Sequoias usually live 2,000 years and often more than 3,000. John Muir wrote ‘nothing hurts the Big Tree. Baring accidents, it seems to be immortal.’ Chemicals in their bark protect them from disease and insects. They survive fire because their thick layer of bark protects the ‘alive’ layer inside and then the bark grows in folds back around the fire scars. The bark doesn’t harbor flammable sap and it holds water, adding to its fire survivability.
The sounds, walking along a forest trail with fire all around was a-MAaa-zinG. The Forest Service was keeping the fire to a snappy sizzle and that’s what you could hear, like a fajita just out of the kitchen sizzle, punctuated by huge thunderclaps and scattered machine gun fire.
And they need fire to make more little baby sequoias. Fire releases the seeds from their cones, provides nutrient-rich ash and mineral soil for germinating the seeds and burns down the competing trees so the sequoias can hog up all the sunlight.