The world’s largest tree is safe from a raging wildfire — for now.
The General Sherman, a 275-foot-tall, 36-foot-wide giant sequoia that towers above the trails in California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, remained out of danger from the KNP Complex fire Saturday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
But the 18,000-acre conflagration, sparked by a Sept. 9 lightning storm, has burned through a western portion of the forest — and came alarmingly close to the Four Guardsmen, the famous group of giant sequoias that generations of tourists have known as the park’s entrance portal.
The General Sherman, a 2,000-year-old behemoth thought to be the world’s largest tree by volume, grows in the northern end of the forest.
Crews worked frantically Friday to shield the park’s most iconic trees, including the General Sherman, by wrapping their trunks with fireproof foil blankets and clearing flammable debris from their bases.
But authorities could not predict where the fire — which is still zero percent contained — would head next.
“We don’t know exactly what will happen today,” Steven Bekkerus, a public information officer with the firefighting Southern Area Blue Team, said Saturday. “Today may be an active fire day.”
