More than a century ago, the naturalist John Muir took President Theodore Roosevelt to camp beneath an ancient, gnarled tree in Yosemite National Park.
The tree, known as the Grizzly Giant, was more than 2,000 years old, stood more than 200 feet tall and spread branches that were several feet in diameter. Soon after, Roosevelt, who described the tree and its surrounding grove as a “temple,” extended federal protections for the park in the Sierra Nevada of California.
In the past several days, however, the Grizzly Giant has been threatened by the Washburn fire, which has torn through more than 3,700 acres of brush and timber in the southern part of the national park, and prompted evacuation orders for the tourist-driven community of Wawona, Calif.
“We have to go to the ends of the earth to protect this tree,” said Garrett Dickman, a forest ecologist with Yosemite National Park, who is helping to manage the efforts to protect the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, the largest and most popular of the park’s three clusters with more than 500 mature trees.
“The past couple years have been a real wake-up,” he added. “We never thought the giant sequoias would really burn.”
California’s giant sequoias have faced particularly fierce wildfires since…
