There is a place on the Santa Lucia ridgeline — mile marker 8.3, if you are counting — where you can see the Pacific in three directions and hear absolutely nothing but a red-tailed hawk and the wind moving through manzanita. Five years ago, you couldn't get within a mile of it.

The 2021 closure followed the Dolan Fire, which burned 125,000 acres of the Santa Lucia Range and turned the trail into a moonscape of ash and fallen oak. Cal Fire declared it "indefinitely closed." Hikers assumed that meant forever. It didn't. The chaparral came back faster than anyone predicted — 15 feet in some sections — and the volunteer crew from the Sierra Club's SLO chapter spent two years cutting it back to a rideable width.