HOLLYWOOD — The hills above Hollywood are the greenest they have been in years, and the people who live at the foot of the trails know exactly what that means. The cars are coming.

A winter of steady rain has done for the slopes what no ordinary season does. The chaparral has filled in, the mustard has come up yellow along the ridgelines, and the trails that spend most of the year the color of a paper bag are, for a few weeks, worth the drive. Word travels. By the first warm Saturday, the narrow residential streets that feed the trailheads fill with visitors circling for parking they will not find.

For the households on those streets, the green hills arrive with a familiar tax. Driveways get blocked. Trash cans go missing on collection day, knocked into the gutter by someone angling a car into a half-space. The quiet that residents pay a premium for evaporates from about nine in the morning until dusk.

“I love that people want to be up there. I do,” said Coleman Ruiz, who has lived three doors from a popular trailhead for twelve years and spends spring weekends waving cars away from his driveway apron. “What I don’t love is finding a stranger’s sedan parked across the end of my driveway while my kid’s asking why we can’t leave. It happens every April. The rain just makes it worse, because the hills look like a postcard.”

The wet winter has left its own marks on the trails themselves. Volunteers who maintain the paths say the rain carved ruts into the steeper sections and loosened the soil, and that heavy foot traffic on wet ground widens the damage — hikers stepping around a muddy stretch trample the plants at its edges, and the trail grows a little broader and barer each weekend. They have asked visitors to stay on the marked routes and to skip the trails entirely on the days after a storm, a request that competes with a hillside at its most photogenic.

Residents have tried the usual remedies over the years, with mixed results: permit-parking blocks that push the cars one street over, requests for more signage, the occasional weekend enforcement sweep that clears the red zones until the officer leaves. Nobody expects a permanent fix. The hills are public, the views are free, and a rainy year is precisely the kind that draws people out to see them.

So the neighbors prepare the way they always do. They move their cars early, warn their guests to walk in, and settle in for a season of it. By July the mustard will have browned and the crowds will thin, and the streets will go quiet again, and the residents will have their trailheads more or less to themselves until the next good winter paints the hills and brings everyone back.