PRATHER, Calif. – On a recent morning, the sky over the Sierra Nevada foothills was brown, the sun an angry red and the air thick with punishing smoke. Dirk Charley was driving his SUV straight toward the Garnet Fire.
“Roll your windows up,” the retired firefighter advised as he passed through a U.S. Forest Service barricade near the fire’s perimeter. “Always face the danger and be ready to go. You want to have a quick getaway, and when they say move, move.”
Charley wasn’t battling the fire on this day. That’s his old job.
He’s now a tribal liaison with the forest service. On this morning, forest administrators were leading a tour of the Garnet Fire’s north flank.
At 60,000 acres, the Garnet Fire was California’s third largest wildfire so far this year. Lightning sparked the fire adjacent to communities that are still traumatized and recovering from 2020’s Creek Fire. Fortunately, the Garnet Fire is now almost entirely extinguished after a series of storms passed through in recent days.
At its peak, 3,000 fire personnel were fighting the Garnet Fire each day to keep it from expanding. Although the blaze will leave a burn scar only a fraction of the size of the one gouged by the megafire five years ago, it still threatened homes, campgrounds and giant sequoias.
“You're about to drive through the firing show. We're burning right here,” warned firefighting Operations Section Chief Donald Fregulia, waving from the side of the road in a bright yellow shirt.
Standing outside the car – the windows rolled up and the SUV facing the burning forest, as Charley recommended – pockets of flame crackled in the trees lining the road. A few dozen specialized firefighters known as hotshots were standing guard, wearing khaki jackets and blue hard hats and carrying axes, fuel canisters and walkie talkies. They were among the hundreds of firefighters stationed in and around McKinley Grove Road.
The hotshot crews were deliberately burning a small area of the forest in an attempt to choke off the main blaze by eliminating its fuel. That’s a process known as backfiring, according to Sierra Natural Forest Natural Resources Manager Jon Regelbrugge.
“I also believe that the main body of the fire has gotten to them as well,” he said.
Sure enough, after just a few minutes, a blast of hot air blew in Regelbrugge’s direction. A quick escape followed.
“There's a lot of fuel and the fire behavior is challenging and they're getting some spot fires,” Regelbrugge said. “They really need full focus and they don't need us in the middle of their operation as they work to contain this fire.”
As Charley, the tribal liaison, pulled away, a tree lit up from trunk to crown like a matchstick. Charley slowed the car down to rubberneck, the sizzling of the bark audible from inside the vehicle.
“If they start torching, oh man, that's like having a giant Roman candle that will throw off sparks for miles,” he said before speeding up again.
Bright yellow flyers – evacuation orders printed with large “X”s and stapled to trees and signposts – appeared to glow in the haze, like paper lanterns marking the way through a haunted wood.
Charley is a member of the Dunlap Tribe of Mono Indians. He and another tribal liaison, William Garfield of the Tule River Tribe, were on this tour to assess important cultural sites in the forest. Many of the landmarks that were in the path of the Garnet Fire included community gathering places, foraging areas, and petroglyphs. Many are still currently in use – but are unknown to most non-native people.
Garfield said their mission on this tour was to look for damage to any of these sites, and to determine the severity in the area. Earlier in the fire, he and Charley also helped advise firefighters on how to bring in massive equipment with the least damage to sensitive areas.
“My responsibility is to maintain a relationship with the tribes… and just keep the partnership going and keep everybody informed and everybody safe,” Garfield said.
This fire operation was massive.
Hotshot crews were called in from Lassen County, Ventura County, Santa Barbara County and others. They were put to work on not only backfiring but also clearing brush, chipping branches and falling trees. They were operating all manner of heavy vehicles, from bulldozers and excavators to feller bunchers and water tenders.
“Hey, that’s my brother’s old hotshot crew,” Charley pointed out toward one group.
Charley and Garfield seemed to know someone in almost every crew they pass – jovially shouting “hello,” “good job” and even “thank you” out their windows.
The camaraderie within this community is palpable. And for Charley especially, firefighting is a family affair. He and his brother became hotshots after their late dad did the same.
“I'm wearing his boots,” he said, laughing. “I'm walking in the footsteps of my old man.”
At midday, Charley and Garfield reach the highlight of the day: the McKinley Grove of giant sequoias.
Even in the haze – especially in the haze – they seem to possess their own gravity. Whatever chaos or destruction was happening elsewhere on the fire, it all seemed to melt away amid the hundreds of silent giants standing in this grove.
“The giant sequoias are the ancestors of the area, you know? Only thing older than them is the rocks,” said Garfield.
Here, a few hot spots were still smoldering, though no flames were visible. Hotshots with chainsaws took down trees in the distance as smokejumpers used ropes and pulleys to scale the towering trees and extinguish spot fires in their canopies.
Water troughs the size of swimming pools fed yellow hoses that snaked throughout the grove to supply sprinklers. And those, according to silviculturist Olivia Roe, had been running around the clock since before the fire tore through here. But the reason might seem unexpected.
“The sprinklers weren't ever designed to water the trees,” Roe said. “They were designed to make this a super humid area.”
And they appear to have worked. By the time the fire arrived in the grove, according to Roe, humidity within it reached about 20% higher than in the surrounding forest, which kept severe fire away from the baby sequoias as well as the towering monarchs that are two to three thousand years old.
“None of them got fully scorched in the fire,” she said. She expects all the sequoias in this area to have survived the blaze, and hopes the fire may even helped new ones sprout in coming years.
Only a fraction of the 300-acre grove received sprinklers, however. The drier parts – located in steeper terrain that were too tough to get to in the days leading up to the fire – may not have been so fortunate. Those will be assessed later, when conditions are safer.
In the coming months, a mountain of work remains in order to get the Garnet Fire burned area assessed and remediated as best they can be. The fire charred about 90 square miles of forest – an area equivalent to twice the size of San Francisco.
Still, to see the sequoias in such good shape, Charley looked serene. In the distance, he touched one of the monarchs – his palm pressed to its bark. It was a moment of peace and prayer.
“These giant spirits, they deserve to be protected,” Charley said. “They are something very culturally significant.”