With California facing huge budget deficits a decade ago, and former governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown threatening to close dozens of state parks, money for big parks projects wasn’t readily available. 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. “More than any college or school, you learn so many life lessons out here.”Īfter the fire, crews hauled away tons of debris, from burned bridges to portions of unstable hillsides that crumbled. “Nature is probably the best place to learn,” Hiles said. They used steel cables and pulleys to construct a 70-foot long wooden bridge over a steep ravine. “The nearest road is at least half a mile away,” Hiles said. They removed 4,150 square feet of old concrete and asphalt, enough to cover a basketball court. They hauled in hundreds of 16-foot-long redwood beams by hand to build railings. They built 160 redwood stairs up steep slopes. “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.Ĭrews 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. 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. 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. The Basin Complex Fire began with a lightning strike two weeks before the Fourth of July, 2008. 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.”
#VENTANA BIG SUR WATERFALL NATIONAL PARL FULL#
It gives you the full Big Sur experience.”įollowing a $2 million renovation, the new Pfeiffer Falls Trail will reopen to the public on Friday. “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. And now a new trail has risen from the ashes after years of back-breaking work interrupted by floods, more fires, budget shortfalls, the COVID pandemic and other delays.
Thousands of people every year hiked up the Pfeiffer Falls Trail, a 1.5-mile round trip route through a redwood-lined stream in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park leading to a 60-foot waterfall.īut the trail and six of its wooden bridges, stairs, signs, hand railings and an observation deck, were destroyed in the 2008 Basin Complex Fire.
For generations, it was one of the most popular attractions in Big Sur.
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