Listen to the first episode of “Field Trip”: Yosemite National Park

When I feel stressed, I pictured the time when I was 10 or 12 years old and my family took a road trip out west. I remember my dad pulling over to the side of the road inside Grand Teton National Park. And my little sister and I jumped out of the back seat of our rental car and we took off running through this huge field of yellow and pink and purple wild flowers. When people talk about that technique to close your eyes and picture somewhere peaceful, that's where my mind goes. To that meadow, to those flowers and like the blue mountains rising behind them. I have loved national parks ever since. I got my first pair of hiking boots in 9th grade and I wore them to Acadia after I graduated college to Shenandoah after I moved to DC to the Grand Canyon after I finished presidential my first podcast. And now I get to wear them on a new adventure. For a while I've wanted to set out on a different kind of trip. Because as beautiful as they are, these parks are not postcards. They're living breathing places that are shaped by the forces around them, which means they are rapidly changing and in many cases, under threat. Over the next five episodes, we'll visit five parks. From the forests of Yosemite in California to the mountains of Glacier in Montana, from the desert of white sands in New Mexico to Florida's Everglades. And Alaska's gates of the Arctic. I am going off the marked trail with people who know these places better than anyone. Thousands of years ago, our people lived right here. People who know their deep history, their otherworldly terrain. Thousands and miles of sand, of just no man's land. Their vulnerability to development and climate change. If something doesn't happen, what you love and care about is screwed. It's in jeopardy. And the biggest, most urgent stories playing out today. This is now my fourth Washington Post podcast that digs into a slice of American history to better understand the present. This time, I'm taking a closer look at the national parks and how they need to evolve to survive. We're fighting not just for land, but for our people, for our spirits. We are. It has to be said that we put up a good goddamn fight. I'm Lily and cutting him with the Washington Post, and this is Field Trip. Let's go. Most people come to Yosemite National Park in the spring or summer. Totally worth doing. But I came here in winter for a reason. So you asked about my favorite trees. This is one of them. Follow me. This is one Garrett Dickman can show me the spots most tourists don't see. You have to do a little bit of claymine. Ramping through about half a foot of fresh powder. I'm the school's location. Mariposa Grove, off the beaten path. He's charging uphill. He can't wait to show me what's ahead. I'm just trying to keep up. Here we go that. Oh my god. That's a giant secluded. Whoa, it's knocking something. Oh my gosh. I feel like we should make a sound in here or something. Woo! I don't know. It's got like a riverberation in here. Yeah, we're at the very center of the tree. This is the core of the tree is intact. But we can walk around. We're surrounded by the flying buttresses in these windows that pierce there around the tree. You can see that it's full of the giant Sequoia cones littered on the ground. I love taking my kid here. Because he just pops in and out of all these little tunnels. He just screams as he makes laps around the interior of this tree. Garrett is in his element. He's your semidies forest ecologist. And I've never met someone this exuberant about trees. Of course, this isn't just any tree. It's giant, like 250 feet tall and about 20 feet wide. This one just makes you feel it makes you feel like a hopper. I mean, it feels like a magical shelter, right? And you can see there's a little bird's nest there. Somebody did use it for a magical shelter. And these, you know, here you can see this old charcoal from the tree. It almost looks like the pixelated minecraft. My steps on used to play that video game all the time, so I know exactly what he means. The pixelated squares in this case form a big black patchwork inside the trunk. I'm starting to see signs of fire all over this tree. It looks like it's been through a lot. How old do you imagine this tree? This one's very, this one's old. This is probably a couple thousand years. There are 500 ancient sequays here. This is the Mariposa Grove. The idea of the National Park Service started here. It was very much at this location, like very much under these trees. That's why I'm so excited to be here, because this is the birthplace of the National Parks. President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 to protect this Grove. It was called the Yosemite Valley Grant Act. And it kick-started the whole idea of public land preservation in America. Eight years later, Congress took that idea and even some of the language from the Yosemite grant. And it protected a much bigger piece of land. They called it a National Park. And that was Yellowstone. Without Yosemite, there'd be no Yellowstone. Without Yosemite, there'd be no National Parks at all. You'd think that in the midst of the Civil War, environmental preservation would be the last thing on Lincoln's mind. But actually there were strategic reasons for it. Among other things, there were powerful people in California pushing for the land grant. And Lincoln needed their support during