Firefighters Race to Preserve Ancient Sequoia Grove at Risk From 55,000-Acre Blaze

Firefighters are racing to save some of the world’s largest trees from destruction, as a nearly 55,000-acre blaze tears through the Sierra Nevada forests.

The Garnet Fire has exploded across Fresno County, with only 14% containment as of Tuesday. According to the U.S. Forest Service, the fire ignited Aug. 24 after a lightning strike in the foothills, triggering partial park closures and evacuation orders throughout the region.

Over 2,200 personnel have been summoned so far to combat a blaze that officials say has demanded “aggressive fire-fighting tactics.”

Forest Service crews in late August, anticipating Garnet’s spread, surrounded the trees with a round-the-clock sprinkler system and deployed smoke jumpers to climb trees and extinguish any flames in their giant canopies.

In a Facebook post last week, the U.S. Forest Service announced that strong winds pushed the blaze north toward McKinley Grove, which is home to roughly 200 ancient sequoia trees. Some of the giants are estimated to be upwards of 3,000 years old.

Ben Blom, the director of restoration and stewardship at the Save the Redwoods League, told KQED that fire hasn’t touched the grove in nearly a century.

“It’s burning in an area that has a lot of accumulated dead trees, accumulated fuel on the ground,” Blom said. “Conditions that are really hard to slow fire spread.”

Blom stressed the precariousness of the situation, especially given that the Sierra Nevada’s Western slope is the only known place in the world where giant sequoias naturally grow — but the trees are increasingly under threat, as wildfire has destroyed a staggering number in recent years.

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve lost close to 20% of all of the old giant sequoias in the world — here in California,” Blom said.

Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, told KQED that although giant sequoias are environmentally adapted to wildfire, the trees are more vulnerable in a “new era of giant, intense fires.”

“Historically, we thought about giant sequoias as being almost fireproof with their thick bark and super long potential lifetimes,” Field said. “It’s not so much that the trees have changed. It’s that the ferocity of the fires has really changed.”

To protect the trees, firefighters have to “reduce the fuel on the ground,” said Field, referring to dead branches and natural litter, to prevent the fire from carrying upwards into the tree canopies.

They also deploy a “pump system that can spray water across the forest.”

Embers from the fire’s front did get lodged in some of the branches of several trees, the Forest Service said, although luckily, there hasn’t yet been an instance where a tree became fully engulfed by fire.

Joe Zwierzchowski, a spokesperson assigned to the Garnet Fire, told KQED that as of 1 p.m. on Tuesday, crews were awaiting smoke jumpers to arrive and begin work on the branches.

He reported that the fire has dropped to moderate levels within the grove, which is a promising sign for the trees.

Blom celebrated the firefighters on the ground for their continuous efforts in combating the blaze.

“They got in there, and right away, started working on protecting this grove,” Blom said.