Eight Miles of Peninsula Trail Are Still Closed. The Rest of Palos Verdes Just Got Busier.

Drive to the end of Crenshaw Boulevard on a Saturday morning and the gate at Burma Road tells you everything the city website already said: Portuguese Bend Reserve is closed. Has been since the emergency declaration in October 2023. The dirt lot near Del Cerro Park still fills up with cars belonging to people who forgot, or who are hoping the closure quietly lapsed sometime over the summer. It hasn't.

Ten minutes away, off Palos Verdes Drive East in Rolling Hills Estates, the Stein Hale trailhead has a different problem. There are too many cars, not too few. A naturalist is unlocking the gate at George F Canyon Preserve for a 10:30 a.m. walk, and the sign-up list filled days ago. Twenty minutes south, at the dead end of Paseo del Mar in San Pedro, the same thing is happening at White Point Nature Preserve.

Most people who live on the Peninsula have collapsed these two facts into one sentence: the trails are closed. That sentence is true for about eight miles of them. It is false for the rest, and this September the difference is more visible than usual, because the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy has scheduled one of its fuller calendars of the year at the two preserves that never fell inside the closure line.

The Boundary Nobody Draws on a Map

The closures that get talked about all trace back to one thing: the Portuguese Bend Landslide Complex, an active, moving slope within Rancho Palos Verdes city limits. The city declared a local emergency over it in October 2023, and it has stayed in effect since, with the council periodically voting to extend it. Roughly 8 miles of trail across the Portuguese Bend, Abalone Cove, Filiorum, and Forrestal Reserves have been closed since then because of open ground fissures and rockfall risk. Abalone Cove Beach and Sacred Cove Beach, along with their access trails, have been closed since July 2024 for the same reason. A roughly two-mile stretch of Palos Verdes Drive South is still off limits to bikes and other wheeled vehicles.

None of that is a Peninsula-wide condition. It is a boundary problem. The reserves that are closed all sit inside the footprint of the active landslide. George F Canyon and White Point don't, because they aren't even in the same city. George F Canyon Preserve is owned by the City of Rolling Hills Estates. White Point sits in San Pedro, inside the City of Los Angeles. Both are managed day to day by the Land Conservancy, a separate nonprofit from the city government running the emergency response in Rancho Palos Verdes. They were never inside the line that got drawn in 2023, so there was never a reason to close them.

That distinction matters more this September than it has in a while, because the ground itself may finally be settling down. The city's most recent survey data, gathered in early August 2026, put average movement across the active landslide boundary at just under one inch per week, a 9.8 percent decrease from July and the first time that citywide average has dropped below one inch per week since October 2023. Southern California Edison has said a sustained rate below that threshold is what it needs to see before considering re-energizing the Portuguese Bend area, so the number is being watched closely by more than just hikers. The City Council is scheduled to review the data, and to consider a further 60-day extension of the emergency declaration, at its September 15 meeting, three days from now. It is not a reopening announcement. Winterization work on drainage and dewatering infrastructure is still scheduled to wrap by mid-October. But it is the first data point in two years that points in the right direction instead of the wrong one.

What's Actually Open Right Now

The one asterisk on that list is George F Canyon's Nature Center, the small building behind the trailhead. It's closed while Rolling Hills Estates works toward breaking ground on a replacement. The 1.6-mile Stein Hale Trail itself, the willow-lined canyon walk that passes one of the only mainland exposures of Catalina schist bedrock in the Los Angeles basin, has stayed open the entire time, and the Conservancy's monthly guided walks there never stopped.

September's Guided Walks, If You Want Company

The Conservancy's calendar for the month leans almost entirely on these two open preserves, and the pace of it makes the point better than any closure map does. The month opened with a September 5 Discovery Walk at George F Canyon, meeting at the Stein Hale trailhead, followed the next morning by a Storytime Trails session for preschoolers at the White Point Nature Education Center. Both have already come and gone, but they set the tempo for what's still ahead.

Today, September 12, George F Canyon runs a 9 a.m. walk called Hidden Wonders, tracing the canyon stream past the schist outcropping, while White Point hosts a reptile-themed Nature Club for Kids at 10:30 a.m. The month closes out with two more open sessions: an Ocean Views and Native Wildlife walk at White Point on September 19 at 10:30 a.m., and a volunteer habitat restoration morning for National Public Lands Day on September 26, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., also at White Point.

All of it is free, and all of it requires signing up in advance through the Conservancy's calendar. Parking at White Point is at the dead end of West Paseo del Mar in San Pedro, accessible only via Western Avenue. George F Canyon parking is a dirt lot on the west side of Palos Verdes Drive East, a few hundred feet south of Palos Verdes Drive North.

Why This Split Isn't the One You'd Guess

The instinct is to assume trail closures track distance from the coast, or which reserves feel more remote, or which ones have had the most rain damage. None of that lines up with what's actually closed. White Point runs right along a coastal bluff in San Pedro, and it has stayed open the entire time, while Portuguese Bend, Abalone Cove, Filiorum, and Forrestal have all stayed shut, because the coastline itself isn't the variable. The boundary of the active landslide is, and that boundary happens to fall entirely within Rancho Palos Verdes.

It's a useful thing to know if you're new to the Peninsula, or if you've lived here through the closures and never quite worked out why some trailheads reopened years ago and others are still gated. It isn't about which trails are safer in some general sense. It's about which ones sit on ground that is still measurably moving, and which ones never did.

What This Means for Your Next Saturday

If Portuguese Bend or Abalone Cove was your default hike, the honest answer is that neither is opening soon. The city's own reporting still treats the closures as indefinite, tied to a monitoring program that just posted its best number in two years but hasn't declared victory. Check the city's trail alerts page before you go, because conditions get reassessed and closures do occasionally shift.

But if you've been avoiding the whole idea of a Peninsula hike because the map in your head says everything is shut, September is a good month to update that map. George F Canyon and White Point are both running fuller calendars than usual, both are a short drive from most Peninsula neighborhoods, and both sit entirely outside the ground that's still being watched.

For more on what's within walking distance in this part of the Peninsula, our earlier look at Golden Cove and its overlooked tide pools covers a similar case of a well-known spot hiding a quieter one nearby. And if George F Canyon has you curious about Rolling Hills Estates itself, our neighborhood guide is a good next stop, alongside our Palos Verdes guide for the broader area.

Whenever the conversation turns from where to hike to where to live, that's where our team comes in. Thompson Team has spent years working the Peninsula's neighborhoods block by block, and we're always glad to talk through what a specific address or street actually offers. If you're weighing a move here, get a free home valuation and we'll walk you through what your property looks like in today's market.