Fires threaten Giant Forest redwoods

A pair of wildfires burning in Sequoia National Park were getting dangerously close to California’s famed Giant Forest on Tuesday, prompting concern about the fate of the world’s largest trees.

Park officials said that the lightning-caused KNP Complex fires, which totaled 5,861 acres, had a huge potential for growth because of their remote locations in dry terrain, and they had been elevated to one of the state’s highest firefighting priorities.

An increasing numbers of hand crews, supported by seven aircraft, were working to slow the run of the Colony Fire, near the park’s Crystal Cave Road, toward Giant Forest, which was 2 miles to the east. The Paradise Fire to the south, meanwhile, was exploding in all directions, and though farther from the coveted giant sequoia stands, posed a similar threat.

“We’re poised to take action on park facilities and the groves as needed,” Mark Ruggiero, a fire information officer for the park, told The Chronicle. “We’re getting more crews and more equipment in now.”

Sequoia National Park remained closed to the public after being shut down over the weekend because of the fires. Those living in the Mineral King area on the park’s south side were ordered to evacuate while an evacuation warning was in effect for the town of Three Rivers at the park’s southern entrance. Employees at Giant Forest and at the park’s Ash Mountain headquarters near Three Rivers began evacuating Tuesday.

Kings Canyon National Park, which is adjacent to and jointly

managed with Sequoia, remained open.

The threat to Sequoia, and to Giant Forest in particular, was especially worrisome in light of last year’s Castle Fire, which burned in and around the park and wiped out an estimated 10% to 14% of all the world’s sequoia trees.

While sequoias were once believed to be mostly immune to wildfires and, in fact, reliant on them to release seeds for reproduction, the trees have increasingly fallen victim to the bigger, hotter fires that have resulted largely because of climate change.

“The fire activity we saw last year shows they can’t handle unlimited fire,” said Rebecca Paterson, public affairs specialist for the park. “We are very concerned about threats to the groves.”

Giant Forest is home to more than 2,000 large sequoias. These include the General Sherman tree, considered the largest living thing on Earth.

The draw of the big trees at Giant Forest is punctuated by their accessibility. The park’s Generals Highway leads right to the grove, and the trees are peppered by a network of trails. A small village that accommodated visitors once sat beneath the sequoias, but it has been moved 7 miles north because of the harm it was causing the tree roots.

A smaller, less known stand of sequoias called the Suwanee Grove stood even closer to the Colony Fire, just over a mile away as of Tuesday morning.

At other popular sequoia groves threatened by flames in the past, such as in Yosemite National Park, firefighters have run sprinklers and cut fire lines to protect trees. Officials at Sequoia said they hadn’t yet resorted to such tactics, though they would do what was necessary to safeguard Giant Forest.

“We’ve been painting the mountains red with retardant for the last couple of days,” Park Superintendent Clay Jordan said at a community meeting in Three Rivers on Sunday night.

While officials said there was a good chance that one fire, or both, would reach Giant Forest, they hoped it would not hit the trees with the same fury as the Castle Fire.

The strong winds that fueled last year’s blaze are not as prevalent in the area where the KNP Complex is burning, and Giant Forest is not as steep and therefore subject to powerful uphill runs of fire like other parts of the park. Plus, park officials have regularly done preemptive burning in Giant Forest, so there’s less vegetation to feed a wildfire.

Still, the areas burning were ground zero for California’s tree die-off during last decade’s drought, and dead and downed trees were providing ready tinder.

The fires were first spotted Friday morning, after a Thursday night storm produced at least 132 lightning strikes. A third fire, to the north, was quickly contained by firefighters. The Colony and Paradise fires, however, were in areas that are far from roads and hard for crews to reach. As of Tuesday, containment remained at 0%.

“These are two tough fires,” Ruggiero said, “and they’re both in difficult terrain.”