Climate Action California is a coalition of individuals and organizations seeking practical, efficient and comprehensive solutions to the climate crisis. From their About Us page:
We are engaged at every level of government—local, regional, state, and federal—advancing science-based climate policy that will speed the transition to a just, equitable low-carbon economy and a healthy planet. Our theory of change depends on strong, mutually respectful relationships with legislators and regulators, as we advocate for bold and effective action.
For those who may not have heard, Topanga Canyon now has its own “P-22” celebrity animal in the form of a mama black bear and her three cubs who’ve made a zig-zag migration from Angeles National Forest (crossing the 101 three times) to now settle in a deep corner of the seaside canyon. Her presence is certainly felt (and occasionally seen) across the community.
Many are ecstatic, others concerned. Here are a couple articles about it:
If you’re at CicLAvia today, drop by our trail work information pop-up booth! It’s located at Beethoven St. and Venice Blvd. We’re here today representing a pair of organizations which, together, provide the backbone of the volunteer workforce that maintains the trails you love to hike/run/ride in the Santa Monica Mountains.
That is, the Santa Monica Mountains Task Force of the Sierra Club (SMMTF), the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council (SMMTC).
Volunteer crew leaders joined forces with NPS in 2021 to host a special event at Peter Strauss Ranch for National Public Lands Day | Photo by John Nilsson
Our volunteers will be stationed on the route from 9 am until 4 pm, and are ready to answer any questions you might have about getting involved in trail work and land stewardship in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Santa Monica Mountains Trail Days
Our two groups, along with a third, the Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association (CORBA), form the organizing committee of Santa Monica Mountains Trail Days which takes place each year in April.
Now running for over 40 years, Trail Days is a fun weekend for individuals, families, and groups to give back to the parks by helping maintain trails. We invited people who participated in April 2025 to upload their favorite photos to our shared album.
Trail Days 2026 will be on April 17-19 (Fri-Sun). Save the date! Registration opens on February 1.
Meet the volunteers!
Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains Task Force
Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. The Santa Monica Mountains Task Force was formed in 1972 as a sub-committee of the Angeles Chapter to protect the Santa Monica Mountains from over-development and maintain open space for future generations. In 1978, Ron Webster formed a volunteer trail crew under the Task Force, and went on to align and build a great many trails in the Santa Monica Mountains and adjacent parkland.
Ron Webster’s Backbone Trails | Illustrated by Melanie Beck (NPS)
Sierra Club volunteers at Trippet Ranch in 2023, with crew leader Rachel Glegg (front center), hosting a “intro to trail maintenance” volunteer event during California State Parks Week.
Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council
The Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council (SMMTC), a volunteer nonprofit organization, is dedicated to establishing, preserving and maintaining the public trail system throughout the Santa Monica Mountains and adjacent areas through education, advocacy and partnership with public and private sectors.
Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council volunteers, led by Cindy Kimmick (left), have assisted the Nature Conservancy with several multi-day oak restoration projects on Santa Cruz Island.
CA State Parks assembled a team of seasoned volunteer trail builders, led by SMMTC crew leader Jerry Mitcham (front right), to install a hidden retaining wall on Musch Trail in 2023 | Photo by Kevin Davenport
Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association
The Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association (CORBA) is a chapter of the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA). They are an all-volunteer non-profit organization serving the mountain bicycling community of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas including southern Ventura County. They are dedicated to preserving open space, maintaining access to public lands, and creating more trail opportunities for all to enjoy.
The Santa Monica Mountains Task Force and the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council are teaming up again for a public outreach at CicLAvia on Sunday, August 17th.
We had great helpers at the San Fernando Valley event in December 2024, whose efforts paid off in attracting over 500 visitors to our information booth to learn about trail stewardship opportunities in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Our 2025 outreach will be along one of CicLAvia’s most popular routes: Culver City to Venice Beach. This 10 mile route runs from the Culver City Arts District to Venice Beach. Along the way, you’ll pass the old Helms Building, the Culver City movie studios, the Mar Vista Farmers Market, the Venice Canals, and the boutique shops at Abbott Kinney, before reaching Venice Beach and Muscle Beach. A truly eclectic microcosm of the melting pot we call home.
In return for supporting this incredible event, we have again been allocated space for our trail work information pop-up booth near one of the route’s major hubs. Lights, cameras, and loads of action (and many costumed participants) make this a fun time all around!
We need volunteers!
As before, we have two roles to fill:
Assisting with Traffic Control Slow and stop participants at the traffic crossing when vehicles are allowed to pass. Barriers will be in place to slow them as they approach. You get to wave foam fingers, flags and such to make sure they pay attention. We need 5 people per shift. All traffic supporters will receive a snazzy yellow and blue CicLAvia Volunteer t-shirt to wear during your shift, which you get to keep.
Staffing the Booth Work the outreach table by telling active, curious people about what we do. We need 2 people per shift.
There are three shifts available, all of which are three hours: 8:30am – 11:30am 11:00am – 2:00pm 1:30pm – 4:30pm
Please help us spread the word about the Santa Monica Mountains’ incredible volunteer trail crews. You can contact either of us if you have any questions or would like to sign up to help out on Sunday, August 17th.
Robert Bittner – Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council (310) 941-9459 rsdinc86@gmail.com
It takes our full community to care for public lands. Volunteers and partner organizations contribute so much to keeping California’s State Parks system healthy, beautiful, and rich in biodiversity!
Join the Trailies on Saturday, June 14th for an Intro to Trail Maintenance at Topanga State Park, taking place during CA State Parks Week, and discover how you can help to protect and steward our State Parks as a volunteer with the Sierra Club.