the war. There was also a symbolic reason. Preserving this Grove for the public to enjoy into the future, highlighted Lincoln's conviction that the war would end and American democracy would endure. But now the Mariposa Grove is at risk of being completely lost. Just as I was starting research for this project in the summer of 2022, Yosemite was in the news. There I was reading books about Lincoln preserving the Mariposa Grove. And on the Post's homepage, there were stories about a giant wildfire heading straight toward it. Pass moving wildfire burning in Yosemite National Park is dumb. It was the Washburn Fire. In California, flames are threatening the world's largest trees in Yosemite National Park. Hundreds of firefighters are battling the Washburn Fire from the air and the ground. The flames still out of control in a southern corner of Yosemite National Park have forced evacuations and are threatening about 500 giant sequoias. As you're going to hear later, Garrett was in the thick of it. It was his job to keep the trees alive. Summer after summer now, this has been Garrett's life. It's why my only chance to talk with him was in winter during the off season. Wildfire has become the biggest, most persistent threat these sequoias face. And it just keeps getting worse. This is why I started in Yosemite because what they're facing here is one of the most extreme versions of a question facing all the National Parks. How does the way they're protected need to change? Yosemite National Park sits in the high Sierra mountains of California. The park is big, roughly the size of Rhode Island, but tourists tend to congregate in one area, Yosemite Valley. It's my first time here. The valley is basically a long and narrow forest floor, and it's walled in by vertical granite cliffs. We see the Merced River flowing through it and thundering waterfalls and rock climbers, scaling half-dome and L-capitan. Oh, are you suspicious? Yes, I'm suspicious. Sizzling Muldoon is Yosemite's superintendent. We meet her on a path leading over the river. Normally, I wouldn't dress up in the suit on a set or two. She's in full-ranger uniform, including the classic broad hat. Looking closely, I can see Sequoia cones on the leather band. Rangers at all 63 national parks, where that same hat. It's a nod to the importance of these trees. Sizzleys worked in the park's service for almost 40 years, starting when she was a sophomore in college. And now it's up to her to decide how to best protect this place and make it accessible to more than 3 million visitors a year. I was actually wondering if you have a good analogy for what it's like to manage Yosemite. Is it managing Disneyland or a Fortune 500 company or a daycare full of 5 million children? Like, what? Just talking all those things are true. Yeah, just some sense. I think some of the beauty and secret of it is people come into these places and just think, oh, I'm just walking into nature. But behind all that is-- Behind the scenes work is intensive. People come into parks and enjoy them, and that's the way it should be. But you don't see what's behind the curtain of what it actually takes to manage these places. What it takes in Yosemite in hard numbers is a $30 million annual operating budget and about 750 park staffers in the summer. But what it takes philosophically has really evolved. In the time the government has been preserving this place, it has also fundamentally changed the landscape. It cut hiking trails into the mountains. It built roads and hotels in the valley. At one point, it paved a huge parking lot over the roots of the giant Sequoias in the Mariposa Grove to give visitors easy access. About five years ago, it finished a $40 million project to remove that parking lot and better protect the trees. Because the park service is now realizing that some of its efforts to do right by visitors were wrong for the land. So a lot of what we can do is start to undo some of that work to kind of give natural processes, to give nature a fighting chance to do what it wants to do. We have manipulated the landscape over the years to build a campground where the river wants to be. And the river lets us know that sometimes. In fact, this right here-- this was the flood level in 1997. She points to assign next to us. It shows how high the water once rose. This river was this high. Amazing. It's above our heads, and we're standing on a bridge a good 15 feet above the water. Park was closed for several months after that. And it wiped out a ton of infrastructure. And a lot of that infrastructure we did not rebuild. Because nature bats last, and it told us that was the wrong place to have that infrastructure. They're now working on a big project to restore the Merced River's natural flow. It's kind of like you have to be thoughtful if you're rebuilding things where you know nature's going to come and wallop you. The power of nature and useemity in particular is stunning. What do you think is like the biggest threat you're worried about for you, somebody? Hard to get beyond climate change. The catastrophic wildfires we see these days in the West are a serious threat. We always thought that giant sequas could survive fire just fine. And then we've seen what we've seen in the last few years where these catastrophic fires have killed thousands of trees. It's amazing. These trees are so big and strong that they've been practically immune to fire for thousands of