Lifestyle
I've done this L.A. walk 400 times. Here's how it saved me
“Hello, old friend.”
That’s the phrase that popped into my head at the start of my favorite walk recently. It was a warm October evening and the swaths of black mustard weed on the trail had completely dried up, leaving the towering stalks spindly and bare. Some were more than 8 feet high. They lined the path as it curved to the right, swaying and rustling in the breeze, like an overeager welcoming committee.
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It had been several months since I’d returned to this trail, which is highly unusual for me. This 5.4-mile trek in Griffith Park is a staple of my life in L.A. To date, I’ve traversed it about 400 times, at nearly every time of day, in every season, snaking my way up the hillside as it’s bathed in golden hour sunlight, ensconced in early morning fog and even lit up under a full moon. But recently I’d been traveling, and then healing a gym injury, and I hadn’t been able to make it for a while.
Returning to the trail, with its soothing chorus of crickets, velvety laurel sumac shrubs and feathery wild grasses, something inside me loosened.
If you had told my 20-something self that my happy place would come to be a quiet trail in the urban-adjacent wilderness, I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m a city girl through and through. I grew up in Center City, Philadelphia, and spent my first few decades in Los Angeles covering arts and culture, food and nightlife — it was all gallery openings and red carpets, open bars and kitten heels throughout the early aughts. Now? My favorite fashion accessory is … a hiking headlamp. But we morph in unexpected ways, like the natural landscape around us, contracting and expanding, cracking in places, melting in others and ultimately sprouting with new life.
I found my walk during the early days of the pandemic — a friend introduced us during a socially distanced get-together. I’d been into hiking, generally, for a while but nothing extreme. During that period of isolation, however, when my workdays were shorter and my social life was on pause, I did the hike three, four times a week after work, and twice most weekends — almost every week from late 2020 through the end of 2021. That’s about 300 times right there. It was a way to burn off stress during that difficult period and, frankly, to fill the hours I’d otherwise be spending solo at home, on the heels of a breakup.
We morph in unexpected ways, like the natural landscape around us, contracting and expanding, cracking in places, melting in others and ultimately sprouting with new life.
Eventually, that difficult time passed, restrictions eased, dinner parties began populating my calendar, I started dating again. But even as my life bounced back, I’ve returned to this trail again and again.
I mostly do the hike alone — it’s become a sort of meditation practice, a way to return to my body and connect to the moment. I don’t listen to music or podcasts; I just zone out to the crunching of gravel beneath my feet. I completely unfurl, my senses becoming more acute with every quarter-mile. I play a little game isolating scents in patches of wind, flaring my nostrils and parting my lips slightly, as if wine tasting. I pass through fragrant California sagebrush and wild fennel in one spot, a blend of sweet pea, lilac and kicked-up dirt in another. I want to fall to the ground and eat the trail in those moments.
The trail’s narrow dirt corridors have held me through so many difficult times. Within their embrace, alone on the switchbacks overlooking the city, it was safe to let go. I walked through that pronounced heartbreak until the only thing left that hurt were my feet. I’ve walked through periods of professional self-doubt and the uncertainty of aging parents undergoing surgeries. I walked until my emotional field of vision was mercifully more narrow: One more step, one more breath, that’s all I had to worry about.
Shortly after both of my cats died unexpectedly, I could barely tolerate the stillness in my apartment. One afternoon the grief overwhelmed me. I raced out the door and sped to the trail — I couldn’t get there fast enough — and as soon as I set foot on the path, under a canopy of Coast Live Oaks, my chest opened up and my breathing steadied. It was like a lifesaving burst of oxygen.
But the hilltops and open canyons also have provided spaces to unleash unbridled joy from new romance, exciting career turns and those same family members’ health and recovery. I’ve talked to myself on the trail, laughed out loud and sung — poorly but proudly — into those magnificent voids. The shifts in my internal landscape, mirrored in the cyclical qualities of the natural world, bring solace. At least until I have to sit in L.A. traffic on the way home!
I’ve long been aware of the science around the benefits of walking in nature. It lowers cortisol levels, reduces blood pressure and has been linked to a decreased risk of chronic disease, studies show; it can regulate sleep-wake cycles, improving the quality of our shut-eye; and, as our sensory and motor skills become activated in nature, it boosts our mood and decreases negative thought cycles.
But walking the same path, repeatedly, may punch up some of those benefits, says my friend Florence Williams, a science writer and author of “The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative.”
“If you’re walking the same terrain over and over again, you’re taking away some of the distractions of the novelty effect, yet there’s still enough [beauty] to be comforting,” she says. “Eventually you become more receptive to the subtle changes around you. Your problems may feel smaller. It gives you perspective that there is this magical world outside of yourself.”
