HOLLYWOOD — The fire road toward Mount Hollywood stayed closed so long this winter that the first hikers back up it found the route half-swallowed in green, wild mustard and grass grown waist-high across the ruts the storms had cut.
Griffith Park reopened the last of its weather-damaged trails this month, closing out a season of shutdowns that began in February, when a run of Pacific storms dropped enough rain on the hills to set them moving. Mud crossed the fire roads. Runoff chewed at the switchbacks below the observatory road. A stretch of path in Fern Dell filled with debris, and rangers fenced off several routes above the flats for weeks while crews cleared slides and waited for saturated ground to settle.
“You don’t reopen a trail because it looks dry. You reopen it when it stops sliding,” said Aurelio Banning, a hiker of thirty years who walks the park most mornings and had spent much of the winter turned back at orange fencing. “I’ve never seen it this closed. I’ve also never seen it this green. Those are the same rain.”
The wet winter that inconvenienced the park also transformed it. Hillsides that spend most years the color of a paper bag came in thick and green, threaded in places with wildflowers, and the creeks that are usually a rumor ran loud enough to hear from the road. Regulars who grumbled about the closures tended to forgive them in the next breath, once they were standing in the middle of a canyon that looked, briefly, like somewhere it rains.
Park staff were more measured. A wet year grows fuel as fast as it grows beauty, and the same grasses that delighted the hikers in March will cure to tinder by July, raising the fire risk in a park that has burned before. Crews used the closures to do more than clear mud, repairing water bars and drainage that a decade of drought had let fall behind, on the theory that the next storm season is always closer than it feels.
Not every scar is mended. A few single-track trails remain rough, their edges sloughed away, and the department has asked hikers to stay off the muddy cutoffs where boots widen the damage a little more with each pass. Signs at the trailheads make the request politely and are, by the evidence of the fresh bootprints beside them, negotiated with daily.
On a clear morning this week the flats were full again — dog walkers, a class of schoolchildren, a man doing tai chi in the parking lot below the observatory road. Banning started up the reopened fire road at his usual pace and stopped a hundred yards in, not from any barrier this time, but to look back down a green hillside he knew would be gold before summer was out.