The fight to preserve California's mighty sequoia trees as fire seasons, climate change worsen

The resilience of some of Earth’s timeless towering treasures, the ancient sequoia trees, is being tested by the very thing they rely on to survive: fire. “Up until just a few years ago, it was just virtually unheard of that fire could actually kill these incredible trees,” said Clayton Jordan, the superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. The massive trees, which shoot up hundreds of feet into the sky, date back multiple millennia. But human-caused climate change is fundamentally altering the fabric of the planet’s forests, and with it, experts say, the earth’s sacred sequoia groves. Sequoia Trees only grow along the western slopes of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. Of the roughly 70 groves of the towering trees that exist in the wild, 40 of them live in Sequoia National Park, according to the National Park Service.