Runyon Canyon's West Trail Is Open Again, and Half the Internet Still Hasn't Noticed
For most of last year, if you walked up to the northern gate off Mulholland Drive, you'd find dirt where a fence panel used to be, a paper notice zip-tied to a post, and a well-worn dirt bypass carved by hikers who'd simply stopped waiting. That's not a metaphor. The West Ridge Trail sat closed for more than a year after the Sunset Fire tore through the park in January 2025, and regulars adapted the way regulars always do: they went around the tape and kept climbing.
The trail reopened in February 2026. That part of the story is old news to anyone who follows Los Angeles fire recovery. What's more useful to a Hollywood resident who treats this park as part of a weekly routine isn't the reopening itself. It's that the loop is now whole again for the first time in over a year, and the advice everyone still repeats about avoiding the crowds was written for a version of Runyon Canyon that no longer exists.
The Sunset Fire ignited on January 8, 2025, and burned through the Hollywood Hills side of the park. KTLA reported that the blaze scorched roughly 60 acres, while WEHO Times put the figure closer to 43 acres, a gap between two credible local outlets rather than a rounding error. What both agree on is that strong Santa Ana winds pushed the fire fast enough to trigger evacuation orders for tens of thousands of Hollywood Hills residents, and that no homes were lost. The park's other trails, the ones on the Fuller Avenue side, stayed open the entire time. Only the West Ridge Trail, the connector that lets hikers reach Indian Rock from the north and come back down without retracing their steps, was fenced off for habitat rehabilitation.
The fence came down in mid-February 2026. KTLA's crew found the reopened trail already busy on the first Sunday back, describing it as packed with hikers within hours. A restroom at the Fuller Avenue entrance was also described as on the way, which matters more than it sounds. Runyon Canyon has never had one. For a park that pulls close to 50,000 visitors a week, according to a park guide last verified in April 2026, going an entire history without a bathroom at its main entrance is the kind of detail that only shows up if you've actually stood in that line.
Before the reopening, the three routes on the Fuller Avenue side were never affected. What was missing was the connector that ties the north end of the park back into that southern network. Here's how the options break down now that all of them are open:
If you're coming from the north side off Mulholland Drive, that entrance drops you closer to Indian Rock and the upper sections, cutting out some of the climbing that the Fuller side requires. Inspiration Point sits about 0.7 miles in from Fuller with a bench worth the stop, and Clouds Rest, at 1,040 feet, is the payoff most people are actually chasing before they even know its name.
Here's the part that matters if you're planning a route this month instead of reading about the fire recovery in the abstract. As of a March 2026 update, AllTrails was still listing the West Trail as temporarily inaccessible, months after it had already reopened. The official city page has had its own lag, at times describing the trail as closed until further notice due to the fire well after hikers were already using it. None of this is a knock on either platform. Trail status pages get updated on someone's schedule, not the park's, and a schedule that moves slower than a fence coming down means anyone trusting the app over their own eyes is planning around a version of Runyon Canyon that's already out of date.
That gap is exactly why local, current information does more work than a static listing. If you're deciding which entrance to use this weekend, the app isn't going to tell you the fence is down. The people who were already walking around the tape in January knew that months before any listing caught up.
The received wisdom is to get there at dawn. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete, and the specifics of the pattern have shifted now that the full loop is back in rotation.
Weekday mornings, roughly 6 to 8 a.m., are the emptiest window by a wide margin. This is mostly locals getting a workout in before work, not the tourist traffic that shows up later. Weekend mornings are the opposite: arrive by 7 a.m. or plan to share the trail with a few hundred other people, especially now that the West Ridge is drawing hikers who spent a year doing the shorter loop out of necessity. The part that surprises people is what happens after that. Weekend afternoons are actually less crowded than weekend mornings, and parking loosens up along with the trail. One recent account noted the small dirt lot at the Mulholland entrance was mostly empty by 2:30 p.m. on a weekday, and the same pattern holds on weekends once the morning rush clears out.
Parking along Fuller Avenue still fills before 9 a.m. on weekends, so if you're not out the door early, the Metro Red Line to Hollywood and Highland puts you about a 15-minute walk from the southern entrance, which is a reasonable trade if street parking has become the actual obstacle to your Sunday routine.
For anyone walking a dog rather than chasing a summit, off-leash areas cover more than half the park, roughly 90 of its 160 acres, with the off-leash zone starting shortly after the Fuller entrance. That detail is unchanged by the reopening, which matters if you've been sticking to the paved fire road out of habit rather than choice.
Spring and early summer bring rattlesnakes onto sun-warmed rock along all three southern trails, which is a reason to stay on marked paths rather than cutting corners the way hikers did around the fence line last year.
None of this is really about the fire anymore. It's about the fact that a park most Hollywood residents treat as background infrastructure, something you use without thinking too hard about it, just got a structural change that the internet's default advice hasn't absorbed yet. The loop is whole again. A bathroom is finally coming to the entrance that's needed one since before most current residents moved in. And the crowd math that everyone repeats, arrive early or don't bother, only tells half the story now that there's a third route pulling weekend traffic away from the fire road at the exact hours people assume it's busiest.
If you've been avoiding Runyon Canyon because the version you remember was one closed trail and a paved road full of strollers, that version is already gone. The park changed while the guides caught up.
We write about Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park and the Hollywood Hills because we live in the details most listings skip past. If you're weighing a move in any of these neighborhoods and want a read on what's actually changing block by block, not just the median price, reach out to the Longfellow + Leach Team for a complimentary valuation and design plan.
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