years. I like to think about what was happening on that day in history when that tree was born. You can think about what was clear a patch you're doing when the Sequoia was born. What was Caesar up to? I'm back walking through the Mariposa Grove with Garrett. He's been in love with these forests ever since his parents took him here as a kid. We go on these long backpacking trips through the high Sierra. The Yusemite was such a cherished landscape in their mind. And then it quickly embedded in mine too. It was like, oh, wow. Now Garrett and these trees are like old friends. They get more and more beautiful with time. They're kind of like people in that regard. I like to think of people getting more beautiful and tired as they cross the threshold of middle age. Garrett himself is middle aged. He's 41. His wife works in the park too on the Merced River Project. They have a young son, the one who loves that hoppah tree. As a necologist, Garrett studies these trees and their unique properties. He gave me a little botany lesson as we walked around the grove. And now on our left, these are the babies. These are juvenile Sequoias here, probably 40 to 80 years old. The younger Sequoias kind of have this Christmas tree look. Yeah. Garrett stops to point out some really thick bark. Which is full of air. Oh, yeah. Light airy. Blare. Yeah, it's almost like this big sponge. The bark on an old Sequoia like this one can be up to two feet thick at the tree's base. It gets thinner and thinner. The higher you go up the tree. It used to be that when fire got into a grove like this, it would laugh at the bases of the trees. But it wouldn't be able to get all the way through the bark. It just left some black pock marks on the trunks. It looks like it's like calling you to walk inside it. It looks like a dark gateway into the tree. I see a bunch of these as we walk around. There's a funny name for them. People call it a cat face. You can see the red bark that's curling around the inside and cupping it where you can see the tree is attempting to heal over that fire scar. He shows me how with fire after fire, these cat faces can get larger and larger. They can kind of hollow out the base of the tree. But the Sequoia can still survive. Sequoias have been able to survive a lot of things other trees can't, including insects. They've evolved a special defense. They're sap. And Garrett lets me taste it. Yeah, very bitter. It's definitely not like maple syrup dripping from a tree. This is not a big deal. Very like smokey almost. And that probably has some smoke attached to it, right? Or if you get some fresher stuff, it probably gets a little more tan and rich. Oh, huh. Yeah, tanons. I guess that is, it's almost like I'm very, very overbrewed tea. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The chemicals in this sap and elsewhere throughout the tree repel insects and fungi. That helps stop or slow the decay that's fatal for other trees. These chemicals also do something else really cool. They give the Sequoia its striking color. Like there's just, there is nothing else like them. They just stand out. This like cinnamon red bark. It's just stunning that bright red orange against the snow. The thickness of the bark, the presence of these chemicals, these are big reasons the Sequoia is in front of me, can live for thousands of years. But lately, these defenses haven't been enough. Cessily mentioned how climate change is creating catastrophic fires that can kill these trees. What's happening is that wildfires today are burning much hotter and much higher than ever before. The flames are now reaching all the way into the canopy of the trees, where the bark is very thin. From there, it can rapidly heat the underlying layer of tissue where the trees living cells are. And when that happens, in the words of one redwood botanist we spoke to, the Sequoia can boil to death. I've seen 300 foot flame lengths in giant Sequoia forest. And the trees are 200 feet, 250 feet tall. So there's flames there, 50 feet taller than the tree. And they just cannot survive that. They'll just get reduced to matchsticks. Droughts in California have exacerbated the problem. The recent intensity of these fires came sooner than the National Park Service had expected. And Garrett. Things happen faster than they're anticipated. Faster than we're all anticipated. Garrett started working in Yosemite in 2010. Summer after summer, he's seen it go from no Sequoia's dying to a couple hundred Sequoias dying to more than 7,000 Sequoias dying in a single fire. That's more than 10% of all the giant Sequoias here in the high Sierra gone essentially in an instant. And since giant Sequoias are only naturally found in the high Sierra, if they're gone from here, they're gone for good. Garrett had a little firefighting experience before working at Yosemite. So as the fires escalated, he volunteered to help. It quickly morphed into a permanent part of his job. He remembers going into one grove after a wild fire burned through. He told me about it as we started walking again. Almost all the branches were gone and most of the trunk was gone. It was just like a chalk outline of a body. I mean, the way you describe some of this, it sounds gruesome. It is gruesome. I mean, I think there's a loss with every single one of these things. I'm trying to mourn for every single one of these trees that we lose. But it's not until the drive home where it hits you. I