Come off Coldwater Canyon Drive onto Franklin Canyon Drive on a Saturday morning and you hit a stop sign most locals have a story about. Roll through it even a little and a camera catches you. Stop fully and you're in. From there the road splits the canyon in half, and depending on which direction you turn, you end up somewhere that barely resembles the other side of the same 605 acres.
Most people who've been coming here for years still think of Franklin Canyon as one park. It isn't, not really. It's two distinct pieces of terrain stitched together by a single road that, until recently, wasn't fully passable.
The Reservoir Side and the Ridge Side Don't Feel Related
Head toward the northern half, the Studio City-facing side, and you land at the upper reservoir. It reads more like an alpine lake tucked into the hills than anything you'd expect this close to the 101. The trails here are easy and mostly flat, there's a boardwalk across the street through the duck pond, and the whole stretch is dog-friendly on both sides of the water. Mornings bring joggers and dog walkers, afternoons bring families feeding the ducks. The pace stays slow even on weekends.
Head toward the southern half instead, the side that faces Beverly Hills, and the terrain changes completely. This is where the Hastain Trail lives, a 2.3-mile round trip that climbs a fire road through exposed chaparral to a rocky overlook with views stretching toward the Los Angeles basin and, on a clear day, the ocean. There's little shade once you're above the oak woodland, so this half rewards an early start and a water bottle, not a leisurely stroll.
Same park. Same entrance road. Two completely different outings, and most visitors default to whichever half they found first and never bother with the other.
Why the Closed Gate Actually Mattered
For a stretch, that split wasn't just a matter of preference. LADWP ran a repair project on the upper canyon road, rebuilding roughly 2,200 feet of roadway and adding a new retaining wall and erosion stabilization stones on the hillside above it. Franklin Canyon Road closed to vehicles for the duration, which meant driving between the two halves internally wasn't an option. You had to exit, loop back around via Coldwater Canyon or Mulholland, and re-enter from the other side.
The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority's park listing now carries an update confirming the repairs are finished and both the North and South gates are open to vehicular traffic again. If you wrote off the reservoir side or the ridge side during the closure because getting there felt like too much of a detour, that's no longer the tradeoff. The project scope from LADWP describes the work as restoring both vehicle and pedestrian access while stabilizing the hillside against runoff, which is a fairly unglamorous way of saying the shortcut between your dog-walk half and your workout half is back.
Choosing a Trail by Mood, Not Just Mileage
Once you're inside, the three named trails do genuinely different jobs:
- Discovery Trail loops about 0.3 miles round trip through black walnut woodland along the canyon bottom. This is the ten-minute reset, not a workout.
- Hastain Trail runs 2.3 miles round trip, rising on a fire road through chaparral to the overlook, then dropping to a single-track trail near the old Doheny ranch house before returning to the lawn area.
- Berman Trail covers about a mile up to Mulholland Drive, connecting Franklin Canyon to Coldwater Canyon Park and Wilacre Park on the other side of the ridge, which makes it the one trail that actually functions as a corridor rather than a loop.
If you already live the Mulholland or Coldwater Canyon side of the hill, Berman is worth knowing about specifically because it turns Franklin Canyon into something you can walk to from the ridge instead of driving around to.
The Nature Center Keeps Its Own Hours
The Sooky Goldman Nature Center sits inside the park with taxidermy displays, a small gift shop, and exhibits on water conservation and native plants, but it doesn't run on the same clock as the trails. It keeps limited hours, generally Wednesday through Saturday, and it's worth calling ahead before you plan a visit around it.
The William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom, named for the conservation-minded Supreme Court justice, hosts school field trip groups on weekday mornings. If you're after a quiet trail and you show up on a Tuesday at 9 a.m., you may find yourself sharing the lower canyon with several dozen fourth graders. Weekday afternoons and weekends are the more predictable bet if solitude is the point.
For something less predictable but more memorable, Community Nature Connection runs naturalist-led full moon hikes inside the park on a rotating schedule, meeting at the Lower Ranch parking lot near the end of Lake Drive. Registration is limited and the hikes get canceled for rain, so they're not something you can plan around casually, but they're a genuine after-dark option most people driving past the gate every day have no idea exists.
Come to a complete stop at the sign near the main parking lot. The camera is real, the fine is real, and it's one of the more consistent ways longtime visitors get caught off guard on a trip they've made a hundred times before.
This Is Also Someone's Street
It's easy to think of Franklin Canyon purely as parkland, a place you drive to and then leave. But the canyon is also home to its own residential pocket, represented within the Bel Air-Beverly Crest Neighborhood Council, and the Beverly Hills Fire Department treats it accordingly. This spring, the department held its second emergency evacuation drill specifically for residents living in and around Franklin Canyon north of Sunset Boulevard, with sirens sounding around 1:30 p.m. and residents asked to grab their emergency bags and head to a designated meeting point at Will Rogers Memorial Park along marked evacuation routes, according to reporting from Canyon News.
For anyone already living in the Hollywood Hills, this probably doesn't read as surprising. Canyon living means evacuation routes are part of the mental map, not an afterthought. But it's a useful reminder that the same fire road you might jog on a Saturday morning is also a functioning street for the people whose driveways open onto it, and that the drill wasn't hypothetical. It ran, with police and fire personnel on site, as described by the Beverly Hills Courier.
Treat It Like Two Trips, Not One
The practical upshot is simple. Franklin Canyon rewards people who stop treating it as a single destination. Decide first whether you want the reservoir side, slow and shaded and good for a dog on a leash, or the ridge side, steeper and exposed and better suited to an early start with water in hand. Then plan around the nature center's actual hours rather than assuming it's open whenever the gate is, and know that a full moon hike or a quiet weekday afternoon will feel nothing like a school-group Tuesday morning.
The road connecting both halves is finally whole again after months of construction. That's not a small thing for a park that only really works as two parks in conversation with each other.
If you're the kind of Hollywood Hills reader who already has strong opinions about Coldwater Canyon versus Laurel Canyon, or you're weighing what daily life actually looks like on the Mulholland corridor before committing to a specific street, Anton Ismailyan has spent his career working these hillside neighborhoods block by block. Browse the Hollywood Hills neighborhood guide or reach out directly when you're ready to talk specifics about where you'd actually live, not just where you'd hike.
