The lesson was learned after a hurried reopening of Angels Rest on a Thanksgiving weekend after weeks of rain and it quickly became a quagmire. Should have let it settle for a few months. Winter hits the trails hard, and volunteer sawyers are out every week or two clearing out downed trees on both open trails and closed trails being worked on.
What's next? So far I haven't heard that any trail will be permanently abandoned, so trails like Bell Creek, Oneonta, Nesmith. However, there's an entire slope on Horsetail/Oneonta that requires a technical reroute, so that's at least a year away, I think. Wyeth, being a trail that doesn't branch into anything else until you get to trails that are already open, is I assume farther down the docket - but they did put in a new trailhead there. From a trail work perspective, the good thing is that many of the trails left (Franklin Ridge and east) are in wilderness, which means they're a lower trail grade and should not require as much attention to detail. The downside is that they've been left fallow for 2 1/2 years now, so it is difficult to impossible to find the original tread in places, especially in areas of crown fire.
I doubt there's any hope for Primrose. It doesn't have the right grade for any official trail and, quite frankly, I'm happy to see it remain an adventure. TKO once put forward the idea of working on the Foxglove connections between Devils Rest and Angels Rest Trail (before the fire), but in effect, that would require them to be official trails first, which the FS doesn't want to make them (no other reason given). Since TKO had some success (it took 10 years) with the Old Vista Ridge Trail, maybe after ten more years of trail work in the Gorge, the FS will legitimize those too; the trail pixies have already worked on the main route. Anyway, in the Gorge there are too many numbered trails left to reopen and not enough volunteers who come out and work on them before there can be any sane conversation about lobbying for the Foxglove trails.
The yellow line trails are absolutely fine. The purple line trails get overgrown with young cherries and alders and there are logs down, but people have bushwhacked them through.