YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (KCBS RADIO) – Crews have lost some ground on the Washburn Fire burning at the southern edge of Yosemite National Park, however they've continued to successfully keep the threatening blaze out of both the historic town of Wawona and a famous grove of sequoias.
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The wildlife scorched 3,700 acres of the park's southern tip as of Wednesday morning, growing a few hundred acres overnight.
Despite the heat, the weather during the week has behaved, giving crews a small bit of humidity in the morning and then a lack of high winds in the afternoon. Crews said the fire, which is 17% contained, is burning in a predictable way, but that doesn’t mean the firefight has been easy.
"As long as the weather holds and we don't get any type of weird wind event or something that would cause that. It's just a matter of 24 hours a day we're getting lines in," Yosemite Fire Spokesperson Mark Ruggiero said.
Crews guided the wildfire towards a river and a rocky area, which should slow its spread. Still, the fire remains frighteningly close, within 50 to 100 yards, to the park's famed Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias.
Ruggiero said firefighters are all that stand between the flames and the trees.
To protect the grove, crews have kept sprinklers on the root systems activated and cleared space around the trees. Ruggiero also credited 50 years of prescribed burns around the grove and past projects to clean out dead trees at its base with making area easier to defend.
"A lot of our prescribed fire projects have aided in reducing fuels, but we're behind some of those projects," Ruggiero said. "So a lot of the work that's been done here in the last four or five days has been removing those fuels and by removing those dead and down fuels around the trees, it makes the trees more secure."
"(Last year's fire at Sequoia National Park) was raging up towards the giant forest, but once it reached the giant forest where they had been doing constant prescribed fire, the fire basically came to a screeching halt," Ruggerio noted.
Fire officials expect to be tackling the wildfire for the next several weeks. An investigation into what sparked the blaze is ongoing, but officials have determined it was not due to natural causes.
All of the park remains open to the public except for the southernmost section where the fire is burning.
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