Costantini Team | Bay Area, CA Real Estate Experts

Ask anyone who has spent a winter above Woodside what happens when Highway 84 closes at Skyline, and they will not need to think about the question. It happened in March 2023, when a 250-foot landslide buckled the road between Foxhill Road and Portola Road, a few minutes below the Skyline junction. The closure lasted for months. A drive from Alice's Restaurant down to Woodside's town center, normally ten to fifteen minutes, stretched to twenty-three minutes over Kings Mountain Road. Average daily traffic on that stretch ran past 7,000 trips, according to town staff estimates at the time, all of it forced onto a single detour.

That closure is also the reason two very different crews have worked the same stretch of Highway 84 that runs past Skylonda. One crew opened more trail down the road. The other is thinning brush and burning slash piles to protect the corridor that's already there. Neither project is really about recreation or fire risk on its own. Both are responses to the same underlying fact: this community funnels through a single intersection, where Highway 35 meets Highway 84, and almost everything reached from up here, from a hiking permit to an evacuation route, depends on that one road holding.

The Four Corners' Landmark Has Changed Hands

The building at 17288 Skyline Boulevard started life as a general store, stocking tools and groceries for loggers working the ridge in the early 1900s. Around 1960, Alice Taylor and her husband bought the place and ran it until 1976. Thirteen years later, brothers Jamie and Andy Kerr took it over, and under them it grew into the kind of stop that can serve up to 1,500 people on a busy weekend day, a scale that's hard to picture until you've watched the parking lot fill with motorcycles on a Sunday morning.

It's still enough of a landmark that hiking guides to the Upper La Honda Creek trailhead list Alice's, by name, as the nearest gas, food, and lodging for anyone heading in from Bear Gulch Road. The crossroads is now officially Sky Londa on USGS records, though Skylonda shows up on the Caltrans sign for southbound Highway 35 and on the local CDF fire station's name. It has nothing to do with the Arlo Guthrie song of the same name, a fact regulars mention almost as often as the road conditions. What it does have is the only real gathering point on this stretch of ridge, which is why every road project, every trail closure, and every fire-season update eventually gets discussed there.

Down the Road, the Preserve Just Connected Itself

For most of the past decade, La Honda Creek Preserve existed as two separate experiences, several miles apart along the same Highway 84 corridor. Lower La Honda Creek offered about 7.9 miles of trail through open grassland, reached from the Sears Ranch Road lot off Highway 84 in the town of La Honda itself, several miles west of the Skylonda crossroads, with no permit required. Upper La Honda Creek sat closer to home, reached from Bear Gulch Road and Allen Road off Skyline just north of Alice's, and offered roughly 3.5 miles, including the short trail to an old-growth redwood known as the Big Tree, but access required a no-fee permit because of limited parking.

On November 8, 2025, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District opened six new miles of multiuse trail, tying every existing segment together into one connected system of more than 17 miles. That's not just an incremental add. It's the difference between two disconnected pockets of preserve and a single network you can actually plan a full day around.

The permit requirement for Upper La Honda Creek hasn't gone away. Parking at Allen Road is still limited, so that access point still needs a no-fee permit even after the connection. Here's how the pieces fit together as of this year:

Access Point	Trail Mileage	Permit Needed	What You'll Find
Sears Ranch Road (main lot)	About 7.9 miles, open grassland	No	Active cattle grazing, mountain biking on designated trails
Event Center	Equestrian parking only	Yes, no-fee	Limited spaces, horseback access
Allen Road / Upper La Honda Creek	About 3.5 miles plus the Big Tree Trail	Yes, no-fee	Old-growth redwood, narrow approach road

The preserve is also one of only two Midpen properties where hikers share trails with grazing cattle as part of an active conservation program, so the posted rules about keeping distance and closing pedestrian gates behind you aren't decorative. And if you're bringing a dog, know that access is limited to the Grasshopper Loop Trail, which closes to dogs from August 1 through mid-December for calving season, plus the permit-gated trails in Upper La Honda Creek.

The Same Preserve Is Getting a Fuel Break, Not Just a Trailhead

While Midpen was finishing the trail connection, a different agency was working the same preserve for a different reason. CAL FIRE has been backing a 19-mile fuel break planned around the community of La Honda, led by the San Mateo Resource Conservation District and requiring cooperation from 21 private and public landowners, Midpen among them. Crews started expanding a section of that break through La Honda Creek Preserve last September, removing low limbs and dead or diseased trees and chipping the material on site, funded through CAL FIRE's Fire Prevention Program and aimed at treating roughly 250 acres in total.

Then, on May 4, 2026, Midpen staff went further on their own land, burning 30 piles of excess vegetation in a closed section of the preserve. The stated purpose wasn't just forest health. It was explicitly to help maintain a community escape route, the same kind of corridor that failed everyone in 2023 when the landslide hit, even if this particular burn sat down toward the La Honda side of the preserve rather than right at the crossroads.

The same preserve that just added trail miles is also getting fire-hardened this year, and that's not really two separate stories. Up here, the recreation network and the evacuation network overlap more than either agency's press release lets on.

If you've noticed more trucks and chippers along Highway 84 this year on the way to or from Alice's, that's likely what you were seeing.

Why the 2023 Closure Still Comes Up

The landslide meeting on May 19, 2023, at Independence Hall in Woodside drew about 40 residents in person and another 150 watching remotely, along with State Senator Josh Becker, Assemblymember Marc Berman, County Supervisor Ray Mueller, and Woodside Mayor Chris Shaw. La Honda Fire Brigade Fire Chief Ari Delay told the room his community could be cut off entirely if any other route closed at the same time. That wasn't hypothetical. Old La Honda Road, the parallel alternate, had its own drainage damage from the same winter storms, bad enough that the town approved an emergency paving project of about $241,530 for the stretch between Martinez Road and Skyline. Caltrans eventually got one lane of Highway 84 open by mid-to-late July 2023 and both lanes back by mid-to-late October, months after the slide first hit.

None of that history is abstract to anyone who lives past the Four Corners. It's the baseline every resident measures against when they hear road crews are back on the ridge, whether they're building trail or clearing brush. The fuel break and the pile burn aren't unrelated projects competing for attention. They're the direct answer to what the 2023 closure exposed: a single road, a single detour, and not much margin if both fail at once.

What This Actually Changes for a Skylonda Weekend

None of this changes what a Saturday looks like at Alice's, still the place where hikers, cyclists, and the Highway 84 motorcycle crowd end up sharing a table. What's changed is what's on the other side of that parking lot. There's more connected trail to walk than there was a year ago, though the Upper La Honda Creek permit is still worth planning ahead for if the Big Tree is on your list. And the fire crews working the same acreage aren't a sign that something's wrong. They're evidence that the one road out of Skylonda is getting more attention than it's had in years, which is exactly what residents asked for after 2023.

If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Skyline Boulevard, or you already live here and want an agent who knows which access point needs a permit and why the fuel break work matters, The Costantini Team has spent years working this exact corridor. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.