MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE, Calif. – California’s largest wildfire of the summer season so far is now nearly fully contained, but not before torching nearly 100,000 acres and burning some of America’s most iconic plants that live in the Desert Southwest.
The York Fire began on July 28 in the New York Mountain Range of the Mojave National Preserve. It quickly grew to consume 83,000 acres across southeastern California‘s San Bernardino County, plus another 10,000 acres across the border into southern Nevada. That ranks it as the largest wildfire in California for 2023.
Firefighters have focused their efforts on the northeast corner of the fire, where they observed persistent smoldering in juniper and pine woodlands. Officials said hand crews attacked the fire directly and received assistance from helicopters that dropped buckets of water on hot spots.
As the fire raged through the desert landscape of the Mojave National Preserve, it burned a number of Joshua trees – some of the most iconic plant life in the Mojave Desert.
It is still too early to say exactly how many have been destroyed, according to the National Park Service, as that the roots of Joshua trees can sometimes survive a fire even if the rest of the tree burns, depending on how hot the fires burned.
CALIFORNIA WILDFIRE BURNS JOSHUA TREES IN MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE
While Joshua trees are adapted to survive harsh desert conditions, officials said they have limited natural defenses or propagation techniques when fires occur around them.
In addition to plant life, park officials worried about the well-being of animal life as the York Fire burned in the MNP.
That includes the desert tortoise, an animal that has been federally recognized as a threatened species and lives in the desert valleys.
MNP staff believe that the York Fire has only caused minimal damage to critical tortoise habitats and has likely only affected a few tortoises, since observations of the reptiles in the area are rare.
AS CALIFORNIA’S YORK FIRE ADVANCES, WILDLIFE MOVE TO SAFETY INSIDE MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE
They also noted that most desert wildlife, including tortoises, can move to safety when a fire approaches the area.
Exacerbating the well-being of desert plants and animals during the York Fire was the presence of fire whirls.
According to the NPS, fire whirls are similar to dust devils but are specifically associated with the heat and energy released by a wildfire.
They can be dangerous in that they can spread embers and ignite new fires.
Along the eastern perimeter of the fire, officials recently recorded over an inch of rain from two different thunderstorms, and radar estimated between one and two inches of rainfall.
The monsoonal moisture that has been in place for a few days has left the area bringing in much drier air and warming temperatures through the weekend.
High temperatures will be in the upper 80s to mid-90s with gusty southwest winds and relative humidity dropping to around 10% each afternoon, according to officials.
Officials said, due to a combination of a wet winter and increasing levels of invasive grasses and mustards expanding across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts, the Mojave National Preserve is seeing an increase in fire frequency over the past 10 years.