On a hot afternoon in California’s Sequoia National Park, Alexis Bernal squints up at the top of a 200-foot-tall tree.

“That is what we would call a real giant sequoia monarch,” she says. “It’s massive.”

At 40 feet in diameter, the tree easily meets the definition of a monarch, the name given to the largest sequoias. It’s likely more than 1,500 years old.

Still, that’s as old as this tree will get. The trunk is pitch black, the char reaching almost all the way to the top. Not a single green branch is visible.

“It’s 100% dead,” Bernal says. “There’s no living foliage on it all.”

The scorched carcasses of eight other giants surround this one in the Alder Creek grove. A fire science research assistant at UC Berkeley, Bernal is here with a team cataloguing the destruction.

It’s not easy to kill a giant sequoia. They can live more than 3,000 years and withstand repeated wildfires and droughts over the centuries.

Now, with humans changing both the climate and the landscape surrounding the trees, these giants face dangers they might not survive.

Last year, the Castle Fire burned through the Sierra Nevada, fueled by hot, dry conditions and overgrown forests. Based on early estimates, as many as 10,600 large sequoias were killed — up to 14% of the entire population.

“This is unprecedented to see so many of these large old-growth trees dead, and I think it’s a travesty,” says Scott Stephens, fire scientist at UC Berkeley, as he surveys the damage. “This is pure disaster.”

With extreme fires increasing on a hotter planet, scientists are urgently trying to save the sequoias that remain. Researchers from federal agencies and universities are teaming up to find the sequoia groves at highest risk. The hope is to make them more fire-resistant by reducing the dense, overgrown vegetation around them, before the next wildfire hits.

But one year later, the sequoia groves are again under threat. At the time of publication, wildfires burning in Sequoia National Park are within a mile of a grove with thousands of sequoias. Firefighters are battling to contain the blazes.

“It’s hard to see these trees that have lived hundreds to potentially thousands of years just die,” Bernal says, “because it’s just not a normal thing for them.”

Sequoias need fire, but fires are changing

Giant sequoias only grow in isolated pockets, tucked in the mountains of California. Losing even a few groves spells significant loss to the entire population.

Sequoias are one of the most fire-adapted trees on the planet. With tough, foot-thick bark, they’re insulated from the heat. They tower above the rest of the forest and the bottom of the tree is bare, without low branches that might be ignited by trees burning around it.

Old-growth sequoias weathered the low-intensity wildfires that were once the norm in the Sierra Nevada. Fires regularly spread along the forest floor, either ignited by lightning or set by Native American tribes who used burns to shape the landscape and cultivate food and materials.

With the arrival of white settlers, fire began to disappear from these forests. Tribes were forcibly removed from lands they once maintained, and federal firefighting agencies mounted a campaign of fire suppression, extinguishing blazes as quickly as possible.

That meant forests grew denser over the last century. Now, the built-up vegetation has become a tinder box, fueling hotter, more extreme fires, like the Castle Fire, that kill vast swaths of trees.

“These trees have been here 1500 years, so how many fires have they withstood: 80?” Stephens says. “And then one fire comes in 2020 and suddenly they’re gone.”

The Castle Fire’s fierce heat was also fueled by the changing climate. In 2012, when a drought hit California, hotter temperatures amplified the toll it took on Sierra Nevada forests. While the largest sequoias could handle it, other kinds of conifers around them succumbed. Millions of trees were killed.

“The extra warmth that came with the drought pushed it into a whole new terrain,” says Nate Stephenson, an emeritus scientist with the US Geological Survey. “That’s what really helped kill a lot of trees, and they became fuel for fires.”

During his four decades of studying sequoias, Stephenson had rarely seen an old-growth sequoia die. When the first images emerged after the Castle Fire hit, he wasn’t prepared.

“That’s when I couldn’t help it,” he says. “I don’t cry often, but I cried when I saw the photos. Because I love these trees.”

Few seedlings sprout from the ash

The soil is still powdery black in the Alder Creek sequoia grove a year later. The UC Berkeley team is scanning it for signs of hope: a spot of green.

“Two tiny sequoias here growing from the regeneration from the fire,” Stephens says, finding 2-inch-tall seedlings, impossibly tiny compared to what they could become.

