Temescal Reopened. Will Rogers Reopened. The Trail Between Them Still Doesn't Agree With Itself

Say you laced up on a Saturday morning and drove up to the Temescal Canyon Road lot expecting the old loop: up the ridge, over into Will Rogers, back down past the polo field, coffee after. You'd find gates open and a trail crew's handiwork underfoot. You'd also find that the two agencies who manage opposite ends of that same connecting trail don't currently describe it the same way, and that the walk you remember may not be the walk you get.

That's the part of the Palisades recovery that doesn't show up in a ribbon-cutting photo. Restaurants and shopping centers reopen on a construction and lease timeline that a developer controls. Trails reopen on a slope-stabilization and interagency-coordination timeline that nobody controls alone, and the seams between adjoining parks are exactly where that shows.

Two Reopenings, Two Different Reads on the Same Connector

Temescal Gateway Park reopened at 8 a.m. on July 17, 2026, eighteen months after the fire, following a stretch of debris removal and trail rebuilding that the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority framed as a major recovery milestone. The rebuilt Rivas Trail is open, leading to two scenic overlooks, and MRCA's own reopening notice describes it as continuing on into Will Rogers State Historic Park. The Sunset Trail is open too, connecting into Temescal Ridge Trail and Topanga State Park. The Sycamore Grove and Rubell picnic areas are back in use.

The one trail most people associate with Temescal, the canyon walk past Skull Rock to the seasonal waterfall, remains closed until further notice. Fire damage left the footing unsafe, and no reopening date has been set.

Ten months after the fire, Will Rogers State Historic Park reopened on November 8, 2025, with hours set from 8 a.m. to sunset. Nine miles of trail came back, with three named exceptions: the Backbone Trail, the Rivas Canyon/Temescal Trail, and parts of the Inspiration Point Trailhead. The park's 31-room ranch house, the one that anchored the property since Betty Rogers donated it to the state in 1944, burned down to a stone chimney. The polo field and lawns are back in use.

Here's the seam. MRCA's language treats the Rivas Trail as the through-route from Temescal into Will Rogers. California State Parks' own list of what's still closed at Will Rogers names the Rivas Canyon/Temescal Trail specifically. Both statements describe the same physical connector from opposite sides of a jurisdictional line, and they don't match. Maybe the Temescal side of Rivas is genuinely passable while a short Will Rogers-side segment isn't, which would explain both statements being technically true at once. Either way, if the plan is the full through-hike rather than an out-and-back from one trailhead, the honest move is to check both agencies' current pages before committing a Saturday to it, not to assume that two "reopened" press releases add up to one open trail.

The Third Park Has Its Own List

Topanga State Park, which shares boundaries with both of the parks above, is operating under its own separate closure order, effective June 12, 2026. The named exceptions are Rogers Road Trail, Bent Arrow Trail, Josepho Spur Trail, Rustic Canyon Trail, the Lower Topanga Day Use Area and its trails, and, again, the Temescal Canyon Trail. A posting from March 4, 2026 adds a parking-specific wrinkle: spots at the East Topanga Fire Road trailhead, the one most locals still call Paseo Miramar, are extremely limited because of ongoing recovery work. The stated workaround is to park at the Los Leones Trailhead instead, where parking and restrooms are described as abundant, and walk in from there.

That's a real change to a route a lot of Palisadians have run for years, and it's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're checking the park's own status page rather than relying on the general sense that "the trails are back."

Dogs complicate the picture further, and not in the way the reopening headlines suggest. Topanga State Park doesn't allow dogs on any trail, fire road, or backcountry route, full stop. Will Rogers allows them in the historic zone and on the Inspiration loop, but not on the Backbone, Temescal, or Rustic Canyon trails. A dog walk plan has to match the specific park and the specific trail, not just the general fact that a gate is unlocked.

The Part of the Map That Moves on a Faster Clock

Contrast all of that with what's happening a few minutes down the hill. Nancy Silverton's Italian-American steakhouse, Spacca Tutto, opened inside Palisades Village in August. Blue Ribbon Sushi came back with an expanded outdoor patio and added Ueki, a 14-seat omakase room tucked behind a shibori curtain. Café Vida, which anchored the Village for 23 years before the fire took the original space, has filed for a liquor license at a new address, 548 Palisades Drive in the Highlands, with an October opening targeted. The Pacific Palisades Farmers Market has resumed at the Village on Wednesday afternoons, 1:30 to 5:30, through December 30, a schedule chosen deliberately so vendors could keep the Sunday markets they'd built elsewhere during the closure, with a return to Sundays still the long-term goal.

None of that is slow by any reasonable measure. It's also a fundamentally different kind of recovery. A restaurant reopens once a build-out passes inspection and a lease is signed. A hillside trail reopens once slopes stop moving, hazard trees come down, erosion control holds through a wet season, and two or three agencies with overlapping jurisdiction each sign off on their piece of it. Those clocks were never going to run at the same speed, and treating a busy Village as proof that the whole neighborhood map is whole again is the mistake worth avoiding this fall.

Planning This Week's Walk

If the goal is the waterfall and Skull Rock, that trail isn't there yet, and no date has been posted. If the goal is ridge views and a real workout, the Sunset and Rivas trails at Temescal deliver both and are open now. If the goal is Will Rogers, go in expecting the ranch house to be a chimney and the connector back to Temescal to carry two different official reads depending on which side you check first. If the route runs through the East Topanga Fire Road, start at Los Leones instead of the trailhead you remember, because parking there has been limited since March.

The retail side of the neighborhood is filling back in fast, and it's worth celebrating on its own terms. The trail network is doing something slower and less photogenic, and the honest version of that story has three separate agencies, three separate closure lists, and at least one spot where their descriptions of the same trail don't quite line up. Checking the current status page before you drive up, rather than assuming last month's map still holds, is the small habit that saves the Saturday.

Understanding a place at this level of detail, down to which trailhead has parking and which agency's sign to trust, is the same instinct we bring to how we present a home. If you're weighing what this stretch of recovery means for a property you own in the Palisades, or you're the kind of buyer who wants an agent who tracks the neighborhood this closely, NŪHAUS would like to talk. Let's tell your home's story.