Sequoias are his babies
In Crescent Meadow in the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park, a giant sequoia fell after a prescribed burn.
It had probably been there at least 2,000 years. It stood for two days with a fire burning inside its trunk before toppling.
“Everything dies. It was its time,” said Ben Jacobs, who was in charge of the 2011 burn.
Where the massive tree was uprooted, there is nothing short of a crater. In this footprint are dozens of teeny- tiny baby giant sequoias.
“The more you look, the more you see,” Ben said.
I was having to choose my steps, trying not to step on one.
Ben stopped and propped up a tilting feathery sprout.
“There you go, little guy,” he said, patting dirt around it.
He was worried about the babies. They needed the snowpack to keep them insulated from winter cold, and for years now there had been no blanket of white over the Sierra.
Sequoias need snow and they need fire. Their cones release seeds during f lames; the saplings need mineral soil to grow.
In the ’ 50s, scientists noticed that there were no new sequoias and thought they were on their way to extinction. It’s likely because natural fires were being suppressed.
People like Ben, who recently retired as the fuel resource specialist at Sequoia National Park, started putting fire back in the Sierra to restore the natural cycle and to avoid the overgrowth that would lead to super fires.
I first met Ben after the Rim fire in 2013.
During the weeks that the secondlargest wildfire in California’s history burned uncontrolled, they always said at the morning press briefings that Yosemite’s famed sequoia groves weren’t in danger.
But everyone knew that you couldn’t say with any certainty what that fire would spare. You only had to look at the giant fire cloud that rose every evening, see the blackened trees where fire had almost taken out base camp — twice.
Even veteran firefighters ( and at least one reporter) were scared.
Whispers started that there had been a daring, last- ditch effort to save the sequoia groves in that part of the Sierra by lighting back fires. They could have gotten out of control. No one would tell me details.
“You need to talk to Ben Jacobs. It was his operation,” they all said.
When I finally tracked him down weeks later in Three Rivers, he acknowledged being nervous that day.
“No one wants to be the guy who burned down Yosemite,” he said.
But he bristled when I called the back fires risky, because he felt the greater risk was doing nothing.
Now, with two more years of drought, protecting the sequoias and other trees has again come down to risky action versus risky inaction.
“Because of the drought, the trees are stressed. If we put fire into the landscape, we add to that stress,” he said. “If we don’t, the whole system might not be as resilient and we risk a fire when we most don’t want it on a hot and windy day.” Like Rim. “Do we wait until it rains and snows to burn again? Honestly, I don’t know — it’s a tough call,” he said. “We’re entering territory where we’ve never been. Is this a four- year drought or year four in a drought that keeps going? That’s the wild card.”
The meadow was still a stripe of deep, lush green. I could smell the pine, unlike at lower, drier elevations.
It’s very hard to look at a little giant sequoia without smiling.
I loved it all with a sudden panicky desperation.
“The vegetation, the animals, everything is thirsty,” Ben said. “We thought water was a renewable resource. But we’re finding out it’s not as renewable as we would like.”