The Mount Wilson Trail Isn't Closed. It's Just 8.6 Miles Instead of 14.

Type "Mount Wilson Trail Sierra Madre" into a search bar right now and you'll get conflicting answers. One hiking app flags a partial closure from fire damage. Another calls the whole loop closed. A third says it's open year-round and beautiful anytime, no caveats at all. If you live within walking distance of the trailhead on Mira Monte Avenue, you've probably given up trying to get a straight answer and just gone to look for yourself.

Here's the straight answer. The historic climb out of Sierra Madre toward Orchard Camp is open, has been tested by hundreds of people this year, and is maintained entirely by volunteers who receive no funding from the city or the Forest Service. What's closed is Bailey Canyon Trail and the upper stretch toward the summit and the old Toll Road. Those are two different trails with two different stories, and most of what you've read online has been mashing them together.

What actually happened, and what didn't

The trail's trouble started with the Eaton Fire in January 2025, followed by a run of atmospheric river storms that did their own damage on top of the burn scar. Rain, rockslides, and downed trees are part of any given year on this trail, according to the Mount Wilson Trail Race organization, but the combination of fire and repeated storms required more extensive repair than usual.

Bailey Canyon Trail, which normally connects to Mount Wilson Trail for loop hikes through the Sierra Madre foothills, remains closed indefinitely for fire damage. That closure is still listed on the current Los Angeles County trail alerts page for the Eaton and Palisades fires. If you're used to doing the loop version of this hike, that option isn't available right now.

The Mount Wilson Trail itself is a different story. The lower section, the one that begins at the trailhead gate at the end of Mira Monte Avenue and climbs through Little Santa Anita Canyon to Orchard Camp, reopened earlier this year after volunteer crews rebuilt what the fire and storms had taken out. The upper trail toward the Toll Road and the summit observatory remains incomplete because of ongoing closures higher up, so the full 14.5-mile round trip to the top isn't currently an option. What you can do is the lower out-and-back, and it's the more historically significant piece of the route anyway. This was the primary access road to the Mount Wilson Observatory before the Toll Road existed, and the first telescope brought to the summit in 1889 went up this exact path.

The number that proves it works

Here's a fact that settles any doubt about whether the reopened section can actually handle real foot traffic: 325 runners finished the Mount Wilson Trail Race on May 23, 2026, on the trail itself, after a two-year hiatus caused by the closures. The race followed the traditional course, starting at Kersting Court, up Baldwin Avenue to Mira Monte Avenue, through the trailhead gate, and up to Orchard Camp and back, for a total of 8.6 miles.

That's the distance worth remembering if you're planning your own trip. Not the 14.5-mile summit hike you'll see quoted on general trail sites, and not the 7.3-mile Bailey Canyon loop that's currently unavailable. It's 8.6 miles round trip from the middle of downtown to Orchard Camp and back, and it's a distance that just got tested by a few hundred people, water stations and all.

The race also produced a small piece of local trivia worth knowing if you run into him at the trailhead. James "JJ" Timphony won this year's race in 1:03:42, his seventh overall win, making him the event's all-time record holder. He works at Pasadena's Run With Us, the race's title sponsor, and became a father for the second time two days before he crossed the finish line.

Who's actually paying for the repairs

If you assumed the city of Sierra Madre or the U.S. Forest Service funds the trail crews doing this repair work, that assumption is wrong, and it's worth correcting because it changes how you should think about the trail's future. According to the Mount Wilson Trail Race organization, neither the city nor the Forest Service provides any funding for labor or supplies on Mount Wilson Trail or Bailey Canyon Trail. All of the work, the reengineering, the erosion repair, the rebuilt sections after the fire, comes from an all-volunteer Trail Maintenance Crew paid for through donations to something called the Fletcher Trail Maintenance Fund.

That's a meaningful detail if you use this trail regularly. The reason the lower section reopened while Bailey Canyon didn't isn't a matter of Forest Service priority or city budget allocation. It's a matter of what a volunteer crew, funded by community donations, was able to rebuild first. The trail you walk on this weekend exists because people in this town decided to fix it themselves.

What to know before you go

The current usable stretch still asks a lot of a hiker, fire recovery or not. The Forest Service lists the trail as six miles one way to the Toll Road under normal conditions, and even the shorter 8.6-mile Orchard Camp round trip climbs steadily from the trailhead gate with little shade for long stretches, especially on the lower slopes above town. Hikers on trail forums consistently flag the first several miles as exposed and hot by mid-morning in warm months, which tracks with the general guidance to start early and avoid midday heat on this particular climb.

A few practical notes if you're heading up soon, based on what's held true on this trail for years:

There's no reliable water source along the open stretch, so carry what you need. The trailhead area sits in a residential neighborhood, so keep noise down if you're arriving early, which most experienced hikers recommend given how quickly the lower slopes heat up.

The trail is a resident's trail again

The version of this story that gets lost in outdated review copy is a simple one. A historic trail that's been climbing out of this town since the 1860s took real damage, got rebuilt by the people who live here, and reopened enough of itself to host a race with 325 finishers this spring. It's not the full summit hike yet. Bailey Canyon isn't back. But the piece that matters most to daily use, the out-and-back that starts three blocks from Kersting Court and climbs into Little Santa Anita Canyon, is open, tested, and maintained by neighbors who put their own money into keeping it that way.

If you've been putting off a return trip because a search result told you the whole thing was closed, that search result is behind. Go find out for yourself, early in the morning, water bottle full, and you'll see what 325 of your neighbors already confirmed in May.

Sierra Madre's small-town character shows up in places like this, in a trail rebuilt by volunteer labor rather than a government line item, in a race that starts and ends in the same town square it always has. If you're weighing a move to a place where that kind of local investment still shapes daily life, Art Del Rey Realty has spent decades working these foothill communities and can talk through what living near trails like this one actually looks like day to day. Let's Connect.