Whew: (Most of) the Giant Sequoias Are Alright

The KNP Complex fire has spared most of the largest trees on earth from fatal burns

The Windy Fire blazes through the Long Meadow Grove of giant sequoia trees near The Trail of 100 Giants overnight in Sequoia National Forest on September 21, 2021 near California Hot Springs, California. As climate change and years of drought push wildfires to become bigger and hotter, many of the worlds biggest and oldest trees, the ancient sequoias, have been killed. The giant trees are among the world's biggest and live to more than 3,000 years, surviving hundreds of wildfires throughout their lifespans. The heat of normal wildfire of the past helped the trees reproduce but increasing fire intensity can now kill them. A single wildfire, the Castle fire, destroyed as much as 14 percent of all the world's giant sequoias in 2020. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Last week, TBI wrote on how park officials and fire crews began wrapping giant sequoias in protective foils. Though these gargantuan trees, like other coastal redwoods, are evolutionarily designed to survive wildfire burns, “extraordinary measures” were taken to ensure they continued to survive inside the park. And we’re happy to learn that the vast majority of these trees have come out on the other side of the KNP Complex fire — intact and still very much alive.

Because of the Climate Crisis, Sequoias Are Being Covered in Pop-Tarts Wrappers

By Monday, news outlets began reporting the flames surrounding the groves of these rare trees at California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks had mostly passed. Their salvation isn’t entirely tied to the aluminum sheets some of these sequoias were enveloped in, but rather the result of successfully implementing controlled burns that were performed around the trees in recent years, per SFGate.

The Four Guardsmen — a group of trees that form a natural entryway on the road to the Sequoia National Forest — were successfully protected from the KNP Complex fire by the removal of nearby vegetation; they, like the General Sherman Tree, were also wrapped fire-resistant material; yes: that metallic film that resembled a Pop-Tarts wrapper.

An Ode to Big Basin State Park, Which Has Been Devastated by the Wildfires

The Associated Press has noted that there’s, however, not a complete update on the full extent of damage in several other sequoia groves that were reached by a separate blaze. (Pictures of the iconic trees being charred by towering flames were shared wildly on social media—but again, they appear to be still generally OK.) The Windy Fire has, as of publishing, burned through the Peyrone and Red Hill groves, as well as a portion of the Long Meadow Grove along the Trail of 100 Giants; it’s unclear how many sequoias were damaged by either the wildfire.

Nevertheless: It looks like there, thankfully, wasn’t a repeat of last year’s ecological catastrophe when the Castle Fire killed off between 10% to 14% of all the sequoias in the world — most of which were in the Sequoia National Forest.

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The climate crisis is real. Reduce; reuse; recycle. And for the love of G*d: No more gender reveal parties… notably those that involve pyrotechnics.

For a quick reminder of how giant sequoias will fair during the climate crisis, revisit this piece on redwood forests TBI updated a few months back.