Is the West Trail at Runyon Canyon open right now? Ask that question at different points in 2026 and you get two correct answers. It reopened in February 2026. It was also flagged as temporarily inaccessible again by March 2026. Neither statement is wrong. That gap between them is the actual story, and it matters more than a simple "trail's back" headline suggests if you live in the hills and plan your mornings around that loop.
The fire behind all of it
The closure traces back to the Sunset Fire, which ignited in Runyon Canyon Park on January 8, 2025. Accounts of the size vary. WeHo Times reported the blaze quickly spread across approximately 43 acres, while KTLA's coverage of the reopening described a fire that scorched 60 acres of the Hollywood Hills in January of 2025. That 17-acre spread between the two figures isn't a rounding error. It's a reminder that even well-sourced local reporting on a fast-moving canyon fire doesn't always agree on scale, and residents who lived through it likely remember the smoke and the evacuation orders more precisely than the acreage.
Those evacuation orders were real and significant. The fire, fueled by dry conditions and strong Santa Ana winds, prompted swift evacuation orders for tens of thousands of residents in the Hollywood Hills area. The good news, and the reason this stayed a park story rather than a housing story, is that the fire was eventually contained and no homes were damaged.
A closure long enough to change habits
What burned wasn't just brush. It was the West Ridge Trail's surrounding habitat, and the city treated the recovery as an ecological project rather than a quick patch job. Runyon Canyon's West Ridge Trail reopened after being closed to the public for more than a year, with the closure allowing for habitat rehabilitation following the fire. That's over a year of the loop working as a one-sided park. If your routine involves the Fuller Avenue entrance and you'd assumed the missing half of the loop was gone for good, February's reopening was real. The newly reopened trail was packed with hikers that first Sunday, which tells you how much pent-up demand had built for a route people used to take for granted.
The reopening that keeps reopening
Here's where the tidy narrative breaks down. By March 2026, trail-status trackers were telling a different story than the February reopening headlines. AllTrails' listing for the park noted that as of March 2026, the West Trail is temporarily inaccessible again. Trailforks, which tracks conditions across the park's full trail system, listed the overall status as Minor Issue, with one trail flagged as a Significant Issue.
None of this means the February reopening was fake. It means the trail's post-fire life is a series of partial closures rather than one clean before-and-after. One recent visitor's account captures the gap between official signage and actual foot traffic well: they described taking the West Trail only to find it closed for renovation, noting that hikers had been walking around the barrier for what looked like months. That's the practical reality for anyone who already lives here. Don't take a single reopening headline as a permanent green light. Check current signage at the trailhead itself before you commit to the full loop, especially if you're headed up from Fuller with limited time.
The bathroom is the bigger tell
If you want a sign that the city sees Runyon as more than a temporary construction zone, look past the trail and toward the entrance. As of that February 2026 reopening report, KTLA noted a bathroom was also coming to the Fuller Avenue park entrance and was expected to open soon. That's notable on its own terms, whatever its status is by the time you read this. This is a 160-acre park with no restroom facilities anywhere on site, a gap that longtime visitors have simply worked around for decades. A permanent restroom is infrastructure spending, not habitat triage, and it suggests the city is planning for sustained volume rather than a return to whatever pre-fire baseline existed.
That volume is worth sizing up. Estimates put weekly visitation at around 50,000 people, which is the kind of number that explains why a single restroom project counts as real news at a neighborhood level. Whether the final figure lands closer to that or higher, the park's foot traffic has clearly outgrown the infrastructure it was built with.
Same loop, different rush hour
A few practical facts about the park itself are easy to lose track of once you've hiked it a hundred times:
- The two entrances sit at opposite ends: the southern entrance is at the north end of Fuller Avenue in Hollywood, while the northern entrance is near the 7300 block of Mulholland Drive.
- The park's highest point, at an elevation of 1,320 feet, is known as Indian Rock.
- Dogs are permitted off-leash in 90 of the park's 160 acres, which is a bigger share than most first-time visitors expect.
- The Mulholland lot was confirmed open as of April 2026, though it's a small dirt lot and fills fast on weekends.
The timing patterns that longtime hikers already know still hold, and they're worth restating now that both ridges are theoretically back in play. Weekday mornings before 8 a.m. remain the quietest window. Weekend mornings are the opposite, and weekend afternoons tend to thin out faster than people expect, with more than one visitor noting the Mulholland lot nearly empty by mid-afternoon on weekdays. The difference this year is that a fully reopened loop spreads foot traffic across two ridgelines instead of funneling everyone onto whichever side happened to be open, so the old crowd math shifts even if the old time-of-day rules don't.
Down in Beachwood Village, the small changes keep coming
Cross over the ridge from Runyon and you're in Beachwood Canyon, a community that has cultivated a reputation for feeling frozen in the 1920s. Beachwood Canyon sits in the northern portion of Hollywood, and its upper section is the Hollywoodland community advertised in the 1920s around the original version of what's now the Hollywood Sign. The village at its center still runs on a small, specific set of businesses. The neighborhood features its own market, cafe, private mailbox rental, florist, and stables, a lineup that hasn't needed much updating in decades. The cafe anchoring that strip has become a known piece of local design history, with an architect's award attached to its build.
That said, "unchanging" doesn't mean nothing moves. The Beachwood Canyon Neighborhood Association's own February 2026 update flagged a real institutional shift working its way through the local land use process. The Planning and Land Use Management Committee met to discuss new tenants at the Monastery of the Angels building, Homeboy Industries, whose plans do not include architectural changes and call for restoring the original windows. For a building that's been a fixture in the canyon, a tenant change of that kind is a meaningful local development even without a single hammer swing visible from the street.
The same neighborhood update round also carried a smaller, more personal item worth knowing if you're the type of resident who reads the community newsletter cover to cover: a Beachwood Canyon neighbor published a memoir blending Sicilian family recipes and stories, the kind of hyperlocal creative footnote that never makes it past a neighborhood association site but says something about who's actually living up here.
What actually changes this year
Put the trail and the village side by side and the pattern is the same in both places. The obvious headline, whether it's "trail reopened" or "quiet historic village," undersells how much is actually shifting in small, specific ways. The West Trail's status is genuinely fluid through 2026, not a settled fact you can rely on from a single news cycle. The bathroom project at Fuller Avenue is the more durable signal that the city is investing in this park's future rather than just repairing its past. And a few blocks over, a land use committee meeting about window restoration is a quieter version of the same lesson: even the parts of the Hollywood Hills that look the most fixed in time are still being negotiated, one small item at a time.
If you're heading up to Runyon, check trailhead signage before you commit to the full loop, plan around the Mulholland lot's tighter footprint, and don't assume the February reopening is the final word. If you're curious about what else is shifting in the neighborhoods around the hills, our Hollywood Hills and Hollywood neighborhood pages track these kinds of local changes as they happen. For anything real estate related in the area, Brandolino Group is always available to talk through what's actually going on in your specific pocket of the hills. Contact us anytime.
