KYBURZ, Calif. (AP) — On a mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand against a gray sky.
“If you can find a live tree, point to it,” Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade’s many massive blazes.
Dead conifers stretch as far as the eye can see. Fire burned so hot that soil was still barren. Granite boulders were charred. Indentations marked fallen logs that vanished in smoke.
Damage in this area of Eldorado National Forest could be permanent — part of a troubling pattern that threatens a defining characteristic of the Sierra Nevada range John Muir once called a “waving sea of evergreens.”
Forest like this is disappearing as increasingly intense fires alter landscapes worldwide threatening wildlife, jeopardizing efforts to capture climate-warming carbon and harming water supplies, studies say.