Walk to the top of Palisades Drive, cut over on Chastain Parkway, and the trailhead into Topanga State Park starts the same way it always has: a steep water-berm climb straight up to Temescal Ridge Trail. For eighteen months, that climb ended in a decision that used to not exist. Turn right toward Temescal Gateway Park and you hit a fence. Turn left toward Trippet Ranch and you were on your own, because there was nowhere else to go.
That changed on July 17, 2026, when the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority reopened Temescal Gateway Park at the bottom of the canyon. For the first time since the Palisades Fire, a hiker starting at the Highlands trailhead can go either direction and actually get somewhere. But the reopening did not restore the hike most Highlands residents actually miss. It restored a different one, and the gap between the two says something about how this recovery is actually unfolding, not how the press releases describe it.
What came back, and what specifically did not
The rebuilt Rivas Trail is open, connecting Temescal Gateway Park to two scenic overlooks and on to Will Rogers State Historic Park. The Sunset Trail is open too, which is the piece that matters most for the Highlands: it restores the through-connection up to Temescal Ridge Trail and into Topanga State Park, meaning the ridge route from your own street now actually reaches a park that has people and facilities in it again, instead of dead-ending at a locked gate.
What stayed closed is the trail most people who live up here actually used on a Tuesday evening or a Sunday morning with kids: Temescal Canyon Trail to the waterfall. Fire damage left the trail bed unsafe, and there is no announced date for it to reopen. Dash Stolarz, director of public affairs for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the MRCA, told the Palisadian-Post after the reopening that crews spent months rebuilding stairs and trail bed on the sections that did reopen. "If you go on the trail, it's really nice and you can see everything," she said. That praise was for the rebuilt Rivas and Sunset trails, not the waterfall loop, which is the detail that gets lost when a headline just says the park reopened.
So the honest version of what happened this July: the short, family-friendly loop that ended in a waterfall is gone for now, with no timeline. The longer ridge-to-canyon route that most casual hikers skipped because it takes most of a day is the one that came back. If your mental map of this trail system is still built around Sunday mornings at the falls, it needs an update, not a footnote.
The route that's actually open now
From the Highlands trailhead, the ridge route continues past the water berm climb onto Temescal Ridge Trail proper. Staying left keeps you on the ridge toward Trippet Ranch, a roughly 12.5-mile out-and-back with about 2,000 feet of elevation gain, water available at Trippet Ranch itself, and bathrooms at the start, at the Hub junction, and at Trippet Ranch. That is not a casual after-work hike. It's most of a day.
The new option is the through-connection: descend the ridge toward Temescal Gateway Park instead of continuing to Trippet Ranch, and for the first time since January 2025 you will not hit a fence at the bottom. You come out at Sunset Boulevard and Temescal Canyon Road, with the Sycamore Grove and Rubell picnic areas open along the way. It is a genuine point-to-point option if you can arrange a pickup, and it means the ridge trail is no longer an out-and-back by default. That's a structural change to how a hike from this neighborhood can be planned, not just a status update.
The trailhead most people forget about
Palisades Drive and Chastain Parkway aren't the only way in. Los Liones Trail, accessed from the trailhead near 510 Los Liones Drive, had only minimal fire damage and connects into the same Topanga State Park trail network from a different angle. It's worth knowing the Los Leones Trailhead has full parking and restroom facilities, while the East Topanga Fire Road access point, sometimes called Paseo Miramar, has had extremely limited parking since a state parks notice this spring flagged ongoing recovery work there. That notice is still the operative guidance, and it steers hikers toward Los Leones specifically because of the parking constraint. If you've been avoiding Paseo Miramar because you assumed it was closed, it's open. It's just not where you want to try to park.
Why the Topanga side is still the slow one
It's worth knowing this isn't a Palisades Highlands problem specifically. Regional trail trackers who've been following the recovery describe the broader Santa Monica Mountains in two halves: the western side around Malibu Creek and Calabasas came through the fire almost untouched, while the Topanga side, which includes everything above the Highlands, took the worst of the damage and has been the slowest to fully reopen. If you're hosting out-of-town guests and want a guaranteed easy hike rather than a check-the-status-page hike, that's the honest reason to point them toward Fryman Canyon or Franklin Canyon instead of your own backyard trail. It's not that the Highlands trail system failed to recover as fast as it should have. It's that it absorbed more damage than almost anywhere else in the range, and the math on that takes years, not months.
California State Parks' own status page for Topanga State Park, last checked on August 23, 2026, still lists some areas closed to the public because of fire impacts, even with day-use facilities and most backcountry trails open. That distinction between "open" and "fully open" is where most of the confusion for residents actually lives. The park reopened. Not every trail in it did.
There's more coming, and it's worth watching for. Trail crews working the north side of Topanga State Park have said they're aiming to reopen Eagle Rock Fire Road, Eagle Springs Fire Road, and the fire road up to the Hub junction once the Department of Water and Power finishes rebuilding power lines and clears its equipment off those roads, with Garapito Trail set to reopen at the same time to restore a full loop hike. None of that has a firm date yet, but it means the map is still actively filling in rather than sitting still.
Who did the work
The list of organizations that rebuilt these trails is longer than a single agency press release usually suggests. MRCA crews worked alongside the California Conservation Corps, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a workforce group called Managed Career Solutions, the Sierra Club, and an LA County Fire Department hand crew, with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers involved because Temescal Gateway Park had spent months as a staging site for fire debris removal across the neighborhood before it could reopen as a park at all. The Palisadian-Post's own coverage of the reopening included a separate story on a 92-year-old trailblazer who led hikers back into the park, which is the kind of detail that tells you more about what this recovery means to the people who live here than any acreage figure does.
What this actually means if you live here
Palisades Highlands is unusual in that it's governed by 21 separate homeowners associations under a single Presidents' Council, each with its own pool, tennis courts, or clubhouse behind its own gate. But the trail system above all of them is the one piece of outdoor life in this neighborhood that isn't divided up that way. It's the shared asset that doesn't care which of the 21 associations your address falls under, and this summer is the first time in a year and a half that it's functioning as something closer to what it used to be, even if the specific route you took before the fire isn't the one waiting for you now.
If you're weighing what life actually looks like in the Highlands right now, that trail system, not the abstract idea of hillside living, is the real texture of it. It's worth walking it yourself before you assume anything based on what it used to be.
If you're thinking about a move into the Highlands, or you already live here and have questions about what's changed in the neighborhood since the fire, Kyle Leibovitch can talk you through it as a neighbor first. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready.
