As 30-mph wind gusts howled across a flat spot known as “the notch” halfway up Mt. Baldy last weekend, three young men staggered down from the summit looking cold, tired and very excited to have just reached the highest point in Los Angeles County in such punishing conditions.
Not only had they braved the summit’s soaring altitude and fierce wind, they each also had risked a $5,000 fine for violating a U.S. Forest Service closure order.
After a September wildfire ravaged Mt. Baldy Village, destroying 20 homes and burning more than 50,000 acres on surrounding hillsides, the U.S. Forest Service closed all of the trails leading to the mountain’s breathtaking summit for more than a year — until December 2025 — to ensure public safety and promote “natural recovery” of the fragile plants and soils that had been damaged.
But had the three climbers, who ascended a trail called the Devil’s Backbone for its narrow ridge with spine-tingling drops on either side, seen any scorched earth or trees along the way?
“No, nothing at all, the trail was fine,” said Isaiah Rosas of Moreno Valley. “There were a lot of people going up and down with us.”
That’s the catch. While the village 5,000 feet below was devastated by the autumn Bridge fire, the summit and the most popular trails leading to it escaped largely unscathed.
And so, like seemingly everything else in our fragile public discourse these days, the government’s closure of the mountain has sparked a heated social media debate. On one side are so-called trail Karens, who monitor online web cameras and question why the forest service isn’t ticketing “ignorant and selfish” rule breakers who are hiking the mountain anyway. On the other side: scofflaws who condemn the forest service as another “useless” government agency reflexively shutting things down in the name of “safety” at the expense of freedom.
Sound familiar?
Adding fuel to the online fire was the agency’s decision to allow recreational businesses inside the closed area to continue operating — despite the alleged threats to plants and soil.
“It just screams of capitalism being okay, and has nothing to do with safety or protecting our public lands,” one Reddit commenter wrote in a particularly spirited thread a couple of months ago.
“At the root of it, we can see it’s not about a safety issue, or trying to let the land recover, which is why I think a lot of people don’t care about the closure and will still hike,” wrote another.
Robby Ellingson is the general manager of Mt. Baldy Resort, a small family-run ski area in the heart of the closed section of the mountain that is much loved by its fans.
In an interview, Ellingson said none of his ski runs or equipment burned, so he actively lobbied the forest service to “have the closure drawn differently.” But instead of changing the lines on the closure map, the forest service gave him a variance allowing him to operate inside the closed area. That means his restaurant and bar, perched halfway up the mountain and appropriately called “Top of the Notch,” remain open. His ski runs will open as soon as there is enough snow.
Sipping a cold beer and admiring the expansive view from the restaurant is a much anticipated reward after a long, hot hike to the summit, so closing the popular trails in September was a devastating blow to Ellingson’s business.
“We lost our entire fall,” he said. “We’ve kind of kept a tight lip about this, about our displeasure about this.” But he’s hoping the forest service will relent and reopen the trails in the spring, as soon as the snow melts.
And although he’s eager to maintain a good working relationship with forest service officials, he said he worries that their sweeping and rigid closure decision undermines their credibility.
Public officials tend to err on the side of “you can never be too safe,” Ellingson said. But, actually, you can, he thinks.
“If you try to be too safe, you end up with silly rules that are counterproductive” because so many people will just ignore them.
In an email, U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Dana Dierkes acknowledged that the most popular trails to the summit, the Devil’s Backbone and the Ski Hut Trail, did not burn in the Bridge fire. They’re closed because they “provide access to other trails that did burn,” she wrote.
On the hillsides surrounding those burned trails, “vegetation was completely consumed leaving terrain without a natural barrier to erosion,” she wrote.
The forest service is predicting “catastrophic landslides and substantial debris flows within the burned area during the winter storm season,” Dierkes said, and those dangers will persist until the vegetation grows back.
“After seasonal weather has passed, we will reassess the status of potential hazards and see if certain areas might be able to reopen,” Dierkes said.
Outside the combination post office/fire station in Mt. Baldy Village last week, residents were preparing for the possibility of landslides when the inevitable winter storms start rolling in. Crews were installing concrete barriers in front of houses across from scorched hillsides; others were preparing a distribution site for sandbags.
But locals too said the broad scope and inflexibility of the trail closures seem to defy common sense.
Even the paved road just around the corner, which leads to stunning views down the valley, is closed. So when the air is warm and the sun is shining and there’s no obvious threat of a landslide from the burned hillside above, taking your dog for a morning walk on Glendora Ridge Road could, theoretically, get you stuck with a $5,000 fine.
“They keep saying it has something to do with the fire, but there’s nothing left to burn,” longtime resident Cindy Debonis, 63, said, shaking her head.
“I think it’s not fair, big time, to the businesses and the locals,” she said. “I want to walk. I’d like to go take a hike. This is where I live.”
