Update:
Worked with the Laguna Canyon Foundation to finish the repair work on Lizards, add some plants at the margins, seed some areas, and help give nature a head start to define the trail edges with growth (if anyone's been through) now that 99.9% of the heavy lifting on the upper section before the canopy is completed. Some PO management, adding brush in areas to keep the trail footprint about the width of the bars and the brush wide enough so it doesn't hook you, but doesn't allow you to make the trail wider.
The current opening is hopefully late March/early April. The hangup is the number of oversight agencies this new trail has to go through, each with their mandatory 14-30 days of review. This is so that when the inevitable happens (user error), a trail user can't sue OC Parks or any of the other government agencies because the level of oversight and review eliminates the idea of negligence, either willful or accidental. Sucks in the short term, but means that there's virtually no way that the trail would be closed once opened.
Oh, and if it rains again, or you're in LCWP and see people poaching it, kindly tell them that the trail will likely remain closed as long as people continue to damage it and undo the work done to it before its open. Nothing better than having 20+ strava segments posted to a closed trail 24 hours after a rain, when the rest of the park is closed as well.
After its open, have at it. Even while working on it today, people were on it (this is a closed trail?) despite the presence of trucks at both ends of the trails, closed signs, rangers on site, etc.
Sidebar, these guys seem to do quite a bit of trail work and are also responsible for some trail work in Aliso (5 Oaks is on their list since its as wide as a freeway in some areas now.) but get very few volunteers from the MTB community, if any. They seemed genuinely surprised that I was there besides Steve, our SHARE (local IMBA Chapter) president.
Head on over to SHAREs website (
http://sharemtb.com) and Laguna Canyon Foundation (
http://www.lagunacanyon.org/volunteer/trail-maintenance/) for more info. All it takes is a couple of hours once a month.