just counted 250 dead trees in each one of them with several thousand years to hold. So you're just ticking away the time on your fingertips. We're like 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, 10,000. You can just tally up the thousands of years of living history there, now gone within that fire burned through there within minutes. And just took that away. [water splashing] While we're talking, he's led me to the grizzly giant, the most famous tree in the park. It has gnarled limbs and a huge black cat face at its base. About 40 years after Lincoln preserved it from afar, another president slept right here beneath it. Petty Roosevelt came out here and met with John Muir, and they'd camped on a day, kind of like today, snowy and underneath the arms of the grizzly giant. And that's where they hatched out many of the ideas about conservation in America and what it would mean to protect these trees in the future. The grizzly giant had been threatened in the Washburn fire. And as we're standing in its shadow, I've finally asked to hear the story of what happened. It all started on July 7, 2022. I'd started getting a flurry of frantic texts from my staff as they watched a plume coming out of the Mariposa Grove. - Sicily first turned about it while she was hiking with some visiting members of Congress. - We started to hear helicopters as we were driving back. You hear helicopters in Yosemite. It's either a fire or a search and rescue going on. So your ears always perk up immediately, and my radio with me. And we were in and out of service, but we could catch words, air attack. We were like, "Uh oh." - I know somebody walked around at that. - I'm just a rocker, I know that. - Air attack. That's when firefighters try to control a blaze by dropping water or fire retardant on it from above. This is the actual calm state from that day. - I just update for ya, 466 acres. - It was a little terrifying because it's a Mariposa Grove. I mean, it's a big deal. It was kind of a sinking feeling like, how big is this gonna get? - Air use just the whole time, like, oh my god, is the Mariposa Grove gonna burn on my watch? - Totally. - Because we had such a dry winter, and because it had been hot for so long, the wood was almost as dry as kiln dried lumber. We also call that bone dry. It is ready to burn. - Garrett drove as fast as he could, and once he got here, it was his job to decide which of these irreplaceable trees to protect first. - So, tree by tree, just so it'd be like, okay, we're gonna do this tree, and then we're gonna do this next tree. - And you have like a priority list of like, we're doing this tree first. And they're then removing to this tree, and then we're moving to this one. - Yeah, like, I can't imagine you so many without vigorously giant, and I don't think anybody else can either. So that's the top of my list. - Garrett and his crew started scraping away the flammable material at its base. Dead branches, piles of fallen needles, cones, brush. - You'll have feet upon feet of that material that would come up, and that top layer is kind of puffy and dirty, and all curts all ends up in your nose. And then you start peeling back some of the older layers. - Over years and years, debris had matted into a thick flammable carpet around each tree. Eventually you get to that mineral soil that you're trying to hit where you know that fire's not gonna pass through. - They used chainsaws, heavy duty rakes, and just like sheer physical grit. - So you're really moving an incredible amount of material away from it, and it can take 10 people an hour just to clear one tree out. - The grizzly giant was cleared. Whether that was enough to save it from the flams' rodent, they didn't know yet. Garret and his crew worked down the list of trees from there. The clothespin tree, the telescope tree, the one we stood inside like hobbits. Each tree needed about a quarter acre of land cleared around it. - So this is big circle, like a fairy circle that's around each of the trees. - One hour, one fairy circle. Another hour, another fairy circle. The smoke was blinding and choking. The air was full of falling ash and leaves and bark. - Your eyes are constantly streaming, your nose is constantly running, so everybody looks like they have a cold, 'cause they're just, their faces, they're just wet with both perspiration and just trying to exude all the smoke that they're sucking in. - Hours spun into a full day, then two, then three. - There's 16 hour days, and then wake up and do it all over again. - Where are you sleeping? - So I was sleeping in the back of my truck, 'cause that's the quickest thing I could do, was just unzip my bag, crawl into the back of my truck and call it good. - Garret and his team eventually cleared these fairy circles around more than 100 trees, and amazingly, it worked. - We were lucky at that time, we were really the only fire in town, and so in town being the West, and so we were getting a lot of resources, we had a lot of people available to us. - The Washburn fire eventually turned and moved away from the grove. It traveled instead up the Merced River, and by early August, fire fighters had fully contained it. The Sequoias were safe, including the Grizzly Giant, for now. But rescuing the Mariposa Grove this one time wasn't so much a victory, as a sign of the relentless challenge ahead. - You know, this is not the thing that I wanna do. Nobody should be doing this. This