means Tuolumne County and the volunteer groups running it have learned to plan around a predictable spike in New Priest traffic for those two hours, morning trips to Sonora, deliveries headed toward Moccasin and the Don Pedro Reservoir area, and anyone making the climb back up into town. None of that traffic disappears when Old Priest closes. It just gets absorbed, briefly, by the road that was supposed to have replaced it eleven decades ago.

That's the part worth sitting with. A road that opened in 1859, got officially superseded in 1913, and technically stopped being "the highway" in 1934 still does enough daily work that closing it for two hours requires advance notice and a public announcement. Groveland never treated New Priest Grade as a full replacement. It treated it as an addition, built by local donation to solve one specific problem, the automobile, while leaving the original solution in place for everyone else.

That instinct shows up elsewhere around town too, in a place that tends to layer new answers onto old ones rather than erasing what came before. The wagon road stayed. The name changed from Garrote to Groveland once tourism arrived, but the town didn't. Even the cleanup itself is volunteer-run by the same kind of community effort that built New Priest Grade in the first place, just with trash bags instead of a survey crew.

If you're headed up the hill this weekend, take New Priest Grade between 9 and 11 on Saturday morning, same as everyone else who's done this before. By Saturday afternoon, Old Priest Grade reopens, and the hill goes back to running the way it has for most of the last century: two roads, one gulch, and a community that never saw a reason to pick just one.

Want more of what daily life actually looks like around Groveland and Pine Mountain Lake, from the roads people actually drive to the properties that make sense once you understand the terrain? DJ Kraft has spent a career here, not just selling it. Let's Connect if you want a local's read on this hill and everything built along it.