Fire threatens giant sequoia groves
by Brian Leubitz
The Yosemite area Rim fire is huge, and doesn’t show many indications of slowing down anytime soon:
Firefighters on Monday dealt with fierce winds that were pushing the giant Rim Fire north toward the communities of Tuolumne City, Twain Harte and Ponderosa Pines.
Overall, fire crews reported progress slowing the advance of the blaze, which had grown to more 235 square miles on the western edge of Yosemite and was threatening thousands of homes, many in the hills above the Gold Rush-era city of Sonora.
Beyond the concerns that this will scare away tourists (myself included…I was planning a trip soon), the fire is now endangering some of the oldest and largest trees in the world. Two of the three largest Sequoia groves are at risk, and firefighters are working to protect them.
It turns out how we think about fire fighting has changed a lot in the last 30 years. Simply putting out every fire isn’t wise, but we also can’t be setting controlled burns every few years. Nature has evolved with a very delicate balance, and we’ve been failing that for over 100 years in the American West. The combination of our fire management strategies with climate changed has made our forests a disaster waiting to happen.
Best of luck to our firefighters. Stay safe.
Photo credit: NASA Goddard Space center on Flickr. The Rim Fire can be seen as a bright blob directly south of Lake Tahoe. The fire is now bigger than Lake Tahoe.
We were in South Lake Tahoe this week end
You could see a haze and smell the smoke
People were being advised not to stay outside too long because of the smoke
Do they know how the fire started ??
… and they’ve done it for hundreds, maybe thousands of years before Europeans arrived, reshaping the environment in the process.