Walk the West Trail loop at Runyon Canyon on any weekend morning this fall and you will not find a fence, a barrier, or a strip of caution tape anywhere along the route. You will find dog walkers, personal trainers with clients in tow, and the same crowded ridge line that has drawn hikers to this stretch of the Hollywood Hills for decades. Check the city's own parks website before you go, though, and it still tells you the West Trail is closed.
That gap between what the hillside looks like and what the paperwork says is part of how this neighborhood has spent the past year and a half recovering from fire, and it plays out differently depending on which few hundred yards of ground you are standing on. Some of it healed quietly. Some of it is still moving through a funded, documented city process with a paper trail you can read yourself. If you live here, knowing which kind of recovery you are walking into matters more than any single headline about a trail reopening.
What actually burned
The Sunset Fire ignited on January 8, 2025, and tore through roughly 43 acres of Runyon Canyon Park. Santa Ana winds pushed it fast enough that the city issued evacuation orders for tens of thousands of Hollywood Hills residents that night. The fire closed the West Trail, the park's steeper and more scenic ridge route, for habitat rehabilitation while the rest of the 160-acre park stayed open.
The closure lasted just over a year, long enough that regulars who had rerouted onto the paved eastern loop stopped expecting the West Trail to come back at all.
The West Trail reopens
It did come back, quietly, in mid-February 2026. Local coverage described the reopened trail as packed with hikers within days, and the reporting was clear that this was the first time in more than a year the West Trail had been walkable again after the Sunset Fire.
The Los Angeles Parks and Recreation website still listed the West Trail as closed. Months later, in June 2026, a hiker logging the route on AllTrails noted the trail was "physically open and has nothing wrong with it," adding there was "no caution tape or barrier anywhere" preventing use, and flagging that the parks department's own site still listed it as closed. As of this writing, in September 2026, that same official Runyon Canyon page continues to say the West Trail is closed, seven months after residents started walking it freely again.
The trail's physical reopening and the city's online closure notice do not match. If you are timing a hike around what the city website says, its closure information is more than half a year out of date.
The Fuller Avenue restroom opens
Fire recovery is not the only thing that has moved slowly and unevenly at Runyon this year. In February 2026, a crane arrived at the Fuller Avenue entrance to install the park's first-ever permanent restroom, a two-stall prefabricated structure that had been in planning since 2024. The project cost close to $1 million, a figure that drew real pushback. Anastasia Mann, president of the Hollywood Hills West Neighborhood Council, told local press that nearby residents worried about odor, increased foot traffic, and the possibility that a permanent restroom could attract the kind of problems associated with the bathrooms at Plummer Park. Council polling had shown most members did not want restrooms in the park at all, even as an estimated 2 million annual visitors to a park with no facilities beyond porta-potties kept pushing the city toward building one.
The structure sat behind construction fencing for months while crews finished grading, landscaping, and path work around it. It finally opened in the last days of August 2026, closing out a process that took roughly two years from planning to a working door.
The two projects followed different timelines, offering a useful contrast in how improvements at Runyon Canyon can unfold.
Three recovery threads, one hillside
| What | Status as of September 2026 | The gap |
|---|---|---|
| West Trail (fire-damaged) | Physically open, walked daily since Feb 2026 | LA Parks website still lists it closed |
| Fuller Ave restroom | Opened late August 2026 after ~2 years in planning | Nearly $1M cost, contested by neighborhood council |
| Wattles Garden Park (fire-damaged, borders Runyon's west edge) | Formal restoration funded and underway | Mansion listed temporarily closed, connector trails still marked closed |
Next door, Wattles Garden Park restoration is underway
A few hundred yards west of the West Trail, Wattles Garden Park was damaged by the same January 2025 fire, called the Sunset Fire in the city's own capital project correspondence and the Hollywood Fire on the parks department's separate project page for Wattles Garden. Wattles Garden's recovery is running through a fully funded and specified process. Los Angeles Recreation and Parks was awarded $350,000 in Measure A RESTORE grant funding for reconstruction there, and the city's own capital correspondence lists exactly what that money covers: rebuilding the wooden gates and decorative arch gateway at the entrance, restoring fire-damaged irrigation and landscaping, and installing erosion controls to manage debris and mudflow on the slopes.
The mansion and formal garden building at Wattles are still listed as temporarily closed, and the connector trails linking Wattles to the Runyon Canyon Road loop remain marked closed while that work continues. If you are used to treating Runyon and Wattles as one continuous hiking system, which many longtime residents do, their separate recovery schedules can affect how you connect the two parks.
What this means for your weekend
None of this changes what a Saturday morning here can look like, but it does change how much you should trust any single source about what is open. The West Trail is walkable now, full stop, whatever the city's website says. If you are entering from the south, Fuller Avenue remains the only entrance without a dedicated lot, so street parking on the surrounding residential blocks is still the bottleneck, not the trail itself. The Mulholland Drive lot near the 7300 block continues to serve the north entrance and gives faster access if you are aiming for Indian Rock, the park's high point at 1,320 feet and still the payoff view most people are climbing for.
If you are hiking with a dog, the off-leash rule still applies to 90 of the park's 160 acres, unchanged by any of this year's projects. And if your usual loop dips into Wattles Garden or the Trebek Open Space on the west side, plan for detours around the areas still fenced for restoration work rather than assuming last year's route is intact.
The story of Runyon Canyon this year is not simply that it bounced back. The West Trail is walkable, while restoration continues at nearby Wattles Garden. Conditions vary by location, so check the status of the specific route you plan to take.
If you are weighing a move to a Hollywood Hills property near this stretch of trail, or thinking about what a hillside home here is actually worth, Alphonso | Bjorn tracks these neighborhood details as closely as the comps. Schedule a Free Home Repositioning Strategy conversation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
