Wandering on a Sunday – Canyons, Trails, and a Roller Coaster

One of the nice things about Los Angeles is that even though it’s a sprawling monstrosity, there are couple mountain ranges that got in the way of the developers and city planners.  So there are actually quite a lot of open spaces and canyons and things to visit.  On a lazy Sunday a while back, I decided to get off the couch and into the world.  So, choosing pretty much at random, I got on my bike, headed southwest, and wound up at Red Rock Canyon Park, a smaller park about 20 miles due west from Hollywood.

Finding the place is a little bit of an exercise itself.  First, you have to find Old Topanga Canyon Road (Not to be confused with Topanga Canyon Blvd), which is off of Mulholland Highway (Not to be confused with Mulholland Drive).

While on Old Topanga, I saw a road sigh that read “Summit to Summit Mountain Way”.  Being that it sounded like something out of Middle Earth, I took a quick look.  It’s not Great East Road or anything, but it is a cool fire road that I’ll definitely explore in greater depth later.

Summit to Summit Mountain Way

Moving on, as you continue down Old Topanga, you’ll want to keep scanning the roadside to your right, making sure you don’t miss the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn-off onto Red Rock Road.  Red Rock Road is a narrow dirt road that winds between trees and rustic houses.  It feels more like West Virginia than LA County, except for the odd house here and there that definitely had a larger construction budget than just about anything in West Virginia.  Eventually, you find a small dirt parking lot with a self pay box.  Welcome to Red Rock Canyon Park

Weekend in Limbo

So I was homeless last weekend.  I couldn’t move in to my apartment until Sunday afternoon and the hostel I was at had no vacancy for the weekend.  So I had nowhere to stay from 10:30 Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon.  I suppose I could have stayed at a hotel or something, but that’s decidedly blasé.  Instead, I sort of wandered for about 26 hours.

I spent most of the afternoon perambulating around Runyon Canyon Park, a few blocks off of Hollywood Boulevard.  It’s basically Griffith Park’s much smaller sibling.