Temescal Gateway Park Reopened in July. Here's What Didn't Come Back With It.

Three weeks ago, 92-year-old Marjorie Friedlander showed up at Temescal Gateway Park with trekking poles in hand. She founded the Walking and Hiking Section of the UCLA Faculty Women's Club, and for 45 years her home on Whitfield Avenue sat a ten-minute walk from the park's shaded canyons, a place she'd walked "many, many, many times." The Palisades Fire took her house in January 2025. It also shut the gates on the park itself for the next 18 months. On Friday, July 17, at 8 a.m., she was one of the first people back inside.

If you've heard the headline, you know the park is open again. What most coverage skipped is that reopening didn't mean restoring. Three things changed for anyone planning a weekend hike here: one trail almost certainly isn't coming back this year, a park a mile up the road is open at partial capacity with no finish date, and a corner of the reopened park itself just got quietly leased out from under the trail network for the next three years.

What You Can Actually Walk Into Now

The rebuilt Rivas Trail is open, leading to two scenic overlooks or continuing on to Will Rogers State Historic Park. The Sunset Trail reopened too, connecting to Temescal Ridge Trail and into Topanga State Park. Sycamore Grove and the Rubell Picnic Area are both back in service.

Dash Stolarz, director of public affairs for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and MRCA, told the Palisadian-Post the crews rebuilt trail infrastructure from the ground up: "We had a lot of professional trail builders. It took months and months to fix them. They built new stairs." Her assessment of the result was blunt: "If you go on the trail, it's really nice and you can see everything."

The Trail That Isn't Coming Back This Year

The Temescal Canyon Trail to the waterfall, arguably the most photographed hike in the Palisades and the one most visitor guides lead with, remains closed. Officials cite hazardous conditions from fire damage, and there's no reopening date attached to that closure. This isn't a temporary detour while crews finish a punch list. It's an open-ended closure on the park's signature route, which means if your mental map of Temescal Gateway includes a waterfall at the end of the hike, that map is currently wrong.

Will Rogers, One Field Over, Is a Different Kind of Open

Will Rogers State Historic Park reopened on November 8, 2025, after being shut since the fire's early days. But "reopened" there comes with its own asterisk. The visitor center building was damaged in the fire and is undergoing full restoration. State Parks only began its public engagement process to plan the park's future in 2026, which tells you the timeline for full trail restoration hasn't been set yet either.

Dog owners should note the rules differ by trail here, and they're specific. Dogs are allowed in the historic zone and on the Inspiration loop, but not on the Backbone, Temescal, or Rustic Canyon trails. The one connector that does allow dogs is the Rivas Canyon Trail, which links Will Rogers directly to the newly reopened Temescal Gateway Park.

The Part of the Reopening Nobody Announced

Here's the piece that got buried. On July 8, nine days before the park's public reopening, the MRCA's governing board authorized a land-use lease with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. The agreement lets LADWP use roughly 65,000 square feet of Temescal Gateway Park, the area north of Simon Meadow and south of the old YMCA swimming pool site that's sat closed since 2008, as a staging ground to rebuild and underground the electric lines that burned in the fire.

The initial lease term runs up to three years, with options to extend. LADWP will pay the MRCA fair market value in use payments, which officials say gets funneled back into park operations, and the utility is contractually required to fully restore the area once the work wraps.

So the same summer the gates opened, a different section of the same park got fenced off again, this time for infrastructure work that could run through 2029. Reopened and fully restored aren't the same claim, and this is the clearest evidence of the gap.

Getting There Without Getting Turned Around

If you're headed to the Topanga State Park side, don't count on East Topanga Fire Road, known locally as Paseo Miramar, for parking. A Los Angeles County trails alert posted in March 2026 flagged that parking there is extremely limited due to ongoing fire recovery work, and it points hikers instead to the Los Leones Trailhead on Los Liones Drive, near Fire Station 23, where parking and restrooms are described as abundantly available.

A few rules worth knowing before you leave the car:

• Los Leones Day Use Trail: dogs allowed. Past that point on the Los Leones Trail itself, they're not.
• Rivas Canyon Trail: dogs allowed when connecting to or from Temescal Gateway Park.
• Backbone, Temescal, and Rustic Canyon Trails: no dogs, full stop.
• Will Rogers historic zone and Inspiration loop: dogs allowed, leashed.

What This Means for Your Weekend

The honest read on Temescal Gateway Park right now is that it's open, genuinely open, and worth the drive up Sunset. But it's a smaller version of the park most longtime Palisadians remember. The waterfall hike is gone for now. Will Rogers is operating at partial capacity while its own planning process plays out. And a piece of Temescal Gateway's own footprint just got signed over to a utility project that could still be running years from now.

None of that makes the reopening less real. Friedlander and the rest of the Faculty Women's Club walked out that Friday morning and got their canyon back. It just means the canyon they got back isn't quite the one that closed in January 2025, and it's worth checking current status before you plan around it, since both the LADWP staging area and the Will Rogers trail network are still active works in progress.

For a community that's rebuilding block by block, from the new Palisades Recreation Center taking shape nearby to the trails behind it, watching what actually comes back, and what quietly doesn't, is part of paying attention to this place. The Cilic Group has spent the past 18 months tracking that recovery street by street, canyon by canyon. If you're weighing what's next for a property here, whatever the reason, request a confidential consultation and talk it through with someone who knows this ground.