is just, I don't feel like taking emergency actions to protect trees is the way to do it. - Garret does actually have a lot of other tools at his disposal. Native ones that the park service had turned away from, but that are crucial for addressing this new crisis. Coming up, the early miscalculations of those who wanted to protect Yosemite National Park. When it comes to the big questions, who you ask matters. From breaking news to politics that impact your life, to advice you can trust, get answers you don't have to question with Ask the Post AI, trained exclusively on post journalism, with clear sourcing. And if we don't know the answer, we'll tell you. Ask the Post AI. Find it on WashingtonPost.com or in the app. I'm at the base of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. To my right is a campground for rock climbers. To my left, there's a roundhouse under construction. Eventually, this will be a space for native tribes to practice cultural ceremonies. The big wood beams are up and some of the fat-stroping. - Hey, welcome to our work in progress. - This is Tara Fouchmore. She's the tribal secretary for the Southern Sierra Miwok, one of seven native tribes that lived in Yosemite Valley. This wasn't just a park, it was their homeland. - We are directly descended from Chief Tenaya, who was the last great chief of Yosemite. And you know, we're all very proud of that story in that heritage, but there's also been a lot of heartache along the way. Chief Tenaya was the leader of the Miwok when native people were kicked out of Yosemite Valley. They called the Valley a "wani," meaning "gaping mouth," and they had lived here for at least 8,000 years before white people showed up. In the 1850s, a state-sponsored militia attacked the tribes to force them off their land. Chief Tenaya led a resistance, but ultimately most native people were either killed or relocated. It wasn't too long after that, in 1864, that Lincoln signed the Yosemite grant. And by 1890, this was a national park with a growing number of visitors. Today, many tribal members live about an hour away around the town of Mariposa. That's where Tara grew up. - I grew up in Mariposa, graduated from high school, left to go to school at UCSC, and said, "I'm never coming back to Mariposa ever again in my life." And, of course, all through high school and all through college, I'd come and work in Yosemite for the concession stands, in real life. - Yeah, like the raft stand and the bike stand, and just have a little-- - She got married, moved away for a while, and then her husband encouraged them to move back. Little did he know that I would like to start working for the tribe and sit on tribal council and just be gone all the time doing tribal stuff. - So, yeah, so now I'm here, and I'm with my people, and I'm just so happy to be here and raising my kids in it. - Tara is involved in the Roundhouse project and other efforts to strengthen the tribe's present-day connection to Yosemite. For a long time, these tribes and their contributions were written out of Yosemite's story. Indigenous people hadn't just lived here. They had actively managed this landscape for thousands of years, maintaining open meadows in the valley, keeping groves of black oaks and Sequoia's healthy. White settlers praised Yosemite's beauty, but they didn't realize how critical the tribes had been to cultivating it. - There's this myth that the Native people just kind of had this hand-in-mouth existence where we just so lazily ate the berries off the plant and caught a deer here and there, and really it was just this very systematic agriculture, you know, that the white person's eye couldn't see that this was a very carefully-tended ecosystem, but it was. It was actually a very scientific process of experimentation over thousands of years that, you know, our people became really knowledgeable of our plant relatives, what their likes and dislikes were, and what would make them thrive. - And one way the tribes managed Yosemite was with fire. There's a deep history of tending to these lands and applying fire. - The tribes recognize that fire can be a tool for keeping trees healthy. They found that smoke acts as a natural pesticide for the black oaks in the valley. Fire keeps the forest floors open, preventing piles of old branches and leaves from building up. And fire is essential for the birth of giant sequoias. - Their seeds can't open without fire, you know, just like the story of the Phoenix, right? That it's creation through destruction. And so a lot of these plants rely on those natural fire regimes to be able to thrive. - Tara said the southern Sierra Miwaq and other tribes in the area would help those processes along in two ways. One, they would let some naturally occurring wildfires burn. So like, if lightning strikes a tree and starts a fire, they would just let that take off. And two, they would purposefully set some fires themselves. But all of that came to a halt after their land was taken. The conservation world forever thought that, you know, the best way to preserve nature was to leave it alone. And that's really not the case, especially when it comes to fire. - Yeah, I mean, do we want to see photos? - Photos would be off the mat. - Yeah, I'm sure of those. We have photos of when Teddy was here. - That's Yosemite's archivist, Paul Rogers. He's showing me around the park's archives. - And there's photos from John Mir as well. - John