Runyon West Trail Is Reopened in Hollywood Hills This September
The West Trail at Runyon Canyon reopened in February, and the Hollywood Bowl's 2026 season continues beyond its fireworks weekend.
Two small calendar details, but they change what a normal week here actually looks like in the back half of September.
For more than a year, Runyon Canyon Park operated as half a park. WeHo Times reported that the Sunset Fire tore through the hillside on January 8, 2025, and that the evacuation orders that night reached tens of thousands of residents across the Hollywood Hills. The burn footprint itself was contained, reported at somewhere between 43 and 60 acres depending on which account you read. The fire went out in days. The closure lasted thirteen months.
That's the part that stuck. The West Trail, the steeper of the two main routes up from the Fuller and Vista gates, stayed fenced off through all of 2025 for habitat rehabilitation while the rest of the park, Runyon Canyon Road, the Star Trail, the climb to Clouds Rest, remained open. Regulars adjusted. They rerouted around the closure so many times it stopped feeling like a detour and started feeling like the only way up.
It reopened in February 2026. KTLA reported the West Trail packed with hikers the Sunday it came back, more than a year after the fire scorched the slope. The full loop, both entrances at Fuller and Vista, the ridge to Indian Rock, the descent through the old fence line, has been intact for seven months now.
The Bowl schedule is another September detail worth checking.
The Hollywood Bowl sits inside the same zip code as the rest of the Hollywood Hills, tucked into the Cahuenga Pass off Highland Avenue, and its fireworks weekend has long functioned as an informal marker for the neighborhood: summer's over when the fireworks go up.
This year, fireworks weekend is not the Bowl season's final weekend. The Bowl's 2026 season, Gustavo Dudamel's seventeenth and final year as the LA Philharmonic's music and artistic director, closes its fireworks programming with OneRepublic on September 11 and 12. That's the show many people mean when they refer to the fireworks weekend. The Bowl's own season schedule runs Bowl-produced programming through September 27, when Jon Batiste plays the last date of the season, two full weeks after the fireworks go dark.
In between, the calendar keeps going: a Jazz at Lincoln Center program with Wynton Marsalis on September 23, an ABBA tribute on the 25th, and the annual Sound of Music Sing-A-Long the very next night on the 26th. These shows do not come with fireworks, but they still mean traffic on Highland and Cahuenga, a full lot, and extra time for driving out of the neighborhood.
The fireworks weekend marks the end of the fireworks programming, not the Bowl season.
Those later dates are worth including when estimating evening traffic along Highland and Cahuenga.
In September, the neighborhood continues its usual routines, with lighter crowds than in July and August.
Beachwood Village, the small commercial strip at the base of Beachwood Canyon directly beneath the Hollywood Sign, still runs on the same handful of businesses it always has. Beachwood Cafe serves breakfast until 3 p.m., which functions less as a menu detail and more as a scheduling fact for anyone timing a canyon hike around it. Beachwood Market handles the daily grocery run for a stretch of hillside that doesn't have much else within walking distance. A block down at Franklin Avenue, 101 Coffee Shop and, further into Franklin Village, Birds and La Poubelle cover the rest of a resident's rotation without requiring a drive down into Hollywood proper.
North of there, past the Hollywoodland gates, Wattles Farm keeps its 4.2-acre community garden running as it has since 1975, a nonprofit-managed orchard tucked just off Curson Avenue with roughly 300 members and paths that stay open to walk even when the adjacent Wattles Mansion itself is closed to public events. The mansion's gardens, designed in 1907 by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, the same architects behind the Beverly Hills Hotel, remain free to walk through even with the interior off limits for now.
None of this changed because of the fire or the Bowl schedule. It's the part of the neighborhood that never stopped, which is exactly why it's easy to overlook when the bigger stories, the trail closure, the fireworks date, are the ones eating up attention.
A few details to keep in mind when planning the rest of September:
The West Trail is open again, and the Bowl's season continues beyond the fireworks weekend. Both details are useful for making September plans in the Hollywood Hills.
Checking the route and event calendar before heading out can help with planning a hike or a drive through the area.
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