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Washburn Fire At Yosemite Expected To Spur Boom In Baby Sequoias

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By NPT Staff - July 25th, 2022
A boom of baby giant sequoia trees similar to this one is expected thanks to the Washburn Fire/NPS

A boom of baby giant sequoia trees similar to these is expected thanks to the Washburn Fire/NPS

A baby boom of sequoia trees is expected in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias at Yosemite National Park thanks to the Washburn fire that burned close to the grove, according to park ecologists.

Athena Demetry, a restoration ecologist at Yosemite, says the trees need fire to spur a new forest of seedlings.

"The Mariposa Grove is one of only about 75 giant sequoia groves on the west slope the Sierra Nevada," she said last week. "It's one of the most important. It's where the national park idea was born, and was the first unit to be preserved as a park, for human enjoyment.

"The Washburn fire, because the fire behavior was low to moderate intensity, it had very beneficial effects for the giant sequoias that were burned along the edge," said Demetry. "The rising heat of the fire opens the closed cones of the sequoias [and] the seeds rain down on a nice fluffy, ashy fuel bed that they really like. If we have pretty good precipitation, those will grow into a carpet of giant sequoia seedlings."

The Washburn Fire was spotted on July 7. An investigation into who started it was underway. By Sunday afternoon the fire had covered nearly 5,000 acres in the national park and adjoining Sierra National Forest. About 80 percent of the blaze had been contained.

In the Mariposa Grove, perhaps the most iconic sequoia grove in the world with more than 500 mature sequoias, firefighters used hand tools and created artificial clouds of humidity with sprinkler systems that also wet down the forest floor to protect the sequoias. The crews also used chainsaws to slice up and move downed trees away from standing sequoias, and also raked flammable forest duff away from the giants.

Demetry pointed out that some wildfires are too hot and can "burn the trees all up." While the Park Service in the past has used prescribed fires to create a low intensity heat to help the sequoia cones open and release their seeds, in this case the Washburn fire did the job.

"We will see a baby nursery of giant sequoias after this fire," she predicted.

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