YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — Last year and the year before, in an unprecedented environmental disaster, wildfires in California’s Sequoia National Park and nearby national forests roared through treasured sequoia groves in the Southern Sierra Nevada, generating flames hundreds of feet high and killing nearly 20% of all the ancient trees left in the world.
But the Washburn fire burning now in Yosemite National Park, licking around the edges of roughly 500 giant sequoias in Mariposa Grove — some over 200 feet tall and more than 2,000 years old — so far hasn’t killed a single one of the massive trees there.
A big part of the reason, experts say, is that park officials for the past 50 years have lightly thinned trees and set controlled burns to remove dead wood and vegetation that had built up over more than century of fire suppression.
