For more than a year, a sign hung at the fenced-off entrances to Runyon Canyon's West Ridge Trail: "Special rules are now in effect for fire recovery. The Runyon Canyon Park burn area is closed to the public until further notice for public safety and rehabilitation." That sign came down this year. Its counterpart, a short walk west at the Curson Avenue entrance to Wattles Garden Park, is still up.
Both closures trace back to the same nine hours. On the evening of January 8, 2025, a blaze that firefighters would call the Sunset Fire broke out near the 2300 block of North Solar Drive, in the gap between Runyon Canyon and Wattles Park. It grew fast, from 20 acres within the first hour to a reported 60 acres by that night, before follow-up reporting settled on a final figure closer to 43 acres burned. Mandatory evacuations covered the stretch from Laurel Canyon Boulevard on the west to Mulholland Drive on the north to the 101 Freeway on the east, down to Hollywood Boulevard. Firefighters had it fully contained within a day. No homes were lost. But the hillside brush between two of Hollywood Hills West's most-used canyon parks was gone, and both parks closed the burned sections for what the city called habitat rehabilitation.
Twenty months later, only one of those closures has ended.
The park that reopened
Runyon Canyon's West Ridge Trail came back in February 2026, according to local coverage from KTLA and WEHO Times. The fencing came down, and hikers were back on the ridge within days, though certain sections remained roped off even after the reopening. The rest of the 160-acre park, run by the city's Department of Recreation and Parks, had never fully closed. Only the burned western ridge itself, the steepest and most habitat-sensitive stretch, sat behind caution tape for the better part of a year while native chaparral had a chance to recover.
That is a fairly ordinary recovery arc for city parkland after a brush fire. You close the burn scar, let the hillside re-establish itself, then reopen once erosion risk drops. Griffith Park went through a similar cycle after its own closures and reopenings during the same fire season.
The park that hasn't
Wattles Garden Park sits on the other side of that burned gap, and it is still closed. The city's restoration page describes an active project there: rebuilding the wooden gates and arch gateway at the entrance, restoring irrigation and plantings damaged by the fire, and installing erosion controls to manage debris and mudflow on the hillside. The funding is specific and traceable, $350,000 from Measure A RESTORE, the county parcel tax approved by voters to fund parks and recreation projects.
Wattles is not an ordinary hillside. The park surrounds Wattles Mansion, a 1907 estate originally called Jualita, designed by architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey for Omaha banker Gurdon Wattles. It was declared Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 579 in 1993, and city records describe it as one of the only intact surviving examples of the country estates that occupied Hollywood before the film industry arrived. The last time the city did major restoration work here, back in 2013, officials were explicit that every repair had to follow the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties. That is a federal preservation standard, not a parks-department checklist, and it governs everything from how a gate is rebuilt to what plant material goes back into the ground.
That is the actual difference between these two recoveries. It has nothing to do with which hillside burned worse. It has to do with what kind of property each park is. Runyon's West Trail is undifferentiated city parkland: close the burn scar, wait for the brush to come back, take down the fence. Wattles is a historic monument with a named funding line and a preservation standard attached to every repair, which is a slower, more procedural kind of rebuilding even when the dollar amount is small.
| Runyon Canyon West Ridge Trail | Wattles Garden Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Status as of September 2026 | Reopened February 2026 | Still closed |
| Closure length | About 13 months | Ongoing, about 20 months |
| Funding mechanism | Standard parks maintenance | $350,000, Measure A RESTORE |
| Governing standard | Habitat rehabilitation | Secretary of the Interior's historic preservation standards |
What it breaks, on the ground
The practical effect shows up on the connector trails between the two parks. West of both sits the 62-acre Trebek Open Space, donated to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in the late 1990s by Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. Its Bantam and Castair fire roads are still open and still see a fraction of Runyon's foot traffic, connected by a steep use-trail that passes a USGS marker with a clear sightline across the canyon to Runyon's western ridge.
Before the fire, a familiar loop tied all of this together: down Runyon's West Trail, a cutoff onto a smaller marked path descending into the canyon, out onto Wattles Drive, and back up through Wattles Garden Park's own gulch trail to the Curson Avenue entrance. That loop is currently broken. The Runyon side of it works again. The Wattles side does not, because the Curson Avenue entrance remains fenced along with the rest of the restoration site. Anyone doing that route now either turns around at the boundary or reroutes through Trebek's Nichols Canyon Road access instead, which adds distance and skips the historic garden entirely.
The one thing that never closed
Through all of this, Laurel Canyon Dog Park kept running. Located at 8260 Mulholland Drive and generally regarded as the oldest dog park in Los Angeles, dating to the late 1980s, it sits outside the Sunset Fire's western evacuation boundary and was never part of either closure. For anyone in the neighborhood who needed reliable off-leash time while the canyon trails were in flux, it has been the constant.
What to actually watch
The headline "the neighborhood reopened after the fire" is mostly true and mostly beside the point. Runyon did. Wattles has not, and the reason is not damage severity or how long the fire burned there. It is that one park answers to a habitat-recovery timeline and the other answers to a preservation standard tied to a specific $350,000 line item that has to close out before the gates, irrigation, and gardens can go back to public use. If you want to know when the old Runyon-to-Wattles loop comes back, the thing to track isn't a general "parks update," it's the completion of that Measure A restoration project specifically, since that is the piece still holding the connector shut.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in Hollywood Hills West right now, from the trail network to the everyday rhythms that don't show up on a map, that kind of ground-level detail is what The Kumar Group tracks closely for the neighborhood. You can browse more on the Hollywood Hills West neighborhood page, and if you'd like to talk through what's changing in the area, Let's Connect.
