Firefighters wrap fire-resistant materials around a Sequoia National Forest tree threatened by the KNP Complex Fire near Three Rivers, Calif., on Friday, Sept. 17. (National Park Service Handout/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
By María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post
The largest tree in the world has lived through millennia, has been named for a Civil War general, and has shaded a socialist commune that briefly called it Marx. Now the centerpiece of Sequoia National Park is endangered by the California wildfires burning nearby.
The KNP Complex Fire — which comprises the Colony and Paradise fires — is torching the Sierra Nevada area and leading firefighters to wrap the giant trees in aluminum to protect them from the inferno that began Sept. 9 and had burned through17,900 acres as of Saturday night.
Wildfire threatens historic trees at Sequoia National Park. Fireproof blankets are the defense.
The sequoias, believed to be some of the world’s most ancient, became a national landmark in the mid-19th century. Hamilton, General Grant, General Sherman, and others are named for American leaders, and their histories enmeshed with the then-nascent country’s history and politics.
Sequoias, which can live to be about 3,000 years old, had already been known by the Native American tribes that inhabited the Sierra Nevada. Then, in the mid-1800s, the giant trees became a tourist attraction after a hunter had an encounter with what newspapers of the time deemed the “Sylvan Mastodon” or the “Vegetable Monster.”
According to a 1975 National Park Service history briefing, the crew of an 1833 expedition into the Sierra Nevada is credited as being the first group of White people to spot the sequoias, but it never reported the discovery. Almost two decades later, Augustus T. Dowd, a hunter tasked with feeding Gold Rush miners, chased a wounded bear into the woods and walked into a sequoia grove.
News spread fast, describing trees that dwarfed people. “It was the equivalent of finding a unicorn or Big Foot,” said Daegen Miller, a historian and author of “This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent.”
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