Photographer: Ralph H. Anderson (source)

In winter, the Glacier Point Road closes to auto traffic at Badger Pass, roughly five miles from the road's entrance, but Glacier Point is still accessible if you have skis or snowshoes and don't mind the 11-mile (18 km) trek. The Glacier Point Gift Shop gets rechristened the Glacier Point Ski Hut and you can reserve beds for an overnight stay so you don't have to ski twenty miles in a single day. The Ski Hut wasn't built until 1997,^[1] but given the morning light direction here (this photo looks more or less north), it's likely these skiers had spent the night at Glacier Point - possibly at the Mountain House or the Glacier Point Hotel, which were still standing in 1942. And apparently whatever they added to their morning coffee bucked them up considerably, because the outer skier is perched right on top of the guardrail that's intended to protect you from a 3,000-foot drop (compare with this photo taken the previous June). They don't make an appearance in this book, so apparently their trust in the integrity of that snowbank was well placed.