Many Big Sur trails have been closed for a year. Work to repair them has barely begun.

About seven miles in on the Pine Ridge Trail – about three miles before the trail reaches Sykes Hot Springs – the trail disappears for about 20 feet. In its place, a sheer cliff slopes down more than 100 feet to the Big Sur River.

Steve Benoit, a retired U.S. Forest Service ranger, and who is currently a volunteer ranger with the nonprofit Ventana Wilderness Alliance, has hiked to the cliff, and expects the trail to remain closed for a very long time.

“I don’t know how to fix that portion,” Benoit says. “I really think it’s going to take some [dynamite] blasting to fix that, and it’s going to take money, and there is no money.”

He adds the seven miles of trail to get to the cliff is “miserable,” with multiple washouts along creeks and dozens of fallen trees blocking the way.

There is no plan yet for how to fix the trail, nor for how to restore others in the Ventana Wilderness that were damaged by the past winter’s deluge.

Forest Service officials don’t even know the extent of the damage – and nobody else does either. But that will change soon: VWA volunteers have gotten clearance to begin surveying the trails Aug. 7, and will fill out reports, take photos and log GPS coordinates.

The trails in the Ventana Wilderness were closed in July 2016, in the wake of the Soberanes Fire, and the closure was extended a full year last December.

Before the closure is set to expire Dec. 4, Forest Service officials are scrambling to come up with a plan and decide how much of the Big Sur backcountry to reopen to the public, but they must first gain an understanding of the damage. At the very least, the Pine Ridge Trail, a popular hiking route that begins at Big Sur Station, will remain closed for many months to come. Restoring it will require an environmental assessment and perhaps a trail re-route.

Much of the problem is resources: USFS spokesman Andrew Madsen says that in 1995, the Los Padres National Forest had about dozen recreation officers working in its Monterey District. Now, there is just one.

That same year, 16 percent of the total USFS budget went toward fire-related costs. By 2015, those costs jumped to 52 percent of the USFS budget. Last year, in the Los Padres National Forest, about 70 percent of the budget went toward fire-related costs.

That means less cash for rangers and administrative positions that can navigate the bureaucracy to put restoration plans in place. In the Monterey District, there is now about $220,000 annually for recreation-related costs. Restoring the trails will require identifying a different source of funding.

“We’re in a tough spot,” says Tim Short, the district ranger for the Monterey District.

“If it wasn’t for VWA, we wouldn’t be getting anything done in terms of trail work,” adds Tom Murphey, the Forest Service’s sole recreation officer in the Monterey District.

Mike Splain, VWA’s executive director, has been noting the funding problems for years. “That’s kind of the way it goes with this forest,” he says. “You retire and there’s no money to replace you.”

Because of the staff shortage, Recreation Officer Diane Cross, who is normally based in the Ojai District, came up in late June to help Murphey and will stay through October. Even still, the two say, their administrative workload makes it difficult to get out of their office in King City and provide boots on the ground. Cross adds there hasn’t been a Forest Service trail crew in the Monterey District since the early 1990s. The lack of trail maintenance likely contributed to the washout on Pine Ridge, she says.

Murphey is crafting a plan to potentially reopen some of the trails near Tassajara Road in the coming months – it still needs be approved by USFS officials and attorneys – but he and Cross say the agency is exercising an abundance of caution for public safety reasons.

“Part of the challenge is, if we only open five miles in [on the Pine Ridge Trail],” Cross says, “how do we guarantee [hikers] are not going to go further and have to get medevaced out? We want to avoid that type of thing.”

The outlook is better in state parks: trails in Andrew Molera State Park reopened July 28, but the popular Rocky Ridge Trail in Garrapata State Park, where the Soberanes Fire started due to an illegal campfire, remains closed indefinitely.

Brent Marshall, the Monterey district superintendent for California State Parks, says repairing that trail has yet to begin, and has been delayed by diverting resources to build a hiking trail around Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge where Highway 1 is closed to traffic, and to reopen trails at Andrew Molera.

He has no estimate for when the Rocky Ridge Trail will reopen.