Runyon Canyon's West Trail Reopened. Half the Hollywood Hills Still Takes the Long Way In.

Back in February, the Sunday after Runyon Canyon's West Trail reopened, the trail was packed with hikers, the kind of crowd the Fuller Avenue gate hadn't seen in more than a year. That's the headline. It's also not the whole story, because a good number of the neighborhood's regulars weren't there at all. They were three streets over, coming up through Wattles Garden instead, on a route they picked up out of necessity and never quite gave up.

That's the part worth understanding if you live in the Hollywood Hills: the trail came back, but the neighborhood's walking habits didn't fully snap back with it.

What Actually Reopened in February

The West Trail, sometimes called the West Ridge Trail, had been closed since the Sunset Fire ignited on January 8, 2025, a blaze that forced evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents across the Hollywood Hills. Reporting on how much ground actually burned varies. WEHO Times put the fire at roughly 43 acres, while KTLA's coverage of the reopening cited 60 acres. Either figure describes a fire close enough to backyards that the closure wasn't a formality. It was habitat rehabilitation on a hillside people can see from their kitchen windows.

The trail came down in mid-February 2026, with the perimeter fencing removed and hikers back on the ridge within days. But the reopening wasn't as clean as a single headline suggests. WEHO Times noted that the city's own parks page still listed the West Trail as closed even after the fence was gone, and that certain sections along the route remained off-limits to the public. A month later, in March 2026, AllTrails was still flagging the West Trail as temporarily inaccessible, weeks after two separate news outlets had reported it open.

If you're the kind of resident who checks an app before a hike, this is the detail that matters more than the reopening date itself. For months, the paperwork and the ground truth were out of sync, and nothing in the reporting we could find shows that gap has been fully closed since. Until you've confirmed conditions at the actual gate, the fence line at Fuller Avenue is a more reliable source than an app.

The Back Door Locals Learned to Use

Runyon Canyon has five ways in, not one: two gates at the bottom of the park on Fuller and Vista, a gate at the top of Runyon Canyon Road off Mulholland Drive, a gate at the northwest end near Solar Drive by the West Ridge trail, and a ridge-spine footpath that starts at the top of Wattles Garden Park.

That last one is the quiet option, and it's the one a lot of Hollywood Hills residents leaned on for the past thirteen months. Wattles Garden Park sits off North Curson Avenue, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, and it comes with its own history worth knowing. The grounds once belonged to Gurdon Wattles, a banker from Omaha, Nebraska, whose winter estate here eventually gave way to the public garden that stands today. The Wattles Mansion, still visible at the top of the garden, was designated Los Angeles Cultural Monument No. 579 in 1993. Below it, a community garden has been run by local volunteers since 1975, tending citrus and avocado trees that predate most of the houses around them. The iron gate at the entrance carries a hand-lettered line reminding visitors that the garden is on loan to them, not theirs to keep, and to treat it accordingly.

Walk past the mansion and the garden, and a narrow dirt path climbs the ridge and ties directly into Runyon's own trail network at the top. It's steeper in places and less trafficked, which is exactly why it became the default route when the west side of the park was fenced off. The habit stuck for a reason: it works just as well now that the fence is down.

Two Doors, One View

The payoff at the top doesn't change depending on which gate you used. Indian Rock, the park's highest point at 1,320 feet, and viewpoints like Clouds Rest and Inspiration Point are reachable from either direction. If you live closer to Curson than to Fuller, there's no functional reason to fight the crowd at the main entrance just because it's the one everyone defaults to. The five entrances aren't equally used, but they're equally valid, and that gap between "popular" and "necessary" is worth knowing if your goal is a quiet morning rather than a photo at the sign.

The other constant through all of this has been the dog policy, which hasn't changed and shouldn't be confused with a temporary accommodation. Dogs are permitted off-leash in 90 of the park's 160 acres, a rule that predates the fire, survived the closure, and will still be there regardless of which gate reopens next.

What's Still Unfinished

Two things are worth watching rather than assuming are done. First, sections of the West Trail beyond the main path remained closed even after the February reopening, per WEHO Times, so "open" didn't mean every fork and spur was accessible right away. Second, KTLA reported in late February that a restroom was planned for the Fuller Avenue entrance, expected to open soon. In the months since that reporting, we haven't found independent confirmation that it's finished. If a bathroom at the main gate has been on your wish list for years, it may be close, but this is a park that has already shown it can lag its own announcements, so worth confirming before you count on it.

The Rest of the Rhythm

None of this happens in isolation from the rest of a Hollywood Hills weekend. The Hollywood Farmers Market still runs every Sunday from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Ivar and Selma, a market that has long counted Ridiculous Baking Company and Underwood Family Farms, the grower that supplies the peppers behind Huy Fong's sriracha, among its vendors. It's the kind of errand that pairs naturally with a morning hike, whichever gate you used to get there.

Earlier this summer, Thursdays belonged to poolside movie nights at Desert 5 Spot, the Hollywood honky-tonk that partnered with CINEHAUS for a run of cult classics under the stars. That series wrapped with June, but it's a fair snapshot of how the neighborhood fills its calendar between hikes: a trail in the morning, a market on Sunday, a bar with a screen and a pool on a weeknight. None of it requires the west side of Runyon to be open. All of it got a little better once it was.

The Actual Lesson

The reopening in February wasn't really about a fence coming down. It was a test of who the neighborhood trusts for information, and the app and the city page both failed it for a while. The gate itself, and the neighbors who walk past it daily, turned out to be the more reliable source. That's a small thing, but it's the kind of small thing that only becomes visible if you're paying attention to a place over a long stretch of time rather than checking in on it once.

That's the same habit of attention behind good real estate advice in this neighborhood. Knowing which trailhead is quieter on a Saturday isn't so different from knowing which block gets afternoon shade or which street floods a little in a wet winter. It's local knowledge that doesn't show up on a listing sheet, and it's the kind of thing Emmanuel and Salvator Xuereb's team has built a practice around, whether the question is about a hiking gate or a home on the market. If you're thinking about your next move in the Hollywood Hills and want someone who actually knows the terrain, schedule a complimentary consultation with the Xuereb Group.