On Thursday night, I attended a meeting with several other stewards of the Santa Monica Mountains lands and trails including Jason Finlay, the trails coordinator for California State Parks Angeles District. Subsequently I want to provide our volunteers and supporters with an update, which includes a great deal of information from Jason.
I also want to take this opportunity to welcome the many new people who signed up to our trail crew mailing list in these last few weeks, as well as those who reached out by phone or email to ask how they can help. We’re very grateful to have you.
What has happened in the parks since the fires began?
Last week, as the fire agencies were still actively fighting the Palisades Fire, California State Parks brought in approximately 35 Resource Advisors (READS) from across the state. The READS work with incident command during the firefight to identify avoidance areas — for example, cultural sites, riparian zones, and areas with protected plants — and then, as containment grows, they shift to suppression repair.
State Parks has a developed fire suppression repair plan with CAL FIRE, which has already been used in the Santa Monica Mountains after earlier fires. Jason’s role during the incident has been to communicate the specific needs of the Santa Monica Mountains’ trails and roads between the various groups involved, and to get us set up as best as he can in the long-term for restoration of the State Parks trail network and surrounding habitat.
As the Palisades burned, the fire agencies were doing all they could to prevent the fire from progressing to Mandeville Canyon or the Valley — at one point, there were 60+ bulldozers on the incident, urgently pushing aside vegetation so the wall of advancing flames would meet only bare dirt.
The suppression repair agencies that come in behind the firefighters don’t do any trail re-building — or more accurately, there is no obligation of CAL FIRE to repair trail — mainly, they work with gigantic excavators and bulldozers to repair the many dozer lines that were cut during suppression, and put in water bars and other topographic structures to break up flow of rainwater. The heavy machinery operators had extra challenges to navigate where dozer lines intersected trails, ie. where our crews will eventually rebuild the trail with hand-tools.
Still, they were able to get a good amount of trail alignment “roughed back in”. Friday was the last day of suppression repair using heavy equipment; those teams have now demobilized and the equipment has left the park. Hand crews were still out working today, and as of this evening suppression repair has been completed.
The fire’s impact to trails
Jason confirmed that “pretty much all of Topanga ” and Will Rogers SHP trails burned, as well as some small sections of Malibu Creek SP, along the Backbone Trail on Fossil Ridge and above Monte Nido. Many MRCA and other agencies’ trails were also damaged.
Almost all of the trails in Friday’s L.A. Times article, These 28 hiking trails burned in the Palisades fire, were built by Ron Webster and his Sierra Club volunteer crew.
Topanga SP trails NOT in the burn area include Dead Horse, most of Musch, Hondo, half of Garapito, a stretch of the BBT adjacent to the elementary school, and Musch Meadows.
On Musch Trail, we learned there is a bad dozer line through sections of the trail just outside of Musch Camp on the approach from Eagle Rock, and through a couple of creek crossings. On Saddle Peak Trail, the dozers went through about 20 switchbacks, right down the middle. These will be particularly difficult, and take a great deal of work, to restore.
We lost the Chicken Ridge Bridge on the Backbone Trail above Will Rogers. This is an important link on the BBT, and will be the biggest single reconstruction effort for State Parks.
All the Rustic Canyon bridges burned through.
The bridge on Temescal Canyon Trail by the waterfall is also gone. In an uplifting email exchange I had with long-time Sierra Club crew member Noel Bell, he recalled the previous time the bridge here burned (and being part of the volunteer crew who installed the replacement).
Three former roads that had been trails prior to the fire were bulldozed, either for access or as fire breaks. Jason told us that Chaney Fire Rd, Henry Ridge Mtwy, and Farmers Ridge Fire Rd are now “three lane highways”. Since then, they have all had equipment working to restore their pre-fire footprints.
The access roads in Topanga SP were “highly impacted”. Jason said the crews did an excellent job of putting them back together, and the repair has left those roads in fairly good shape after a lot of work; however, with the newly denuded slopes, and potential added erosion from intersecting dozer lines, he expects critical failures at a lot of points, and even the loss of some roads if we get significant rainfall this winter. They will be racing to shore up what they can. His greatest concern for the roads is the saddle between Bent Arrow Trail and Garapito Trail.
We will have to reroute the entrance of Garapito Trail — something we were already looking into before the fire — as there has been significant change to the whole contour of that area.
During a pause in his cataloguing of the additional damages, Jason said:
“I’m really thankful for Ron Webster right now, and the “lightly on the land” ethos, because we don’t have a lot of [man-made] structures in these areas. That’s one of the big positives I’ve been taking away. These trails are laid out with minimal structure, and it’s really going to be a lot easier to repair because of that.”
To our surprise and relief, Ron and Mary Ann’s memorial bench on the Rivas connector between Topanga and Will Rogers survived the fire. MRCA ranger Fernando Gomez sent us a few pictures.
What comes next, and when will volunteers be able to help?
The next step for State Parks is to complete detailed assessments: logging the trails, getting a better idea of hazards, identifying the specific repairs that will be needed to start reopening trails, as well as estimating the costs — this is a FEMA event for the parks as well. They are starting with the most popular trails including Temescal Ridge and Los Liones. Jason noted that it’s still physically very difficult to hike into these areas to do the assessments, because there is 12-18″ of slough covering every trail, and he will send out staff crews to start clearing some of the debris ahead of the folks doing the assessments.
For the most part, the subsequent work is going to be a lot of clearing up rocks and slough. Most of the vegetation is completely burned out. There are not a lot of downed trees or things like that. More time will be needed to scope repairs to structures like bridges and retaining walls, which our volunteer crew will also assist with when the time comes.
One concern we have for the crews is working in all the ash, and the possibility of dangerous particulates. Hopefully we will get a little bit of rain (but not too much) to help everything settle down and then, with appropriate precautions, we can start tackling the work.
Sierra Club, Trails Council and CORBA trail crew leaders will be meeting with State Parks again next week, to go over their early findings and begin scheduling some volunteer work days. I’m told we might be able to start restoration work in early February.
I will share more information as it becomes available.
-Rachel G.
