One of the most popular hiking trails in Big Sur has reopened after a huge redwood tree smashed through a 70-foot bridge over a big ravine during a winter storm two years ago, blocking public access.
The Pfeiffer Falls Trail in Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, a favorite for generations of hikers, is back, state parks officials announced this week.
For decades, thousands of people every year hiked up the 1.5-mile round trip route through a redwood-lined stream leading to a 60-foot waterfall.
But the trail has been battered in recent years. Six of its wooden bridges, stairs, signs, hand railings and an observation deck were destroyed in the 2008 Basin Complex Fire.
The trail was temporarily and roughly rerouted. After years of delays from heavy winter storms, COVID, funding shortfalls, and more fires, crews built a new trail as part of a $2 million upgrade to the park, with impressive new wooden bridges, signs and other amenities, completing the project in 2021.
But then, less than two years later, a punishing atmospheric river storm sent a large redwood tree crashing down the steep slopes of the forest, slamming into the main bridge and causing other damage to the new facilities.
After raising repair funds, obtaining permits and getting help from the California Conservation Corps, state parks officials working with Save the Redwoods League rigged equipment in the remote area and completed repairs, restoring access.
“State Parks staff have worked hard to replace the damaged portion of the bridge so visitors can enjoy this lovely hike through the redwoods again,” said Jim Doran, State Parks Monterey District maintenance chief.
“Access is very difficult,” he said. “Everything has to be done by hand. There’s no way to get heavy equipment in there. Everything has to be hand carried. It’s very rugged terrain.”
The wooden bridge that was wrecked spans the Pfeiffer Redwood Creek ravine. Repairs cost roughly $50,000, according to state parks officials.
“It’s unfortunate that the trail had to close so soon after our original renovations,” said Matthew Gomez, senior parks program manager for Save the Redwoods League.
“The ravine is a challenging area to build something as intricate as this bridge, so it took a lot of careful planning,” he added, calling the new bridge and trail “better than ever.”
The 1,346-acre Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park is a central attraction in Big Sur. The property was owned in the 1800s by one of the early Big Sur settler families, the Pfeiffers, who operated a lodge and cabins for visitors who came by stagecoach. In 1933, after a Los Angeles developer offered to buy the property for $320,000 to build a subdivision, John Pfeiffer sold it to California’s state parks department instead to preserve it in its natural state.
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.”
But the rugged landscape where the North American continent crashes head-long 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. The southern portion of Highway 1 is closed now.
On February 9, 2024, a massive landslide occurred near Lucia, about 20 miles south of Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park. The event, which began 450 feet above the roadway, was named Regent’s Slide, and is still being cleared by crews working for Caltrans, who have been driving steel rods into the side of the steep cliffs to better secure and stabilize the area.
For the original repairs to the Pfeiffer Falls Trail, crews from the California Conservation Corps, California’s state parks department and the nonprofit American Conservation Experience put in 66,000 hours of work between 2017 and 2021. 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.
In that job and the recent repair effort, workers rigged steel cables and pulleys into nearby trees to lift the 10,000-pound bridge, Doran said. They replaced its redwood rails and decking, and had to order a 15-foot specially fabricated fiberglass piece from a Texas company to repair the bridge base. It’s rock abutment also was damaged and had to be repaired.
People are already out taking advantage of the restored access, he added.
“There are tons of people enjoying it,” Doran said. “Luckily we still have some water in the waterfall this time of year. A lot of families who are camping in the campground want to do an hour hike and see the waterfall. It’s a really good all-ages hike.”