Embers launched by the Garnet Fire were smoldering Tuesday in the high branches of several trees in a cherished grove of iconic giant sequoia trees in the Sierra Nevada, and a team of firefighting “smoke jumpers” was on the way to try to put them out.
Fire officials believed the tree-canopy fires were the last remaining threat to McKinley Grove, after firefighters clearing underbrush and debris, and even deploying sprinklers succeeded in keeping flames that entered the grove from inflicting significant damage.
On Sunday night and into Monday morning, when the north side of the 55,000-acre blaze in the mountains east of Fresno exploded in a 10,000-acre run, it spat embers across a valley into McKinley Grove, a popular cluster of giant sequoias — a tree found only in California. The firebrands, likely bits of bark and branches, landed in the trees and have been burning in built-up debris on branches, said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Joe Zwierzchowski.
“We’ve identified which trees are holding embers, Zwierzchowski said. “So far, so good — nothing is engulfed in flames and fully on fire.”
The small spots of fire are out of reach of firefighters’ hoses, Zwierzchowski said. “You just can’t shoot water that high,” he said, adding that hoses can squirt water upward a maximum of about 50 or 60 feet.
So the Forest Service has called in a team of smoke jumpers, whose work usually involves parachuting into remote locations to fight wildfires. Because their parachutes can get caught in branches, these specialized firefighters “are good at climbing tall trees and retrieving items,” Zwierzchowski said.
The climbers were expected to reach the grove Tuesday afternoon. Likely, their work will require carrying a shovel or rake up each ember-holding tree and knocking the smoldering material out so it falls to the ground.
The forest floor has seen some burning, and much clearing of vegetation and debris by firefighters aware for a week that the fire could threaten the grove, Zwierzchowski said. Key to suppressing the fire were dozens of sprinklers drawing from water tanks and running continuously since Sept. 3, he said. The devices nearly saturated the ground, and boosted humidity in the grove by 20%, dampening fire spread, Zwierzchowski said.
Despite the preparation, the 10 or so firefighters on the ground in the grove had to pull out overnight Sunday because of the ferocity of the blaze’s leading edge, Zwierzchowski said.
“There was too much fire, there was too much danger,” he said. “They made sure the sprinklers were running. They made every preparation that they could to leave the grove in the best condition they could.”
But days of preparation left little for the fire to burn, keeping the intensity down, Zwierzchowski said.
The threat to McKinley Grove was recognized soon after lightning ignited the Garnet Fire on Aug. 24, and flames tore into an area of the Sierra with no recorded fire history and massive amounts of dead timber, undergrowth and dry debris, said Ben Blom, director of stewardship and restoration at Save the Redwoods League. It was, Blom said, “in some ways a worst-case scenario” thanks to the accumulated fire fuels.
The grove was identified this past spring by the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition, composed of groups managing the state’s giant sequoia forests, as one of the most vulnerable to fire, Blom said.
Giant sequoias have evolved with fire over millions of years, with low-intensity flames opening their seed cones.
Their groves typically burn every 10 years, and vegetation and debris don’t build up to levels that feed flames of tree-killing intensity, Blom said.
But, Blom said, McKinley Grove has seen little fuels-reduction by people. “The Forest Service started work in there last year and ran out of money and couldn’t finish the project,” Blom said.
Save the Redwoods estimates McKinley Grove holds 150 to 200 giant sequoias knows as “monarchs” for being more than four feet in diameter, plus many smaller trees of that species.
“It’s a spectacular grove,” Blom said. “One of the things that’s unique about this grove is it’s really isolated from other giant sequoia groves. It’s kind of an island — it’s isolated from where most of the giant sequoia groves are, which is further south.”
Fire has swept through many of those groves in recent years. In 2021, firefighters wrapped trees with fireproof aluminum blankets in the famous Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park, home to five of the world’s 10 largest trees, including the largest of them all, the General Sherman Tree. While that forest’s huge trees survived the flames, a fire the previous year killed between 7,500 and 10,600 giant sequoias, an estimated 10% to 14% of all the trees of that species in the world.
At McKinley Grove, firefighters who had been working with hand tools came across a surprise, a baby giant sequoia only a couple of feet tall, amid some manzanita, Zwierzchowski said.
“They put a sprinkler on it,” he said, “and it’s good to go.”
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