Yosemite wildfire smoke chokes national park's views and air quality
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[July 11, 2022]
By Steve Gorman
(Reuters) -A wildfire threatening some of
the world's oldest giant sequoia trees in California's Yosemite National
Park expanded five-fold over the weekend as smoke prompted air quality
alerts throughout the park and obscured views of its famed scenery.
As of Sunday, the blaze had scorched nearly 1,600 acres (648 hectares)
of timber and brush at the southern end of the park, up from 250 acres
on Friday, a day after fire was first reported by visitors on the
Washburn Trail of the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.
National Park Service personnel immediately closed the Mariposa Grove,
home to more than 500 mature giant sequoias, and on Friday evacuated the
adjacent community of Wawona and the Wawona Hotel and campground.
Coming at the height of the summer tourist season, the evacuations
displaced an estimated 1,600 people in all, according to Park Service
spokesperson Nancy Phillipe. The Park Service also has shut down the
southern entrance to the park, which Phillipe said draws about 4 million
visitors a year.
The park's best-known attractions, including Yosemite Valley, remain
accessible to visitors from its western entrance. But smoke and soot
have dimmed views of landmarks such as the towering granite formations
of El Capitan and Half Dome, as well as Bridalveil Fall and surrounding
cliffs.
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Federal wildfire officials on Sunday warned that air quality for
particulate matter had reached unhealthy levels across much of the park.
While flames stoked by extremely dry, hot conditions worsening on Sunday
have burned largely unchecked, none of Yosemite's landmark sequoias,
some of them over 3,000 years old and given names, has yet been lost,
Phillipe said.
Firefighters were taking special measures to protect the grove, clearing
away undergrowth that could add to the fuel bed and deploying
ground-based sprinkler systems to increase humidity levels around them.
"We're feeling confident of the plan we have in place today," Phillipe
told Reuters by phone.
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![](../images/071122PIX/news_d5.jpg)
Visitors check out the view from the east end of the Wawona Tunnel
into Yosemite Valley, showing three major landmarks, from the left,
El Capitan, Half Dome and Bridalveil Fall, obscured by thick smoke
in the area from the wildfire burning to the south in the Mariposa
Grove of Giant Sequoias, at Yosemite National Park, California,
U.S., July 9, 2022. Courtesy of U.S. National Park Service/Handout
via REUTERS
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The cause of the blaze remained under investigation,
and no injuries have been reported, officials said.
But in one brush with disaster on Sunday, the crew of an "air attack
plane," which operates as a control tower in the sky directing
planes and helicopters fighting the blaze, reported being nearly
struck by flying tree debris carried aloft in swirling winds of the
fire's smoke column, fire command spokesperson Stanley Bercovitz
told Reuters.
Giant sequoias, the world's largest trees by mass and insulated by
thick, spongy bark, have coexisted for millennia with
lightning-sparked fires considered part of the natural balance of
healthy redwood forests. Fire is even vital to reproduction of the
trees, whose cones require high heat to crack open and release
seeds.
However, experts say drought-stressed sequoias today have grown
increasingly vulnerable to more frequent bouts of extreme wildfire
activity symptomatic of human-caused climate change.
Thousands of the trees have perished in six major wildfires that
have raged through California's Sierra Nevada range over the past
six years, burning 85% of all giant sequoia groves between 2015 and
2021, compared to only one quarter in the preceding century,
according to Park Service.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Colleen
Jenkins and Stephen Coates)
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