The lifecycle of a sequoia hinges on wildfire, which is the trigger for releasing its seeds. The blast of heat opens the cones, sending a shower of seeds to the forest floor, which get established quickly on the newly cleared ground.

In some groves, researchers are finding hundreds of seedlings where the Castle Fire burned with low-intensity, the kind of fire sequoias are accustomed to.

But in the Alder Creek grove, where the fire burned with ferocious heat, the team only finds a dozen seedlings the entire afternoon. Other groves look similarly bare.

Even under normal conditions, around 98% of sequoia seedlings die in their first year. This year could be even tougher with extreme drought gripping the landscape.

“I am very concerned that some areas will not have sequoias,” says Christy Brigham, head of resource management and science for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “All the adults are killed and there will not be enough seedlings to repopulate.”

That’s leading land managers to consider planting new sequoias, so the scorched groves don’t disappear entirely. But in a changing climate, it’s not a simple question. As temperatures rise, young trees planted today face surviving in a vastly different future. The most suitable habitat for sequoias could move somewhere else.

“That is one of the gifts of giant sequoias — is that they force us to think in deep time,” says Brigham. “It forces us to confront the challenge of climate change.”

Rush to save remaining sequoias

Federal land managers say that given the millennia-length timeframe, planting new sequoias is a back-up plan at this point. The more pressing need is saving the trees that are left.

A coalition of the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, universities, tribes and nonprofits is banding together to identify the groves most at risk. This summer, the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition has been rapidly assessing conditions on the ground.

“We just saw what one wildfire did,” Brigham says. “Can we find the places, do the plans, and get the funding and put the people on the ground fast enough to prevent loss like this in the future?”

Brigham estimates around 40% of the sequoia groves on national park land alone are at risk of severe wildfires, because the surrounding forests haven’t burned in decades. Other groves at risk are found on Forest Service or private land.

Sequoia National Park has used controlled burns, also known as prescribed fire, since the 1960s to prevent forests from becoming overgrown. But Brigham says burning continues to be a challenge.

In the spring, when cooler conditions are better for controlled burning, projects are limited because of the threatened pacific fisher. The slender, mink-like animal was listed as endangered in 2020, and its habitat is protected during the spring denning season.

But burning in the summer can be tough because of air quality concerns, extremely dry vegetation or lack of personnel, since they’re generally fighting wildfires.

“There are all these constraints on prescribed fire that we can’t control,” Brigham says. “As it gets hotter and drier, that window is smaller and smaller.”

Brigham says she’s hopeful that land managers can move quickly over the next year to prioritize the sequoia groves that need help the most. With extreme fires increasingly common, time is running short.

“It is not too late,” says Brigham. “We can do better. People love these trees. So I just hope we can take that love and translate it into immediate action to protect the groves and long term action to limit climate change and its impacts.”

It was just after 1 a.m. on May 28 when the future that Jayland Walker was planning shattered in an instant.

His fiancée, Jaymeisha Beasley, was traveling with family outside Cincinnati when they were hit by a tractor-trailer. Beasley wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and was thrown from the van onto the interstate. Within moments, she was struck by a passing vehicle, leaving her with fatal injuries. A hit and run. She was 27.

For those who knew Walker, the next 30 days are hard to make sense of. The person they remember loved sports — wrestling most of all — and was quiet and kind. He was a fiancé, son, brother and friend who knew how to make people laugh. And he was never one for trouble, they say.

Which is what makes the final moments of his life all the more painful and confounding. With Walker’s funeral scheduled for Wednesday, they are struggling to understand what may have caused him to flee police on June 27 during what should have been a routine traffic stop. They don’t understand why a 25-year-old with no criminal record was shot dozens of times by officers in Akron, Ohio, leaving him with more than 60 gunshot wounds. And they don’t understand why after years of nationwide protests over racial injustice, young Black men like Walker continue to be killed by police at a rate that is more than twice as high as that of white Americans.

Police in Akron say they sought to stop Walker for a “traffic and equipment violation.” Video of the ensuing chase shows what police say is a muzzle flash coming from Walker’s driver-side door. Walker was unarmed when he was shot, according to authorities, but police say a handgun was later found in the car.

