A blaze raging through the Sierra National Forest in Fresno County has burned through part of a large grove of giant sequoias, setting at least a few of the rare, towering trees on fire.
The Garnet fire, now at more than 49,000 acres, swept through the McKinley grove sometime Sunday night or early Monday morning, according to Jay Tracy, a spokesperson for the fire.
An inversion layer — a weather phenomenon that acts like a lid on the blaze — lifted and the fire “started throwing some spots,” he said, referring to tossing embers that ignite spot fires. In this case, those spot fires were in the tops of trees.
An aerial assessment mid-morning Monday showed flames in the crown of one of the giant sequoias, which can grow to more than 300 feet, said Adrienne Freeman, spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. Later in the afternoon, she reported that several more were on fire.
Smokejumpers — wildland firefighters with tree-climbing expertise — are being dispatched to the area.
Freeman said she’s glad the damage isn’t worse. Some people have mistakenly described the fire as a running-crown fire — one of the most destructive kinds — that shoots through the canopies of trees, she said. But it appears the blaze remained on the ground. However, there’s nothing stopping new embers from landing in the grove and wreaking havoc.
“I’m not breathing a big sigh of relief yet, just because the possibility of embers is not gone,” she said.
In a video shot in the grove around noon, a firefighter pans his camera to reveal trees against a yellow sky thick with smoke.
Narrating, he says the fire is “pretty low intensity right now,” but goes on to point out several trees on fire. He points to one he suspects is hosting flames, explaining, “I can hear popping over there.” Then he highlights several others.
Yellow hose snakes around trees on the forest floor. It’s a sprinkler system set up before the blaze arrived to protect the sequoias and continue to shoot water onto their hefty trunks, according to the video provided by USFS.
Giant sequoias are found only in California, primarily on the western slopes of the southern Sierra. Of the Golden State’s roughly 80 sequoia groves, McKinley was ranked among the most vulnerable to fire, according to Ben Blom of the Save the Redwoods League, citing a report that has not been publicly released.
The grove, home to roughly 200 behemoth trees, is one of the few that has not burned in the last 10 years. Some work has been done to reduce fuels in the roughly 100-acre stretch of forest, but not all areas were treated.
With their towering canopies and thick bark, giant sequoias have adapted to withstand low-intensity fire, and even need it to reproduce. But ferocious fire in recent years, fueled by climate change, has proved fatal to the trees experts once thought were impervious to flame. An estimated 20% of the world’s mature giant sequoias have died in the last decade due to severe wildfires, according to the league.
“Every grove and every monarch [mature tree] within those groves is really critical to save and protect,” Blom said.
Fire personnel took protective measures in the McKinley grove even before the Garnet blaze arrived. They laid sprinkler lines and wrapped the trunks of some of the hulking trees with a fire-resistant material akin to tin foil. Duff was cleared from the forest floor.
Similar tactics were employed in 2021 in an effort to save General Sherman — the largest tree on Earth by volume — from the KNP Complex fire that scorched large swaths of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
On Friday, firefighters were feeling hopeful. Temperatures dipped and relative humidity climbed, offering the possibility of a tamer fire to battle.
But the fire on Sunday exploded dramatically on the northwestern front — in the direction of McKinley grove. Giant columns of smoke that could be seen for miles rose into the air.
The fire grew about 2,500 acres overnight into Monday morning, up from roughly 12,600 acres the previous day, said Tracy, the fire spokesperson.
Several factors are working against firefighters now.
There’s been no recorded fire in the burn area for the last 80 years, said Tracy, who works for the Fresno Fire Department. He estimated there are more than 400 tons of dead and downed material per acre that could go up in flames.
There’s also a significant number of snags, or standing dead and dying trees, which can fall onto firefighters with potentially fatal consequences. The risk was so high in the area near the McKinley grove that crews were yanked Sunday night, leaving no one to conduct on-the-ground assessments of tree damage.
That’s all on top of the fact that the topography is steep and rugged.
Still, ”everybody is really, really working their tails off to put this fire out just as soon as they can,” he said. It’s now 14% contained.
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