Mir. He's often giving credit for protecting Yosemite. He lobbied to expand its footprint, to defend it from loggers and encroaching industry, and to make the entire area in official national park. His writings on wilderness were also incredibly influential. He wrote about the, quote, "healing power of nature," and how we should leave it untouched and unspoiled. - So you actually have that photograph somewhere here? - We do, yep. - Yep, super sad. It's RL13238. - There's a particular photo of him that I wanted to see. It's from that trip Garrett mentioned, when Murer camped under the grizzly giant with President Roosevelt in 1903. - There we go. - There is the original. - Wow. - Paul's assistant pulls it out of a box. - Like a wallet, photo, two and a half by three and a half. Teddy Roosevelt and John Mir. This is like, I've seen this photograph a million times. I take the photograph in my hand. - Wow. So they're standing up on Glacier Point, Roosevelt, like, his hand on his hip, his head, his crutch-yip around his neck, his high boots, John Mir, his hands behind his back, his long beard, his hat and coat. And that is that you, somebody falls in the background? - Yep. - Audio producer Emma Talkov is looking over my shoulder with the microphone. - Is it a little surreal for you seeing this in person? I know you've studied Roosevelt and Aaron's stuff. - Yeah. It's so delightful to me how my head, and iconic image should be enormous. And this is just so, it's so small and delicate. Seeing how small this photo was in real life made me think about the way. Mir and other people who helped establish this park have been made huge in our imaginations, like lionized to the point where they can do no wrong. But Mir left a very complicated legacy. - When you spend time in the archives as a native person, it's tiring and wearing, and you just kind of have to step outside at the end of the day, take care of yourself, your spirit. - This is Irene Vasquez. She works for the National Park, and her office is just down the street from Yosemite's archives. Like Tara, she's a member of the Southern Sierra Mi Walk, and grew up in Mariposa. So she's been hearing about John Muir, her whole life. - I remember during a report on him in elementary school of him being an environmental hero, you know. Oh, he saved you Yosemite. And then growing up and reading what he said about my ancestors. - He called native people savages, and wrote that they "seemed to have no right place in the landscape." He didn't think their techniques for burning the forests had a place here either. He saw all fire as a threat, and he pushed hard to keep it out of Yosemite. I asked the park service if they're reconsidering how to frame Mir's legacy today. A spokesperson sent a statement, and I want to read you part of it. It says, "We must look back at the history we find difficult in equal measure to looking back at the history in which we take great pride." And then it goes on to say, John Muir played a pivotal role in the establishment of the National Park System. And as a historic conservationist, he continues to inspire environmental stewardship and civic engagement to this day. However, Muir belonged to an exclusive echelon of society that benefited from the same social divisions and inequities that have historically shaped the development of the National Park Service. Many white people at the time shared Mir's views on indigenous burning. Irene came across an article about Yosemite published in 1860. It said, "The Indians have, with vandal hands, set portions of this magnificent forest on fire." Vandal hands, and here we are, and Native folks were, they weren't allowed to carry on those traditions because they had vandal hands, yeah. In the late 1800s, the interior department started banning fires on public lands. I should say, it's not clear if Mir had any direct influence on that, but it became policy to put out "every fire," naturally occurring ones and ones set by humans. But without good fire, Yosemite's meadows turned into dense forests, fallen limbs piled up, black oak scotsick, and fewer new sequoias were born. By the late 1960s, the park service started to change course. It stopped putting out all naturally occurring wildfires. It also reintroduced some intentional burning here and there. And that helped, but the occasional fire couldn't repair all the damage that had been done over nearly a century of fire suppression. Fast forward to the 2000s, and Irene says the forests here were still overgrown and done healthy. I would go buy these groves and it would just look so deteriorated and sad and uncared for, and it just felt disrespectful knowing that these oaks are so important to my family and some of these oaks are so old and ancient they're older than the park service, they're older than Yosemite, and it's like, why is this being allowed to be just not taken care of? Many of the forests in and around Yosemite have become so sickly due to a lack of regular intentional burns that they've become tinder boxes. And in the era of climate change, where we have drier conditions and hotter temperatures, that's a major problem. The park realizes this, and that's part of why a couple years ago it created the job Irene now has. These Yosemites are very first cultural ecologist. I hope I'm doing a good job. I think it could be a little bit heavy times burdensome. There's so much that could be done. Irene's job is to bring