The gate at Sunset and Temescal Canyon Road doesn't look like anything happened here. No caution tape, no orange fencing, no sign warning of debris removal in progress. Just the same dirt lot, the same coral-colored dust that gets on everything, cars angled in at the same lazy diagonal they always were. If you didn't know to look, you'd assume Temescal Gateway Park never closed at all.
It closed for eighteen months. And when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority reopened the gate on July 17, they were careful to say what the reopening actually covers, because it isn't the park most Palisadians carry around in their heads. The loop everyone means when they say "let's hike Temescal" runs past a footbridge, through a shaded grove, up to a small seasonal waterfall, over to the rock formation kids have been climbing on for decades and calling Skull Rock. That loop, the Temescal Canyon Trail, is the one piece of the 141-acre park that stayed closed. It still is, with no date attached to when that changes.
What actually reopened
Two trails came back with the gate. The Rivas Trail was rebuilt, new steps and all, and now climbs to two overlooks before connecting into Will Rogers State Historic Park. The Sunset Trail reopened too, which is the access point for the Temescal Ridge Trail and, beyond that, Topanga State Park. The Sycamore Grove and Rubell Picnic Areas are usable again. That's a real park, and eighteen months of closure makes it worth walking even if you've hiked it a hundred times before.
What didn't come back is the part with the most name recognition. The waterfall loop and the Skull Rock detour, together the route most casual hikers actually meant when they said Temescal, remain closed because fire damage left the trail conditions unsafe. Not scheduled. Not "later this year." Closed until further notice, which is the phrase land managers use when they genuinely don't know yet.
That distinction matters more here than it would most places, because Temescal wasn't just a hike. It was the default answer to "what should we do this weekend" for a decade of Palisades families, and it's the trail visiting friends got walked to because it delivered a waterfall, a rock scramble, and an ocean view in under two hours without leaving the neighborhood. The map that reopened in July has all of that except the three things people came for.
Why it took eighteen months to open half a park
The delay wasn't just fire damage. For months after the January 2025 Palisades Fire, Temescal Gateway Park wasn't a park at all. It became the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' central command site for debris removal across the Palisades, the staging ground that let crews clear thousands of fire-damaged homes and vehicles before neighborhood rebuilding could start. Restoration on the trails themselves couldn't begin in earnest until that operation wound down and handed the footprint back.
Once it did, the work was a coalition effort: the California Conservation Corps, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, the workforce development group Managed Career Solutions, the Sierra Club, the LA County Fire Department's Camp 13 hand crew, Palisades Resilient, and California State Parks all worked alongside MRCA staff to clear hazardous trees, including mature oaks that had to come down for safety, rebuild the damaged sections, and get the park to a state where the public could return without a ranger walking every step ahead of them.
In its report on the reopening, the Palisadian-Post quoted Dash Stolarz, public affairs director for the Conservancy and MRCA, on the physical rebuilding.
"We had a lot of professional trail builders."
That's the kind of understatement that tells you the job was bigger than the sentence lets on. New steps had to be engineered into the Rivas Trail. Fire-scarred trees that once shaded hikers had to be evaluated one by one and removed if they posed a falling risk. The habitat itself is still recovering, and Conservancy officials have said reforestation work will continue as funding allows, which is a polite way of saying the canyon won't look the way it did in photos from five years ago for a long while yet.
There's also a quieter footnote to the reopening that says something about how these recovery projects layer on top of each other. A gravel overflow lot inside the park, previously used by the Army Corps during debris removal, is now being negotiated as a staging site for LADWP's power-line undergrounding project in the area. Once that work wraps, the Conservancy and MRCA plan to work with the Malibu/Palisades YMCA to develop the site jointly. Nothing about post-fire recovery here happens in one clean phase. It's overlapping projects handing a piece of ground back and forth.
The same story, one park over
Walk east and the pattern repeats at Will Rogers State Historic Park, which sits close enough that the Rivas Trail connects the two. Most of Will Rogers' hiking trails reopened, with three exceptions: the Backbone Trail, the Rivas Canyon/Temescal Trail connector, and portions near the Inspiration Point Trailhead. The polo field is back. The lawns are back. What's gone is the 31-room ranch house that anchored the park for generations, burned down to a stone chimney and a few remaining fragments of the structure.
That's the shape post-fire recovery keeps taking in this part of the Palisades. A park reopens, most of its trails come back, and the piece that made it feel finished, whether that's a waterfall, a rock formation, or a historic ranch house, is exactly what's still missing. It's not that recovery stalled. It's that the last five percent of any restoration project is usually the hardest and slowest part, because it's the part that involves genuine structural risk rather than simple cleanup.
What a Saturday actually looks like now
If your old routine was the full Temescal loop, here's what fills that slot for now. Start at the Rivas Trail, take it up to the two rebuilt overlooks, and if you want more mileage, continue on into Will Rogers State Historic Park rather than doubling back. The Sunset Trail is the other option, and it feeds into the Temescal Ridge Trail if you're headed toward Topanga State Park instead. Either route gets you canyon walking and ocean views. Neither gets you the waterfall or Skull Rock, and neither will for a while.
It's worth going anyway, and not just because eighteen months of closure earns a visit on principle. The canyon is visibly healing. New growth is coming up through burned chaparral in places, and the contrast between the scorched hillside and the green pushing through it is the kind of detail that photographs don't quite capture and that you only notice walking it yourself. The MRCA has asked visitors to stay on marked trails and respect posted closures, since restoration work continues in specific pockets even with the gate open.
None of this is a complaint about the pace. Getting a park this large functional again after the debris removal mission it hosted, and after the tree loss and trail damage that came with the fire, in eighteen months is fast work by any land management standard. It's simply worth knowing, before you plan a Saturday around a memory of what Temescal used to be, that the park reopened is not the park restored. The gate is the same. The map behind it isn't.
For residents tracking how the rest of the neighborhood is coming back into shape, from Palisades Village's phased reopening to the pace of rebuild permits across the Palisades, the trail system is one more place where the headline and the ground truth don't quite match yet. That gap is closing. It's just closing on its own schedule, one segment at a time.
If you're watching Pacific Palisades from further out and wondering what daily life here actually looks like right now, past the recovery statistics, The Salazar | Bunnell Group spends as much time on the ground here as we do on the numbers. Explore our Pacific Palisades neighborhood page for more on the community, or reach out directly. Partner With Our Expert Team when you're ready to talk about what's next, whether that's this year or a few seasons from now.
