The Latest Breaking News from Sierra Nevada

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Admirers of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains are familiar with the swaths of blackened trees flanking its sprawling green forest ranges. A new University of California, Berkeley study quantifies that devastation, finding nearly a third of southern Sierra conifer forests have died in the last decade.

In downtown L.A., in the parking lot of the Automobile Club of Southern California, sits a quaint monument, one century old. It’s a cross section of a giant sequoia, propped on its side, with arrows pointing to tree rings marking era-defining events. Meanwhile, in the Sierra Nevada, thousands of crown-scorched…

LOS ANGELES — A combination of heat, low humidity and parched vegetation continues to bedevil firefighters battling an inferno burning in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Yosemite that has forced thousands to flee their homes.

LOS ANGELES — Firefighters were struggling to battle California’s largest fire of the season so far, a fast-moving inferno tearing through the Sierra Nevada foothills west of Yosemite National Park that has burned at least 10 structures, forced several thousand people to flee their homes and is threatening multiple mountain…

LOS ANGELES —Firefighters were struggling to battle California’s largest fire of the season so far, a fast-moving inferno tearing through the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Yosemite that has burned at least 10 structures, forced several thousand people to flee their homes and is threatening multiple mountain communities.

GREENVILLE, Calif. — A burn scar in Northern California offers an unsettling glimpse into what forests across the Sierra Nevada could become. Bare tree carcasses are strewn across the dun-colored hills. Rock outcroppings jut out like bones.

On a recent camping trip to Kings Canyon National Park I had the opportunity to escape the light-polluted vistas of the city and look through a pair of binoculars at the stars under a dark Sierra Nevada sky.

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…

GRASS VALLEY, Calif. — Five years ago, Canadian mining executive Ben Mossman came to this little Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, planning to strike it rich.