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 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.
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. 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.
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.
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