native ecological practices back to the park, including fire. Right now, for example, she's doing a lot of work to restore the black oak groves in Yosemite Valley by strategically burning them. She's spent time talking to tribal elders and digging through the archives to piece together that lost history. Why is it that bringing back fire to Yosemite feels so important to you personally? Fire can help just bring that fire back, doing that work to allow that good fire to come back is healing in that way. So, it's knowing that it's a step to not allowing those sacred things to just burn up and disappear. I'm so struck by the word "healing" that you used and how. I mean, it sounds to me like it's healing for the forest and for the trees, but that. It's healing like personally. Yeah, deeply personally. It's needed. Burns in Yosemite are helping to restore native people's connection with the land. They're also helping to ensure that all the people who now love and visit this place don't lose it to wildfire. Here's smelling number two pencils that's cedar. If you're smelling a two by four, that's pine. I got a chance to see how Garrett and his team are fighting fire with fire. It was back near the base of El Capitan, El Cap, for short. There are 30 bonfires around me and audio producer Emmett Halkoff, and each one is bigger than any bonfire I have ever seen in my life. They're really combusting right now and they've got flying lengths that are 15, 20 feet tall. I'm wearing a yellow fire-resistant jacket on top of my winter coat and it is quite hot. We really kick off a lot of heat. And Emma's mic cover just melted. Oh shoot! Oh my god. Yeah, this is melted. Okay, wow. It's like a. It's a commercial, though. Oh my god. There are fire fighters walking around us going from bonfire to bonfire with drip torches. They're flipping the ends of logs into the fires and as they burn down they're bringing it back up again. Garrett and this crew are doing what's called a pile burn. It's when you gather up all the debris that's built up in a forest, dead trees, down to limbs, overgrown brush, you drag it into big piles, and then you set those on fire and burn it all to ashes. A lot of these will burn all day, the first hour of the fire is burned most intensely. If I'd ended the day, they'll most would be just kind of smoldering and burning. You've come back to the night you'll see, you know, just these embers glowing through the forest. And for the climbers who are up on LCAP right now, they're going to be able to look down and just see a constellation of lights on the forest floor. Garrett does all sorts of controlled burns, including what they call broad cast burns, where they'll start a low intensity fire, and then just monitor it as it eats its way through the forest. In the last couple decades, as wild fires have gotten worse, the park has leaned harder than ever before into using fire as a tool and embracing other forms of indigenous knowledge. The park service says it's happening throughout the system, and that Yosemite has been at the forefront. Superintendents Sicily Muldoon told me that's a main priority of hers. Fire is a part of this landscape, just like water and sunshine really, the Sierra wants to burn some. It's like there were people who made this, and we didn't listen. There have been people who have known this for a millennia. The amount of fuel on the ground from 100 years of fire suppression and the changing climate, it's just like a torch out there, and we've seen it. I think forever, we're gonna have to be thinking about fire, but our thinking is really shifted in really active management and using every tool at our disposal to plan for the future. For a few weeks after these pile burns, this landscape here will be tarred, but then new life will start pushing its way through. First, some tree seedlings, and then flowers. There'll be the small little purple loop ins, and then there'll be the harlequin loop ins, yellow and pink, and then you'll see these big, deep, rich loop ins that'll come in. So you get, in return for putting fire back on the ground, you get a bunch of flowers. It's magical. And you get more than just flowers. By clearing out all that excess, you get more air circulation, more sunlight, stronger trees, and a landscape that's more resilient. As he's fought fire after fire, Garrett has seen it make a difference. In areas where they've been able to do prescribed burns, the Sequoias have been far more likely to survive. That's actually what happened with the Mariposa Grove. Garrett and his team's frantic clearing of fairy rings around the trees during the Washburn Fire gave them an extra level of protection. But ultimately, the fire never even got that close. Cruza eosemitee had done strategic burns there enough times that the fire actually turned away from the center of the Grove. And that's what really saved the grizzly giant. But there's a problem. After more than a century of fire suppression, the park has a huge backlog of areas to burn, and a day like today when they can set 30 bonfires is really rare. We're threading an awful lot of windows in order to try to even do something so simple as burn a pile. I mean, each friend has bonfires. I just see money going up in the air. We've been waiting almost two years in order just to burn these piles. Wow. We have hundreds and hundreds of bonfires ready to go in the park right now. A bit of that delay has to do