Landmark Big Sur trail rises again from ashes
Pfeiffer Falls route to waterfall amid redwoods returns 12 years after fire
For generations, it was one of the most popular attractions in Big Sur.
Thousands of people every year hiked up the Pfeiffer Falls Trail, a 1.5-mile round trip route through a redwoodlined stream in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park leading to a 60-foot waterfall.
But the trail and six of its wooden bridges, stairs, signs, hand railings and an observation deck, were destroyed in the 2008 Basin Complex fire. The landscape has long-since recovered. And now a new trail has risen from the ashes after years of backbreaking work interrupted by floods, more fires, budget shortfalls, the COVID-19 pandemic and other delays.
“This trail is going to make a lot of people’s day,” said Marcos Ortega, superintendent of state parks’ Big Sur sector, on a recent hike through the redwood forest. “It’s kidfriendly. You get to see a waterfall. You’re in the redwoods. It gives you the full Big Sur experience.”
Following a $2 million renovation, the new Pfeiffer Falls Trail will reopen to the public on Friday.
With its stunning rocky coastline, majestic mountains and deep redwood-shrouded valleys, Big Sur, the writer Henry Miller once said, is “the face of the earth as the creator intended it to look.”
That was evident last week as sunlight dappled through the towering redwoods. The silence was broken only by the
“Everybody rallied around this project. They saw the loss. They missed it. They wanted it to come back. It’s been a long journey, but worth the wait.” — Jess Inwood, a senior parks program manager with Save the Redwoods League
babbling of Pfeiffer Redwood Creek and the lyrical song of a diminutive chestnut-backed chickadee nearby. Green sorrel and sword ferns carpeted the landscape, giving the entire area the look of a Sierra Club calendar page.
But the rugged landscape where the North American continent crashes headlong into the Pacific Ocean is in a near-constant state of natural upheaval and calamity. Highway 1, which runs in a hair-raising, two-lane ribbon from Carmel to Hearst Castle, has been closed more than 60 times due to slides and other disasters since it first opened in 1937. There have been three major wildfires in Big Sur in the past 12 years. What people build is temporary.
The Basin Complex fire began with a lightning strike two weeks before the Fourth of July, 2008. It burned 162,000 acres through the Ventana Wilderness and several state parks — charring an area five times the size of the city of San Francisco. Among its victims was Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, a popular destination 26 miles south of Monterey that is visited by 440,000 campers, hikers and families a year.
“You can still see the impacts there,” said John Hiles, a state parks maintenance chief who supervised the rebuilding of the iconic trail, pointing to black streaks 30 feet up a huge cinnamon-colored redwood as he walked there Friday.
Crews from the California Conservation Corps, California’s state parks department and the nonprofit American Conservation Experience put in 66,000 hours of work over the past four years, he said. They built 160 redwood stairs up steep slopes. They hauled in hundreds of 16-foot-long redwood beams by hand to build railings. They removed 4,150 square feet of old concrete and asphalt, enough to cover a basketball court.
“The nearest road is at least half a mile away,” Hiles said.
They used steel cables and pulleys to construct a 70-foot-long wooden bridge over a steep ravine.
“Nature is probably the best place to learn,” Hiles said. “More than any college or school, you learn so many life lessons out here.”
After the fire, crews hauled away tons of debris, from burned bridges to portions of unstable hillsides that crumbled. State parks officials opened a temporary route from the nearby Valley View Trail to allow public access to the waterfall again, but it closed in a mudslide four years ago.
With California facing huge budget deficits a decade ago, and former Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown threatening to close dozens of state parks, money for big parks projects wasn’t readily available.
State parks crews diverted their attention to rebuilding trails, bridges and other features that had burned 10 miles south in the same fire, at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, home of the iconic McWay Falls — an 80-foot waterfall that plunges directly into the Pacific Ocean just off Highway 1.
When they refocused on the Pfeiffer Falls project, parks planners designed a new route, moving the trail out of the creek to reduce its impact on the environment and winding along the slopes. The huge Soberanes fire swept through the area in 2016, putting a halt to the work. When they began again in 2017, massive atmospheric river storms flooded the area and wrecked part of Highway 1.
Trail crews were diverted to build an emergency trail around the washed-out highway so locals could reconnect with civilization. Afterward, they were slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Then they were diverted again last year to cut brush and repair bulldozer lines at the Dolan fire in southern Monterey County and the CZU Lighting fire in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“Everybody rallied around this project,” said Jess Inwood, a senior parks program manager with Save the Redwoods League, a San Francisco-based environmental group that helped pay for the work. “They saw the loss. They missed it. They wanted it to come back. It’s been a long journey, but worth the wait.”
A few final touches remain, Hiles said. He pointed to a 5e-foot diameter slice from the trunk of a fallen redwood tree, in a worn display at the trailhead. Marks in the tree rings showed where metal arrows had once highlighted historic events.
“That was the Magna Carta,” he said, pointing to an area near the tree’s center. “Over here is when the Constitution was signed. That was the moon landing. We’re going to refinish it and put new plates on it. It will be really nice.”