Drive up Franklin Canyon Drive from the Beverly Hills side this month and you will notice something that was not there for more than a year: an open gate at the crest of the hill, where a construction barricade used to sit. For over twelve months, that spot marked the edge of usable park. On the other side of it, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power crews were rebuilding roughly 2,200 feet of hillside road, and everything past the work zone, the reservoir, the duck pond, the Studio City-facing half of the park, sat effectively cut off from the side most Beverly Hills residents actually visit.
The Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, which runs day-to-day operations at Franklin Canyon Park, now lists both the North and South Gates as open to vehicle traffic. The repair is finished. What that reopening restores is worth understanding, because for most people who live near this park, the closure never registered as a closure at all. It just looked like the park always did: a dead end, entered from one side, exited the same way.
The Repair That Split the Canyon in Two
The work LADWP just completed was not cosmetic patching. The project regraded and stabilized roughly 2,200 feet of Franklin Canyon Road, installed a new retaining wall, and placed large stones along the hillside to slow erosion and keep runoff off the pavement. LADWP's own project description was blunt about the tradeoff: the road would be closed to vehicles for the duration, and for safety, there would be no pedestrian access through the work zone either.
That is a stricter closure than most people assume when they hear "road repair." It did not just slow traffic. It severed the canyon's single connecting road, the one that runs the length of the park linking the Mulholland-adjacent north end to the Coldwater Canyon-adjacent south end. As late as mid-2026, visitors were still describing the north entrance as inaccessible and routing themselves entirely through the Beverly Hills side instead. The reopening this year is the first time in a long stretch that both ends of the park have functioned as one connected place rather than two separate pockets you had to drive around the hill to reach.
One Address, Two Very Different Walks
Here is the part that gets lost when a closure runs this long: Franklin Canyon was never really one park experience. It has always been two, sharing a single address at 2600 Franklin Canyon Drive but reading almost nothing alike depending on which gate you use.
Enter from the Beverly Hills side and Hastain Trail is the default. It is a 2.3-mile round trip on a fire road that climbs steadily through chaparral to an overlook with views of the lower canyon, west Los Angeles, and, on a clear day, the Pacific. The trail then drops down to a lawn at the old Ranch area, near the site of the former Doheny family home. It is a real climb, dry and exposed for most of its length, better suited to hiking boots than a stroller.
Enter from the Mulholland side and the character changes entirely. The upper reservoir has the feel of an alpine lake rather than a Southern California canyon, with easygoing, mostly flat trails on either side and a boardwalk running through the duck pond across the road. This is the Heavenly Pond side, a three-acre lake with an ADA-accessible pond, where ducks, turtles, and koi are the main attraction and the loop is genuinely stroller-friendly. The Sooky Goldman Nature Center sits at this end too, along with the trailhead for a short, easy path through black walnut woodland at the canyon bottom.
A quick reference for the three main trails:
- Discovery Trail: 0.3 miles round trip, an easy loop through black walnut woodland along the canyon floor, accessed from the north side.
- Hastain Trail: 2.3 miles round trip, a moderate to strenuous fire-road climb to a city-and-ocean overlook, accessed from the Beverly Hills side.
- Berman Trail: about a mile up to Mulholland Drive, connecting Franklin Canyon to Coldwater Canyon Park and Wilacre Park for hikers who want to keep going past the park's own boundary.
Bring a stroller to the wrong entrance and you will be pushing it up switchbacks instead of around a flat reservoir loop. That mismatch has been easy to make for over a year, because the closed connector meant most visitors only ever learned one side well enough to have an opinion about it.
What Reopening Actually Changes, and What It Does Not
With the connector road open again, you can move between the two halves without leaving the park and re-entering from the opposite side of the hill. That sounds minor until you have actually driven the alternate route, which means backtracking out through Coldwater Canyon and up to Mulholland Drive to reach the north entrance separately. For anyone who wants to see the overlook and the duck pond in the same visit, the reopened road removes a real detour.
A few things did not change with the repair. The Sooky Goldman Nature Center's indoor exhibits remain closed due to funding shortfalls, even though the surrounding grounds, picnic areas, and trails stay open on the same schedule as always. The stop sign near the main parking lot still has photo enforcement, and it is not a formality. Regulars know to come to a full, three-count stop before proceeding. Visitors who treat it like a suggestion have reported fines well over $100. And poison oak still lines sections of both Discovery and Hastain, close enough to the marked trail that it is worth staying on the packed path rather than cutting corners through the brush.
Which Gate to Use Now
With both gates functioning, the choice of entrance is no longer dictated by which half of the park happens to be open. It comes down to what kind of hour you actually want.
- Want the reservoir loop, the duck pond, and a walk that works with a stroller: use the Mulholland-side entrance near the Sooky Goldman Nature Center.
- Want a real climb and a view worth the effort: use the Beverly Hills-side entrance off Coldwater Canyon Drive and take Hastain Trail to the overlook.
- Want to turn a short visit into a longer outing: take Berman Trail north from the reservoir side into Coldwater Canyon Park.
The park is still 605 acres with more than five miles of trail spread across two ends that do not feel like the same place. Reopening the connector does not shrink that distance. What it removes is the artificial choice the closure forced on people, where visiting one half meant giving up the other for the day.
There is a longer story underneath all of this. The reservoir at the north end dates to 1914, when William Mulholland's Department of Water and Power built it to help distribute water newly arrived from the Owens Valley. The Doheny family later held land at the south end, near where Hastain Trail ends today. By the 1970s, developers had the canyon in their sights until conservationist Sooky Goldman and then-Congressman Howard Berman pushed to have it protected instead. The National Park Service bought the ranch land in 1981, folding Franklin Canyon into the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the same year the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom began running programs for local schools. The park's two personalities were not an accident of geography. They came from two different histories meeting in the middle of the same canyon, and for the past year, a washed-out stretch of road was the only thing standing between them.
If you already live near Franklin Canyon, this is the kind of change that only matters once you know to look for it. If you are weighing a move into the hills above Beverly Hills and want a clearer sense of how a property's proximity to spaces like this actually plays out day to day, Jonas Heller is available to talk through it. Request a private consultation.
