We’ve been reporting on how the Garnet Fire, burning on the Sierra National Forest east of Fresno, has been spreading into a large area of old-growth forest in the Teakettle Experimental Forest. The Climate & Wildfire Institute, a think tank with connections to UCLA, got about $5.4 million from the California Climate Investments (CCI) fund to plan and implement a 3,000+ acre prescribed burning project here.The project was still in planning, and nothing had been burned before the wildfire arrived.
CCI money comes from taxing industrial polluters like major oil refineries or dairy operations for their CO2 emissions. The Teakettle grant project promised it would lock up carbon safely in large trees, keeping it out of the atmosphere.
Here is the project description from CWI’s CCI grant proposal:
This project will reintroduce fire to 3,274 acres of old-growth forest to restore its resilience and stabilize carbon stores in the large trees. Before burning, the project implementers will remove snags and burn piles of dead wood adjacent to the control line perimeter roads surrounding the burn area. The area contains one of the largest tracts of old growth outside of the National Parks and within the last eight years has nearly been burned by high-severity fire from the 2015 Rough and 2020 Creek fires.
As of midday on 9/2/2025, the entirety of the Teakettle project area has burned. Lots of that carbon is now roaming the global jet streams. Most of the upper-elevation area of the project burned the morning of 9/2, at a very high severity. Other areas, lower on the slope, and closer to seasonal drainages, appear to have had some less-severe fire, but still got toasted pretty good, if we are going to use technical terms.
Here are satellite images taken on 9/2/2025 at noon showing fire behavior of the active burn, and canopy conditions of the areas burned prior to 9/2. It is not a given that all of the trees in Teakettle will die, but most of the ones in the north end will.
We’ll be interviewing CWI’s Teakettle Project Manager, Scott Scherbinski, and CWI’s Senior Consultant, Bethany Hannah, tomorrow, on The Lookout, and will be adding to this feature as conditions evolve on the fire. You can also watch our Lookout Livestreams from the past several days, which have tracked the evolution of the Garnet Fire, with an emphasis on the fire’s push into Teakettle.
