LOS ANGELES — Firefighters on Monday were racing to protect a grove of ancient sequoia trees from the 2,340-acre Washburn fire in Yosemite National Park in California.
The fire, which more than doubled in size over the weekend, was within striking distance of the park’s Mariposa Grove, home to more than 500 mature sequoias including the Grizzly Giant, a 209-foot behemoth estimated to be about 3,000 years old.
“We really don’t want to leave this one to chance because this really is such an iconic tree,” forest ecologist Garrett Dickman said in a recent video showing sprinklers spraying water around the base of the Grizzly Giant.
“We’re trying to give it some preventative first aid, really, and make sure that when the fire — if the fire — comes over here, that this tree is protected,” he said. “That is, to cool flames and to increase the relative humidity and decrease the fire behavior around this tree.”
But crews had their work cut out for them: The fire on Monday morning remained 0% contained, officials said.
The blaze, which ignited Thursday near the park’s Washburn trail, was feeding on “heavy dead and down fuels,” according to the U.S. Forest Service, including vegetation dried by the West’s worsening drought.
“They’re dealing with complicated terrain and there’s not a lot of natural barriers we can use — things like lakes and roads that the fire won’t cross,” said Forest Service spokesman Stanley Bercovitz.
The fire is also threatening the community of Wawona, where mandatory evacuation orders remain in place and Highway 41 is closed from the South Entrance to Henness Ridge Road.
Sequoias are known to withstand heat, and in fact have long relied on fire for reproduction. But California’s new breed of hotter, faster and more frequent fires fueled by climate change have proven a formidable foe for the giants, with last year’s KNP Complex and Windy fires destroying about 3,600 of the trees in Sequoia National Forest and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks — an estimated 3% to 5% of the world’s sequoia population.
The year prior, the Castle fire in Sequoia National Park wiped out an estimated 10% of the world’s sequoias, with experts warning that extreme heat and drought were sapping moisture from the trees and impairing their defenses.
Bercovitz on Monday said the Washburn fire was “bumped up against” the northern line of Mariposa Grove, where firefighters were laying hand lines and lining up for defense.
“The grove is threatened but it’s not imminent,” he said. “Now it’s just a matter of getting as many resources on it as possible.”
Nearly 550 personnel have been assigned to the blaze with more on the way, he said.
“They’ve ordered a lot of engines and a lot of crews, so that’ll start bumping up. This is getting high priority,” he said.
The KNP Complex last year led to one of the most indelible images from the 2021 fire season: the massive General Sherman tree wrapped in protective foil.
Crews battling the Washburn fire have not yet turned to foil to defend the Grizzly Giant, but Bercovitz said some of the sprinklers wetting it on Monday were the same ones used on the General Sherman last year.
So far, at least, the fire is staying close to the ground and is “mainly terrain driven,” he said.
But while crews were not expecting to see strong wind at the fire on Monday, they will be contending with increased heat and reduced relative humidity, according to Andy Bollenbacher, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Hanford.
Bollenbacher said Monday could be the hottest day on the blaze so far, with temperatures slated to climb into the mid-80s and humidity projected to drop as low as 15%.
He said there may be a slight midweek reprieve before the heat picks back up on Friday and into the weekend, but cautioned that any relief would be minimal.
“It’ll go from being extremely hot to being really hot,” he said. “It’s going to start cooking again by Friday, Saturday.”
The fire has created large plumes visible from miles away, and Bollenbacher said smoke was affecting Yosemite Valley as well as portions of the Sacramento Valley and the Bay Area, where air quality advisories have been issued.
“The smoke is going west, northwest of the fire — that whole area is being polluted quite a bit,” he said.
The plume was so intense that on Saturday, a tree branch was “sent into the air from the powerful updraft produced by the fire,” the Forest Service said, and “as it dropped back to earth, it narrowly missed two firefighting aircraft.”
One Twitter user captured an audio recording of the pilot communicating with a dispatcher after the incident.
“Just wanted to let you know a branch went right over the top of us — pretty good size, probably 50 feet above us coming down, and fell right in between Tanker 103 and myself,” the pilot can be heard saying.
A public community update on the fire will be held at 7 p.m. on Monday at the Oakhurst Community Center, officials said.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
