For years, if you pulled into the lower Fryman Canyon lot on a Saturday morning after nine, you circled. The Wilacre Park trailhead off Laurel Canyon Boulevard filled fast and stayed full, and late arrivals looped the lot waiting for a spot to open. That was the known rhythm of this trail for a decade.
It isn't anymore. Since Los Angeles County pulled the subsidy that had kept the Wilacre lot free since 2014, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority has been charging seven dollars for two hours and fourteen for four, and the lot has gone quiet. A hiker interviewed by KNX News put it plainly: "if you look at the lot right now, it's pretty empty." An emptier lot sounds like a win for anyone tired of circling. It isn't. The cars didn't disappear. They moved to the streets around the park, and that's a worse problem than the one the fee was supposed to solve.
The Lot That Used to Fill by Nine
Before this summer, the Wilacre lot's biggest complaint was volume. It's the closest, easiest entrance to the Betty B. Dearing Trail, the wide, shaded loop that climbs through walnut woodland and chaparral on its way up the ridge, and on a clear weekend it pulled hikers, runners, and dog walkers from across the Valley and over the hill. Full lot, long line to get in, no other real friction. That was the deal for about ten years.
The deal changed earlier this year. NBC Los Angeles reported in early July that the lot, which used to run full with a line of cars waiting for spots, had gone mostly empty in the weeks since the new fee took effect. One hiker, Stephanie Aguilar, told the station the fee "was a really big shock to all of us in the community." The Studio City Neighborhood Council had already flagged the reinstatement to residents that spring, pointing them to the MRCA governing board's June 3, 2026 meeting for the agenda and details. By the time television cameras showed up in July, the change had been in effect long enough to reshape how the trailhead functions on an ordinary weekend.
The Same Streets, Twelve Years Later
Here's the part that makes this more than a pricing story. The Wilacre lot wasn't made free in 2014 out of generosity. It was made free to fix a specific problem: cars parked on residential streets around the trailhead.
Go back further and the pattern is exactly the one playing out now. When the lot first opened in the late 1990s, the MRCA charged three dollars, cash only. Hikers skipped the machine, the lot sat underused, and the surrounding blocks absorbed the overflow. According to a city council district account from the period, hikers used residents' private property as an extension of the park, littering and damaging landscaping, until then-Councilmember Paul Krekorian worked with then-County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky to make the lot free, on the condition that it stay free, specifically to pull cars off the streets and back into the lot.
That arrangement held for roughly a decade. Then the county funding tied to it ran out this year, the fee came back, and neighbors are describing the same streets filling up the same way. One resident near the trailhead told NBC that cars are now spilling onto Laurel Lane and Sunshine Terrace, with houses on those blocks lined bumper to bumper the way they were before the free lot existed. Parking enforcement has responded the way it usually does, by writing tickets, which means the seven-dollar fee a hiker avoids by parking on Sunshine Terrace can turn into a citation that costs more than the machine would have.
This isn't a new fight. It's the old one, minus the fix.
The Real Cost Isn't the Seven Dollars
If you're weighing whether to pay or park on the street, the fee itself is the smaller issue. The bigger one is the machine.
The Wilacre lot's pay station only issues a printed receipt, no app, no tap-to-pay. NBC's reporting noted that even with an emptier lot, hikers were waiting in line to print a parking card, a wait one neighbor described as long as half an hour despite plenty of open spots. So the friction that used to happen at the entrance, waiting for a space, now happens at the kiosk, waiting for a receipt. Neither is fast. One just costs more in gas idling and the other costs more in patience.
A few practical things worth knowing before your next hike:
- Bring cash or a card and expect to queue at the machine, even if the lot itself looks half full. The bottleneck now is the kiosk, not the parking.
- Check the posted rate before you pay. The MRCA sets pricing and can adjust it, so the seven-and-fourteen figures reported this summer are the current rate, not a fixed one.
- If Wilacre is backed up, the ridge trail has other doors. The Betty B. Dearing Trail connects Wilacre to Fryman Canyon Park at the Nancy Hoover Pohl Overlook on Mulholland Drive, and continues on to Coldwater Canyon Park, home of the TreePeople pavilion, and Franklin Canyon beyond that. Entering from Mulholland instead of Laurel Canyon Boulevard skips the Wilacre kiosk entirely.
- Respect posted signage on residential blocks near the trailhead. The spillover onto streets like Laurel Lane and Sunshine Terrace is exactly what triggered the original 2014 fix, and it's what enforcement is now ticketing for.
What This Means for the Next Saturday You Hike It
The headline version of this story is that parking got more expensive at a popular trailhead. The truer version is that a fix the neighborhood fought for over a decade ago quietly expired when its funding did, and the same congestion it was built to solve is back on the same blocks. The lot looking empty isn't evidence the problem went away. It's evidence the problem moved a block or two, onto streets that don't have a pay station or a subsidy to bring back.
For now, the fee stands, the machine still only prints cards, and the alternate entrances up on Mulholland and at Coldwater Canyon remain the easiest way around both. Whether the county revisits the subsidy is a decision that hasn't happened yet. Until it does, the calculus for a Saturday morning on this trail has less to do with getting a spot and more to do with deciding where you're willing to leave your car.
Studio City's trails, streets, and the rhythms that connect them are the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing photo but shapes how a neighborhood actually lives day to day. If you're curious about this pocket of the Valley, from the flats near Ventura Boulevard up into the Fryman hills, Jonah Wilson Partners is glad to talk through what's changing here and what it means for you. Contact Us.
