Inside Yosemite National Park, scary sights and hopeful signs seen amid the Washburn Fire

THE LATEST: Fire consumes hundreds of acres overnight

Carey Hayes arrived this week at Yosemite National Park with her college friends to enjoy the sights.

And the group was still making the best of it, despite a wildfire that closed the park’s south entrance and continued Sunday to threaten a grove of ancient giant sequoias while surging past 1,500 acres.

“(Friday) we saw this plume of smoke that’s really close to our campsite,” Hayes, of Culver City, told The Bee on Saturday. “We decided to go hiking anyways and went into the park. (We) went and did the Nevada Falls hike. It was real beautiful.”

As they returned from their hike, they found the roads were closed. It meant a long detour, but they and other visitors — despite some difficulties — continued to be able to access many areas of the park away from the fire.

The southern entrance on Highway 41 was closed Friday, but the park remains open during what authorities are calling the Washburn Fire. Visitors traveling to the south could detour to the Highway 140 entrance along the Merced River.

Locations south of the Highway 41 entrance including Fish Camp, Tenaya Lodge and Oakhurst remained open.

At Tenaya Lodge, guests took in the smoke plume as part of the scenery.

Still, even as visitors remained hopeful their trips would not be interrupted, the threat to property and the famed trees of the Mariposa Grove remained.

About 700 people have been forced to evacuate homes and campgrounds. Park spokesperson Scott Gediman said Friday that the firefighting effort has included dealing with long-range spotting, as embers are carried over and past fire lines toward Wawona.

Areas evacuated included the Wawona Hotel, Wawona campground and Wawona itself, a private community with about 80 homes surrounded by the park.

A fire shelter set up in Mariposa on Friday soon after the evacuations were announced was closed Saturday after serving about 10 people, the Red Cross said in a news release.

The fire had grown to 1,384 acres as of a Saturday afternoon update, though that was scaled back to 1,190 about an hour later, presumably after more accurate mapping was completed.

By Sunday morning, a report from the National Park Service and the National Interagency Fire Center shortly after 6 a.m. pegged the acres burnt at 1,591 and indicates that the fire is burning in challenging terrain in an area with an ample supply of heavy fuel.

Saturday saw a significant increase in the resources being devoted to the firefight. About 360 firefighters are working to contain the fire, about 150 more than the previous day. Those include hand crews building containment lines around the fire, along with engine crews and 11 helicopters.

The firefighting cost so far is estimated at about $1.5 million, the national fire center reported.

Despite the additional resources, containment of the Washburn Fire remained at 0%. The fire was expected to grow at a moderate pace, increasing fire activity through at least the first half of the week. Rising temperatures are likely to create challenging conditions for firefighters.

Yosemite National Park Superintendent Cicely Muldoon told The Bee on Saturday that concern about the wildfire remained that it’s “adjacent to the area of Wawona and adjacent to the giant sequoias.”

“Of course paramount is always first and last is firefighter safety and community safety and protection of life and property,” she said. “That is why it’s a full suppression fire. It’s just too close to too many values at risk. We’re doing everything we can to contain this fire as fast as we can and keep our community safe.”

But there were no reports that any of the oldest and biggest sequoias in the Mariposa Grove sustained serious damage.

“Fire is moving around, but this part of the grove I feel, is in pretty good shape,” said Garrett Dickman, forest ecologist with Yosemite National Park. “We got low flame lengths over here. It’s just cleaning the things up. It looks like a nice clean burn.

“There’s other parts of the fire there of more concern, but I think the grove is actually going to be in good shape again. We have decades of prescribed fire in here and I think that’s what’s going to save these big trees.”

It is the largest sequoia grove in Yosemite, home to about 500 mature giant sequoias, including the 200-foot plus tall Grizzly Giant. Park officials posted video on social media Saturday showing sprinkler systems installed to protect the 3,000-year-old sequoia described as the second largest in the grove and one of the most photographed.

After detour, amid fire fears, a ‘nice dinner’

Hayes and Co. were among those who persevered.

“Our campsite is right near the west entrance and that was closed,” Hayes said of their post-hike experience. “We had to go three hours around to our campsite and not know if we’re going to be evacuated or not. There’s a lot of uncertainty, but we ended up going out to a nice dinner.”

Hayes remains nervous that they might get stuck in traffic when it’s time to go. They planned on leaving Sunday.

“I was very paranoid that we would be stuck in a pickle trying to hurry out,” she said. “Like (will it be) a one-way road or having a bunch of people evacuate the park all at once and we would just be sitting in traffic and our Teslas would die (without a) battery charge. These are all the things to worry about.”

“But when you’re with the right people, we ended up having a good time anyways.”