We’ll be cleaning up trails at Trippet Ranch from 8:30 am until about 12:30 pm, and then head down to the oak-shaded picnic area outside the skeet lodge (near the Trippet parking lot) for lunch. The work will include vegetation clearance, removal of invasive plants, and minor trail tread repairs. Participants will receive lunch and a complimentarygift.
Trails that have been closed since January 2025 are gradually reopening in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Several parks and trails managed by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) have been reopened to public use in the past week, with a few notable exceptions. An amended order of closure was posted on Friday, along with an update on MRCA’s Instagram.
In March, we joined forces with the SMMTC and CORBA trail crews to help CA State Parks with post-fire trail restoration work on the north side of Topanga SP. There was a huge turnout for these events, and our volunteers did great work! Together we made repairs to the fire-damaged Gizmo Trail, with a second team simultaneously working nearby on the Rita Walters Trail, outside the burn perimeter.
State Parks program managers have outlined the next phase of reopening of roads and trails in Topanga State Park, and, if there are no ongoing concerns after a final review, they’re looking to reopen Eagle Rock Fire Road, Eagle Springs Fire Road, and Fire Road #30 to the Hub Junction in the next couple of weeks—once DWP has completed their work on the power lines, and cleared their equipment from the roads.
They wish to reopen Garapito Trail at the same time, which makes a really nice loop hike when combined with those roads. Getting Garapito ready for reopening is currently the #1 priority for the Sierra Club trail crew and our partners!
Subscribe to our mailing list to volunteer with us.
Check the Topanga SP webpage for news, as this will invariably be the first source of official announcements about CA State Parks trails reopening and extended closures.
Trails Council crew members among the greenery on Garapito Trail. Photo by Steve Messer.
East Topanga Fire Road to Parker Mesa from Trippet Ranch is also poised to reopen in the coming weeks, but we expect there will be a longer-term closure beyond the Parker Mesa junction to avoid feeding the public into the Palisades closure areas.
Los Liones Trail had only minimal damages. The State Parks crew went in in March and cleared all the burned vegetation, removed landslides, and widened the trail bench. However, with the trail still closed and lack of foot traffic through springtime, it’s probably growing in very quickly and may well need some additional rehab.
Work on Santa Ynez Canyon Trail is tentatively set to begin in late June, depending on access.
Will Rogers State Historic Park is closed until further notice while the park is supporting the clean-up effort. Staff have been working to get the trails into shape, ready to reopen when the time comes. They’ve finished cleaning up all the day-use trails, as far as removing obstructions. They’re currently doing finish-work, and rebuilding structures like retaining walls and small bridges.
Rogers Road—the Backbone Trail section between Will Rogers and the Hub Junction, which includes the Chicken Ridge—remains closed indefinitely.
To respond to increasingly severe wildfire seasons, habitat loss, and shrinking federal budgets, Santa Monica Mountains Fund is launching Trails Forever—a bold new campaign to restore and reimagine the trail system that connects us to this extraordinary place, and safeguard our trails for generations to come.
They’re kicking off the campaign on Saturday, June 7th (National Trails Day) with a community celebration at the Anthony C. Beilenson Visitor Center at King Gillette Ranch, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm. We’re looking forward to connecting with fellow Santa Monica Mountains advocates and hearing more from SAMO Fund about the campaign.
(Opening excerpt from a press release on Senator Adam Schiff’s website. Bold highlights are our own)
Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and U.S. Representative Laura Friedman (D-Calif.-30) introduced the bicameral reintroduction of the Rim of the Valley Corridor Preservation Act, landmark legislation that would protect some of the last wild and open spaces in the Los Angeles area and allow the National Park Service (NPS) to work with local communities to better protect natural resources and improve access to nature. This bill would add over 118,000 acres to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SMMNRA) and is based on an NPS study that was reported to Congress in 2016.
The Rim of the Valley stretches from the Simi Hills and Santa Susanas to the Verdugos and the San Gabriel Mountains, making a “green belt” that encircles the San Fernando, La Crescenta, Santa Clarita, Simi, and Conejo Valleys.
This training is geared toward volunteers and staff leaders across all Sierra Club entities and programs. To get the most out of the workshop, you should plan to attend all four sessions, which will be held on Zoom.
Through these highly interactive sessions, each one 90 minutes long, participants will gain a better understanding of campaign planning, and how to apply what they learn to their own campaigns.
A team of student researchers from the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) at UCLA is conducting visitor counts and surveys at trails in the Santa Monica Mountains this spring.
The visitor counts will provide a better understanding of trail use since the last SMMNRA trail survey conducted in 2018. The data collected will help the Grateful Bench Project improve visitor access to trails, inform their efforts to educate visitors about the trails, and deepen visitor appreciation of natural resources in the park.
The UCLA IoES team is recruiting volunteers to help with the visitor counts.
Volunteers will be stationed at one of 20 trailheads (see map below) and will count visitors for four-hour shifts on Saturdays, April 26th or May 3rd.
If you would be interested in volunteering with this team of UCLA researchers to perform visitor counts at certain Santa Monica Mountains trailheads, please RSVP using their Volunteer Registration Form
Trailheads where visitor counts will be conducted on Saturday, April 26th and May 3rd, 2025.
In addition, the team will be installing fliers on newly installed benches with QR codes linking to a short visitor survey. These surveys will gather data on trail usage and visitor experience, helping Grateful Bench design outreach and educational material for park visitors.
The goal is to eventually install permanent QR codes on benches that will bring visitors to location-specific information about park natural history and ecology. While benches throughout the park provide a place for hikers to rest and enjoy the mountain scenery, equipping them with these electronic “plaques” transforms the otherwise simple amenities into educational tools. Their goal is to offer visitors a wealth of information about the habitats and ecosystems in front of them, fostering a deeper appreciation for the nature that surrounds them.