“It’s just not matching the person that I know, because he’s not into that and that’s not him,” his sister, Jada Walker, told ABC. “That’s not Jayland.”

A community remembers a wrestling fan who loved to laugh

Walker and his sister grew up in a blue-collar community on the west side of Akron. Their parents separated when he was still in school, but friends recalled a close and supportive family despite the separation.

“You can tell he came from a good home, because he was polite, he was respectful,” says Brian Turner, formerly a dean of students at Buchtel High School in Akron, where Walker studied. “He would say things such as ‘please, thank you, excuse me’ — things some students kind of struggle with these days.”

For the men in the Walker family, wrestling was life. Walker’s uncle and father both wrestled, so by the time he made it to Buchtel, a school where the student body is majority-minority, there was little doubt he would follow in their footsteps.

On the wrestling team, Walker made friends with Tyler Cox, who remembered him as “one of the funniest people you would ever meet.”

“He was a natural comedian,” Cox says.

Cox says Walker was a leader — a captain during his sophomore year on the team and someone who spent his summers volunteering to help coach the youth team underneath them.

But he also described a unique closeness with Walker shaped not just by wrestling, but by shared challenges the team faced.

“We all became family,” Cox says. “We had problems and struggles within wrestling that we all went through together as a team that made us closer.”

He recalled the story of how one day after school, the police were called on the team after a disagreement with a school staff member over whether they were allowed to be on campus. The issue was not that they didn’t want to leave, says Cox, but that they were with an immune-compromised parent who could not safely wait outside in the cold with them.

“It was something that we just couldn’t let it slide. That was when everybody really locked in” and grew closer, Cox says.

Their coach during that time was Robert Hubbard, who says Walker wasn’t just a “really sweet kid,” but also one of the most motivated wrestlers he can remember.

“Wrestling as a high school sport is probably the toughest one out there, so if I’m saying you’re a hard worker, you’re a hard worker,” says Hubbard.

He was also one of the friendliest kids at the school, remembers Norma James, a former assistant principal at Buchtel.

“What it was for me, it was the smile,” James says. “Every morning I stood in the hall and I was the one looking at kids as they came in because we have a dress code … I was always ‘the bad guy’ in the morning,” James says, the one who had to enforce the rules. “That really kind of crushed my day … I got to the point where I was looking forward to seeing him come in because I knew I would see him smile.”

Walker faced immeasurable loss after high school

Walker would stay in Akron after graduating from Buchtel in 2015, working for Amazon for a time before taking a job as a delivery driver for DoorDash.

His life after high school wasn’t always an easy time. In 2018, his father, Edward “Pete” Walker, died at the age of 57. In 2020 came the pandemic, followed by the death of his fiancée earlier this year.

“That’s a lot,” says Cox, Walker’s former teammate. Cox says he and Walker eventually lost touch after high school, but that “I can only imagine what was really going through his mind.”

Walker’s death has sparked days of protest in Akron over what many of the city’s residents see as a continuing double standard around race in policing.

James pointed to the confessed shooter in Highland Park, Ill. — the 21-year-old white man who killed seven people during a parade on July Fourth before he was chased hours later and apprehended by police without a single bullet fired.

Eight officers who were involved in Walker’s death have been placed on administrative leave, and the shooting remains under investigation.

“At some point you got to realize something is going to give,” Cox says. “It’s like you pretty much filling up a water balloon and you just keep continuously filling this water balloon. At some point that water balloon is going to pop.”

For James, the death of the young man whose smile she once sought out every morning has been difficult to process.

“All those bullets for a traffic violation,” James says. “They shot him as many times as they shot up Bonnie and Clyde, and they robbed and killed across the country. I mean, I can’t wrap my head around the why of it. The why so much.”

It’s left her struggling when she thinks about what she might one day have to tell her grandchildren.

“How do you tell children that when you go outside, because of something you have no control over, there are people who not only hate you enough to discriminate and hurt you, but some even want to kill you. How do you tell them that?” she says.

“And then how do you live with that each day knowing that at any given time, everything you’ve done and accomplished is stripped away from you and the only thing you are is a person of color. Or a person that other people hate for whatever reason. That’s a hard conversation to have.”