Most people reach Yosemite on roads they never think about. The Wawona Road climbs in from the south. Tioga Road crosses the high country to the east side. Both were cut by hand. Most of the hands were Chinese.

Twenty-three miles in a winter

At the end of 1874, Henry Washburn and his partners set out to build a toll road from Wawona into Yosemite Valley. Their contractor hired mostly Chinese immigrants. The crews worked straight through the snowy winter of 1875. They had picks, shovels, axes, wheelbarrows and blasting powder. They finished all 23 miles in about four and a half months.

Eight years later a mining company wanted a wagon road over the crest to its silver claims near Tioga Pass. The Great Sierra Wagon Road ran 56 miles. One report says 250 Chinese and 90 white laborers finished it in 130 days. They had no machines. They blasted granite with powder and stacked retaining walls by hand. Much of what they built is still under the pavement of Tioga Road today.

The mine shut down soon after. The road outlived it by more than a century.

The kitchen downhill

The Washburns also ran the Wawona Hotel. Every summer they hired more than twenty Chinese workers. These men grew the produce and ran the laundry. They also staffed a kitchen that served as many as 450 guests a night.

The head chef was Ah You. He was born in China in 1848 and came to California at 21. Henry Washburn hired him in 1886. He ran the kitchen until 1910 and stayed on staff until 1933. That year the hotel changed hands, and the new owners dismissed every Chinese employee. The Washburns kept a home in Merced for their former staff. They came to Ah You's funeral when he died in his nineties.

The laundry and the bunkhouse sat downhill from the hotel, out of sight of the porch. Guests ate the food and slept on clean sheets without ever seeing who made either one. A 1917 laundry building survives. The Park Service restored it in 2019. It now stands in the Yosemite History Center at Wawona, open from late spring into fall.

The cook who helped make the Park Service

Tie Sing was born in Virginia City, Nevada, on September 1, 1865. He was head cook for the U.S. Geological Survey from 1888 to 1918. Survey crews spent months mapping the Sierra, and he fed them in places no wagon could reach. He cooled meat by wrapping it in wet newspaper in the wind. He let biscuit dough rise draped over the back of a warm mule.

In 1899 the Survey named a 10,552-foot peak on Yosemite's southeastern edge after him. Sing Peak was a rare honor for a living man. It was rarer still for a Chinese man in the years of the Exclusion Act. He never could become a citizen. His wife and children stayed in Hong Kong.

In 1915 Stephen Mather hired him to cook for a two-week trip through the Sierra. Mather was trying to win over a group of business and cultural leaders to the cause of national parks. He believed a man who ate badly after a cold night would not care how fine the scenery was. Tie Sing's dinners did their part. Robert Sterling Yard joined Mather on a trip the next summer. He wrote later, “I shall not forget that dinner.” The National Park Service was created the next year.

Tie Sing died on August 19, 1918, still working for the Survey. A wagon went off a collapsing road in San Benito County. He fell into a creek and struck his head on a rock. He was 52.

His name nearly disappeared with him. Park ranger Yenyen Chan brought it back in 2011 with a short documentary on Chinese Americans in Yosemite. Since 2013 hikers have made a six-day pilgrimage to Sing Peak every year.

Why it stayed with me

I first saw the Sierra as a kid on family camping and ski trips. These days I ride those same roads on a motorcycle. You feel a mountain road differently on a bike. You notice the cuts in the granite and the old stone walls holding up the outside curves. For years I never asked who built them. The answer was sitting in plain sight the whole time. It just never made it onto a sign.