About PassOpenings
A few dozen mountain roads in America close every winter and reopen when the plows finally win — Going-to-the-Sun over Logan Pass, Tioga over the Sierra crest, Trail Ridge, Beartooth, Independence, and the rest of the roster. Every spring, travelers planning a June trip and locals refreshing the plow report ask the same question: when does the road open?
The park and highway-department pages answer for today. They don't answer for the week you booked five months out. That takes the history — and the history was scattered across press-release archives, old park pages, and newspaper stories. PassOpenings gathers it: every opening and closing date on record for each pass, the median and the freak years, and the odds a road is open by the dates you care about.
Where the dates come from
Agency records, first and always: National Park Service opening-date tables and news releases, state highway-department archives, and — for individual years where an agency list is incomplete — established local newspapers. Every pass page lists its sources at the bottom of the record, with the date we last checked them. When we can't source a year, we leave it out rather than guess.
What this site is not
A road-status authority. Conditions on these roads change by the hour, gates close for weather in mid-July, and the only word that counts is the operating agency's. Every page here links the official status page — check it before you drive, every time.