Rim Fire

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Almost 40 percent of the area burned by the Yosemite National Park Rim Fire is nothing but charred land, fire ecologists say.

The third-largest wildfire in California history has left a barren moonscape in the Sierra Nevada mountains that experts say is larger than any burned there in centuries.

The fire has consumed about 400 square miles, and within that footprint are a solid 60 square miles that burned so intensely that everything is dead, researchers said.

"In other words, it's nuked," said Jay Miller, senior wildland fire ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. "If you asked most of the fire ecologists working in the Sierra Nevada, they would call this unprecedented."

Smaller pockets inside the fire's footprint also burned hot enough to wipe out trees and other vegetation. Other areas that burned left trees scarred but alive.


The Rim Fire has burned 77,000 acres in wilderness areas in the northeast corner of Yosemite, but only 7 percent of that area was considered high intensity that would result in tree mortality, said Chris Holbeck, a resource biologist for the National Park Service.

"It really burned here much like a prescribed fire would to a large degree because of land management practices," Holbeck said. "Fire plays a natural part of that system. It can't all be old growth forests, though Yosemite holds some of the oldest trees in the Sierra."

Short-term impacts in the park could include the displacement of a unique and threatened subspecies of great gray owls that makes home in treetops in the fire's range.

By the time the Rim Fire ripped through the canyon, it developed its own weather system that pushed it to consume up to 50,000 acres in a day.