Young Hollywood’s hot to walk the walk

Why are we hiking, here in the city? Not that it’s a bad thing, per se. I myself hike. Usually I go to my closest designated hiking area, Runyon Canyon, which is at the base of the Hollywood Hills off Fuller and Hillside. The hardest part of the hike is finding a place to park near the entrance. I usually circle the block over and over, listening to music and burning gas, until a space reveals itself. I mean, the streets around Runyon Canyon are hilly, and who wants to walk up and up and you’re not even at the hiking part yet?

Runyon Canyon is where Young Hollywood goes to hike. Why is Young Hollywood hiking? Beats me. If I had to guess, I would say it has to do with the carbs. Why Is Young Hollywood Hiking? Sounds like a question Vanity Fair would sink its teeth into.

Anyway, at Runyon Canyon, there are dogs everywhere, and women without hips and the dim-looking boyfriends who love them. The hike itself takes around 90 minutes to complete; you loop up into the hills and are eventually rewarded with a panoramic view of the city. By then I’m usually starving and wondering how long the wait is at Ammo or Toast or one of those trendy breakfast places down below. In fact, if I were Ammo or Toast, or any of those trendy breakfast places, I would install a high-powered telescope at the top of Runyon Canyon so people could check out the wait and hurry down the hill, particularly if they saw a parking spot out front.

This hiking business, in other words, is trickier and more complex than it seems. It has hidden pitfalls. Not long ago I had a friend visiting, a woman I wanted to impress, and the next thing I knew I was making hiking the centerpiece of my campaign to woo her. Only later, when the campaign was in tatters, would I wonder, as I’m sure Al Gore must have, why I had put so much blind faith in the act of hiking.

But at the time I was convinced that mixing in a hike would not only be an essential part of her groovy L.A. experience with me, but it would also reflect well on me, the avid urban hiker. And so we hiked. First at Runyon Canyon, where she wheezed up the hill, asked to stop numerous times, asked how much higher it was, asked why didn’t I tell her it was a real hike so she could have worn the right clothes. Near the top we stood there, hands on hips, staring down at people’s swimming pools. The day was terribly hazy, and when we reached the summit we couldn’t see much of the city, much less a breakfast place.

And yet, in my crazy hiking zeal, I decided that another hike was in order -- a better hike to make up for the now-inferior hike. My cousin recommended we drive north on Pacific Coast Highway past Malibu, to Yerba Buena Road, turn right, snake up into the hills, etc. etc. This was called the Mishe Mokwa hike at Circle X Ranch. When we arrived we were the only car there. It was midday on a Tuesday. I would have felt better had I seen a ranger, but oh well. Off we went on a hike that wound to the summit of the Santa Monicas, rock formations in the distance.

I was wearing a backpack with sandwiches, which is not a normal look for me. The hike itself was rigorous, cutting through brush and dried-out creek beds. Eventually we hit a sign that warned of rattlesnakes. My friend, who was visiting from North Carolina, announced that she “didn’t do rattlesnakes.” I said it was just a warning, that it didn’t mean the rattlesnakes were here today, but she wasn’t having any of it. And so we turned around and walked back to the picnic area. There, we ate our sandwiches, which came from the Malibu Country Mart and were awfully good, if anticlimactic.

Why had I thought hiking would unlock the key to a great time? In order to best contemplate this weighty issue, I took another hike. A few Saturdays ago I tried Fryman Canyon, which is off Laurel Canyon in Studio City. In terms of its parking’s proximity to the hike, Fryman is right up there. But the hike itself I found to be just ordinary, like any number of recent Woody Allen movies.

Besides, I missed Runyon Canyon. I missed the dogs and the skinny people and that time I saw media mogul Barry Diller bounding down the dusty hill at me, like he had good news (he didn’t, he just walked right on past). I missed the conversations I eavesdropped on, like the one where the guy in the Free Tommy Chong T-shirt agreed with his buddy that, yeah, he could fathom Bush is probably saving the Osama capture for right before the election.

All of us, trudging up a hill leading to nowhere special.

Paul Brownfield can be reached at paul.brownfield@latimes.com.