Crews Make Slow Progress on California Forest Fire

So far, the fire that started Friday and quickly moved from the Freeman Creek Giant Sequoia Grove into the Golden Trout Wilderness has not significantly damaged an ancient stand of giant Sequoia trees, including one named for President George H.W. Bush after he signed a proclamation protecting all of the groves of giant redwoods in the Sierra Nevada.

“We can only use minimal impact suppression tactics,” incident spokesman Raj Singh said. “Being in a wilderness, we can’t go in there with bulldozers or drop retardant. We do drops but it’s mostly water. Most of the work we’re doing is hand-line construction.”

Because of dry conditions and a lack of snowfall this winter, the U.S. Forest Service decided to aggressively fight the fire instead of letting it burn, Singh said.

“As of right now and based on all of those conditions, if this fire were to burn for rehab it has the potential to get very large very fast,” Singh said.

The fire was raging in an area rich with pines and brush that haven’t burned in 140 years.

“It’s burning away from the George tree right now,” said Denise Alonzo, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman. “It burned very gently along the ground in the grove. I don’t believe that any of the giant trees were scorched.”

Fire officials named the blaze the George Fire.

The fire was 35 percent contained as of Monday evening after earlier traveling erratically and jumping all of the break lines dug by hand crews. As of Monday morning, it had consumed 1,700 acres, and low clouds prevented a helicopter from performing a sunset survey to assess how much larger it had grown.

The only development threatened was a scout camp, where crews created a fire line to protect buildings storing camping equipment.

Investigators were trying to determine the cause of the fire.

More than 700 firefighters battled the blaze with help from air tankers, and more were on the way. Rangers, meanwhile, tried to warn backcountry hikers in the Golden Trout Wilderness.