I've done this L.A. walk 400 times. Here's how it saved me
"Hello, old friend."
That's the phrase that popped into my head at the start of my favorite walk recently. It was a warm October evening and the swaths of black mustard weed on the trail had completely dried up, leaving the towering stalks spindly and bare. Some were more than 8 feet high. They lined the path as it curved to the right, swaying and rustling in the breeze, like an overeager welcoming committee.
It had been several months since I’d returned to this trail, which is highly unusual for me. This 5.4-mile trek in Griffith Park is a staple of my life in L.A. To date, I’ve traversed it about 400 times, at nearly every time of day, in every season, snaking my way up the hillside as it’s bathed in golden hour sunlight, ensconced in early morning fog and even lit up under a full moon. But recently I’d been traveling, and then healing a gym injury, and I hadn’t been able to make it for a while.
Returning to the trail, with its soothing chorus of crickets, velvety laurel sumac shrubs and feathery wild grasses, something inside me loosened.
If you had told my 20-something self that my happy place would come to be a quiet trail in the urban-adjacent wilderness, I wouldn't have believed it. I'm a city girl through and through. I grew up in Center City, Philadelphia, and spent my first few decades in Los Angeles covering arts and culture, food and nightlife — it was all gallery openings and red carpets, open bars and kitten heels throughout the early aughts. Now? My favorite fashion accessory is … a hiking headlamp. But we morph in unexpected ways, like the natural landscape around us, contracting and expanding, cracking in places, melting in others and ultimately sprouting with new life.
I found my walk during the early days of the pandemic — a friend introduced us during a socially distanced get-together. I’d been into hiking, generally, for a while but nothing extreme. During that period of isolation, however, when my workdays were shorter and my social life was on pause, I did the hike three, four times a week after work, and twice most weekends — almost every week from late 2020 through the end of 2021. That’s about 300 times right there. It was a way to burn off stress during that difficult period and, frankly, to fill the hours I’d otherwise be spending solo at home, on the heels of a breakup.
Eventually, that difficult time passed, restrictions eased, dinner parties began populating my calendar, I started dating again. But even as my life bounced back, I’ve returned to this trail again and again.
I mostly do the hike alone — it’s become a sort of meditation practice, a way to return to my body and connect to the moment. I don’t listen to music or podcasts; I just zone out to the crunching of gravel beneath my feet. I completely unfurl, my senses becoming more acute with every quarter-mile. I play a little game isolating scents in patches of wind, flaring my nostrils and parting my lips slightly, as if wine tasting. I pass through fragrant California sagebrush and wild fennel in one spot, a blend of sweet pea, lilac and kicked-up dirt in another. I want to fall to the ground and eat the trail in those moments.
The trail's narrow dirt corridors have held me through so many difficult times. Within their embrace, alone on the switchbacks overlooking the city, it was safe to let go. I walked through that pronounced heartbreak until the only thing left that hurt were my feet. I’ve walked through periods of professional self-doubt and the uncertainty of aging parents undergoing surgeries. I walked until my emotional field of vision was mercifully more narrow: One more step, one more breath, that’s all I had to worry about.
Shortly after both of my cats died unexpectedly, I could barely tolerate the stillness in my apartment. One afternoon the grief overwhelmed me. I raced out the door and sped to the trail — I couldn’t get there fast enough — and as soon as I set foot on the path, under a canopy of Coast Live Oaks, my chest opened up and my breathing steadied. It was like a lifesaving burst of oxygen.
But the hilltops and open canyons also have provided spaces to unleash unbridled joy from new romance, exciting career turns and those same family members’ health and recovery. I’ve talked to myself on the trail, laughed out loud and sung — poorly but proudly — into those magnificent voids. The shifts in my internal landscape, mirrored in the cyclical qualities of the natural world, bring solace. At least until I have to sit in L.A. traffic on the way home!
I've long been aware of the science around the benefits of walking in nature. It lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure and has been linked to a decreased risk of chronic disease, studies show; it can regulate sleep-wake cycles, improving the quality of our shut-eye; and, as our sensory and motor skills become activated in nature, it boosts our mood and decreases negative thought cycles.
But walking the same path, repeatedly, may punch up some of those benefits, says my friend Florence Williams, a science writer and author of “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.”
“If you're walking the same terrain over and over again, you’re taking away some of the distractions of the novelty effect, yet there’s still enough [beauty] to be comforting,” she says. “Eventually you become more receptive to the subtle changes around you. Your problems may feel smaller. It gives you perspective that there is this magical world outside of yourself.”
There may be more exciting trails in L.A. with, say, the Hollywood sign or a waterfall at the end. But the magic of my walk — stretches of different trails, patchworked together, leading from Cadman Drive to Coolidge Trail to Hogback Trail to Dante’s View to Mount Hollywood — comes from my knowing it so intimately. To know that after heavy January rains, inevitably there will be a deep, V-shaped rut along the center of the trailhead, like a voracious alien mouth; or that in late May the mustard weed will be so wildly overgrown and bushy that it will completely swallow up the trailhead sign, post and all; or that for a brief window in late October-early November, two pink silk floss trees will bloom the color of bubble gum just below the Vista Del Valle lookout point.
I once met a red-tailed hawk while doing yoga atop a rocky peak during my walk. I was in full triangle pose with nothing but blue sky in all directions and the loud whooshing wind. My feathered friend appeared right in front of me, hovering at eye level, wings spread. It looked into my eyes, then soared off.
Once, coming down the hillside, I was stopped by a family of coyotes slinking across the trail. I waited with several other hikers before progressing, only to be stopped at the next switchback by an angry rattlesnake, mid-trail, tail in the air. Only weeks earlier I’d run into a tarantula on the trail’s edge clutching a still-living insect in its long furry arms — several hikers were hovering over it, snapping photos with paparazzi-like fervor.
In those moments I feel so far from home — my original home, on the East Coast in the inner city, where my closest natural respite was a patch of grass beside a fire hydrant. How did I end up here, in what often feels like the Wild West, traveling on this rustic dirt trail — and in a hiking vest?! The contrast between past and present feels so pronounced in those times. And yet, I feel more at home here, on this trail, than almost anywhere else.
The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
Recently, I found myself exploring the trail in a new way: in a hulking SUV. I'd called up Griffith Park ranger Sean Kleckner with the desire to see my trail through the eyes of an expert. "Those, over there, are actually castor bean stalks,” Kleckner said as we zoomed past. With every bit of trivia I learned, the walk I thought I knew well surprised me, like a longtime acquaintance shedding their persona, revealing unexpected sides of themselves.
The late celebrity mountain lion P-22 hung out on this trail at night, Kleckner said. He was captured on Ring doorbell video hunting for food in trash bins by the homes near the trailhead. I thought back nervously to the many night hikes I'd taken there. The walk was edgier than I’d thought.
Countless car commercials were filmed at the Vista Del Valle lookout point, a helicopter landing pad about midway through my walk with sweeping views of the city. It was glamorous too.
The slippery shale and decomposed granite at the steep top of Hogback Trail make it the site of more hiker rescues (often by helicopter) than almost any other spot in the park, Kleckner said. Apparently it also was dangerous.
I considered all of this as I rounded the first switchback recently for the umpteenth time. The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
And yet, this time the walk felt novel.
We were, it turns out, still getting to know one another.
“Hello, new friend,” I thought. “It’s nice to meet you.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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