with pushback. In the past year, semitee has had to navigate some concerns from communities surrounding the park. Not so much about the idea of prescribed burns, but about their side effects. These burns put more smoke into the air and introduce some risk of fire spinning out of control, which is a thing that has happened in places like New Mexico. But the much bigger reason for the backlog is that it takes a lot of time for Garrett to identify high-priority locations, secure the funding, file for permits, staff the crews. And then after all that, he has to wait for nature to agree. So if it's too windy, too dry, too hot, even too cold, or too wet, he has to wait and wait and wait. So if we don't jump on this opportunity, it's going to slip between our fingers. The weight can take a long time, and the wildfires are escalating quickly. I frankly thought we had more time to do to get ourselves back on the right track. And I think we still do. I know we still do, but we're going to have to hustle. And so if we can do the things that we know that work, I think they can handle the hotter temperatures and the drier periods that are coming that way. So I think the Mariposa Grove, or we've done a lot of work, and we're dedicated to continue to do work, I have a lot of optimism for that Grove. The close call with the Washburn Fire in the Mariposa Grove has actually left Garrett feeling a little more hopeful. I don't think it's applying the optimism to say that if we do take these actions, they will be there for our kids. Once a Grove has seen fire, it's unlikely to burn with high intensity any time for the next decade or so. That creates a narrow window of opportunity. If Garrett and others can get the right fire regimens on the ground during those years, then they'll actually have groves that are extra fire resilient for several decades to come. There's now a whole coalition of people like Garrett racing to preserve these trees in the wider high Sierra, federal, state, and tribal entities, all working together. Garrett tosses some branches into the fire. The flames in front of us roar up and crackle, then settle back down again. For you personally, like, why go through all this effort to save a tree? That's our origin story of the National Park Service. My belt has Sequoia cones on it, my hat's got Sequoia cones on it. The birth of the National Parks started with those trees. As I wrapped up my time in Yosemite, I found myself thinking about a high school teacher who listened to my presidential podcast. He sent me a poster of Abraham Lincoln a couple years ago, and on the back was a sticky note. He'd written in marker, "Fun fact." June 1864, President Lincoln signs the Yosemite Valley Grand Act, protecting trees he'd never seen. What wisdom did he have? I loved that question. And before this trip, I felt like I knew the answer, that it was wise beyond measure to protect this place, in perpetuity for all Americans. But I now also wonder about the Wisdom Lincoln didn't have, and not just Lincoln, of course, but everyone who was engaged in the complex project of protecting these National Parks. In Yosemite and elsewhere, the park system is beginning to repair its relationship to nature. But what about its relationship to people? If the idea of National Parks is as Teddy Roosevelt put it, essentially a democratic movement, then shouldn't people be central to that project? There are urgent conversations taking place about how to do that too. So next, we're going to a park where the debate over how to restore stewardship to Native tribes is reaching a climax. When we went up to get sage a couple days ago, there was white people telling my mom that she couldn't pick anything. They're telling my Indian mother, and she goes, "Have you read your treaty lately?" [Music] Field trip was reported and produced by me, Lilian Cunningham, Bishop Sand, and Emma Talkoff. It was edited by Robin Eimer and Theobalcom. Additional editing by Renita Jablonski, Juliet Eilprin, Dana Hedgepath, Chris Atonson, and Courtney Kahn, who is also our project's editor, copy editing by Mike Cerelli. Fact checking for this episode by Nicole Pasolka, Sound Design and Mixing by Jim Briggs. We had additional production support from Sam Bear. The series includes original music by decoded forests, and our credits theme is by Ilonnie Music. Field trips, show art, is by Kati Wertos, and special thanks to Alison Michaels, Arjun Singh, and Rob Rosenblow. [Music] In making this show, it was so important to me to bring you inside all of these parks and to bring you along on my reporting journey. That work would not have been possible without the support of Washington Post subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can unlock a special deal as a listener to this series. Your first four weeks are free when you sign up at washingtonpost.com/parkspodcast. [Music] Good journalism is even better when it's shared. With a premium subscription to the Washington Post, you get three extra accounts to share with friends and family, so they can stay informed too. Right now, you can get a premium subscription to the post for $6 every four weeks. Just $6 unlocks trusted reporting to share with other people in your life. After your first six months, it will cost $19 every four weeks. You can cancel any time. Head over to washingtonpost.com/subscribe and get premium access to the Washington Post today. That's washingtonpost.com/subscribe