Yokuts languages are well known for their complex morphophonological patterns (e.g., Newman 1944, Archangeli 1983, 1991, Guekguezian 2017, Golston, Guekguezian & Krämer 2019). This paper argues that vowels that alternate with zero in these languages are not homogeneous in terms of their underlying representation. The analysis builds on work by Zimmermann (2019) in the Gradient Symbolic Representations framework (GSR; Smolensky & Goldrick 2016, Rosen 2016), and demonstrates that a full GSR account of these languages' patterns requires at least three degrees of underlying activation for alternating vowels. Crucially, intermediate degrees of activation are not limited to ghost vowels -- i.e., vowels whose position and/or quality is lexically-idiosyncratic. A GSR account requires that even predictable "epenthetic" vowels within roots must have an intermediate degree of underlying activation. Multiple degrees of activation for apparently similar vowels must co-exist; not all epenthetic vowels are equal.