There may be more exciting trails in L.A. with, say, the Hollywood sign or a waterfall at the end. But the magic of my walk — stretches of different trails, patchworked together, leading from Cadman Drive to Coolidge Trail to Hogback Trail to Dante’s View to Mount Hollywood — comes from my knowing it so intimately. To know that after heavy January rains, inevitably there will be a deep, V-shaped rut along the center of the trailhead, like a voracious alien mouth; or that in late May the mustard weed will be so wildly overgrown and bushy that it will completely swallow up the trailhead sign, post and all; or that for a brief window in late October-early November, two pink silk floss trees will bloom the color of bubble gum just below the Vista Del Valle lookout point.
I once met a red-tailed hawk while doing yoga atop a rocky peak during my walk. I was in full triangle pose with nothing but blue sky in all directions and the loud whooshing wind. My feathered friend appeared right in front of me, hovering at eye level, wings spread. It looked into my eyes, then soared off.
Once, coming down the hillside, I was stopped by a family of coyotes slinking across the trail. I waited with several other hikers before progressing, only to be stopped at the next switchback by an angry rattlesnake, mid-trail, tail in the air. Only weeks earlier I’d run into a tarantula on the trail’s edge clutching a still-living insect in its long furry arms — several hikers were hovering over it, snapping photos with paparazzi-like fervor.
In those moments I feel so far from home — my original home, on the East Coast in the inner city, where my closest natural respite was a patch of grass beside a fire hydrant. How did I end up here, in what often feels like the Wild West, traveling on this rustic dirt trail — and in a hiking vest?! The contrast between past and present feels so pronounced in those times. And yet, I feel more at home here, on this trail, than almost anywhere else.
The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
Recently, I found myself exploring the trail in a new way: in a hulking SUV. I’d called up Griffith Park ranger Sean Kleckner with the desire to see my trail through the eyes of an expert. “Those, over there, are actually castor bean stalks,” Kleckner said as we zoomed past. With every bit of trivia I learned, the walk I thought I knew well surprised me, like a longtime acquaintance shedding their persona, revealing unexpected sides of themselves.
The late celebrity mountain lion P-22 hung out on this trail at night, Kleckner said. He was captured on Ring doorbell video hunting for food in trash bins by the homes near the trailhead. I thought back nervously to the many night hikes I’d taken there. The walk was edgier than I’d thought.
Countless car commercials were filmed at the Vista Del Valle lookout point, a helicopter landing pad about midway through my walk with sweeping views of the city. It was glamorous too.
The slippery shale and decomposed granite at the steep top of Hogback Trail make it the site of more hiker rescues (often by helicopter) than almost any other spot in the park, Kleckner said. Apparently it also was dangerous.
I considered all of this as I rounded the first switchback recently for the umpteenth time. The scene was so familiar: the sour scent of the scrub brush and palms, the hillside homes glowing at dusk, the old burn in my calves.
And yet, this time the walk felt novel.
We were, it turns out, still getting to know one another.
“Hello, new friend,” I thought. “It’s nice to meet you.”
On-air challenge
Today I’ve brought a game of ‘Categories’ based on the word “party.” For each category I give, you tell me something in it starting with each of the letters, P-A-R-T-Y. For example, if the category were “Four-Letter Boys’ Names” you might say Paul, Adam, Ross, Tony, and Yuri. Any answer that works is OK, and you can give answers in any order.
1. Colors
2. Major League Baseball Teams
3. Foreign Rivers
4. Foods for a Thanksgiving Meal
Last week’s challenge
I was at a library. On the shelf was a volume whose spine said “OUT TO SEA.” When I opened the volume, I found the contents has nothing to do with sailing or the sea in any sense. It wasn’t a book of fiction either. What was in the volume?
Challenge answer
It was a volume of an encyclopedia with entries from OUT- to SEA-.
Winner
Mark Karp of Marlboro Township, N.J.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Joseph Young, of St. Cloud, Minn. Think of a two-syllable word in four letters. Add two letters in front and one letter behind to make a one-syllable word in seven letters. What words are these?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Wednesday, December 31 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
“I’m his wife,” I said to the on-call doctor, asserting my place in the cramped exam room. It was a label I’d only recently acquired. A year ago, it had seemed silly to obtain government proof of what we’d known to be true for six years: We were life partners. Now I was so grateful we signed that piece of paper.
Earlier that morning, I’d driven my husband to an ER in Torrance for what we’d assumed was a nasty flu or its annoying bacterial equivalent. We’d imagined a round of industrial-grade antibiotics, and then heading home in time for our 3-year-old’s usual bath-time routine.
But the doctor’s face was serious. Machines beeped and whirred as my husband laid on the hospital bed. Whatever supernatural power colloquially known as a “gut feeling” flat-lined in my stomach.
“It’s leukemia,” she said, putting a clinical end to what had been our honeymoon period.
Only six months earlier, a female Elvis impersonator had declared us husband and wife. A burlesque dancer pressed her cleavage into both of our faces as our friends cheered and threw dollar bills. A wedding in Vegas was my idea.
After two years of dating Marty, a cute roller hockey player with an unwavering moral compass, I knew I wanted to have a child with him. It was marriage, not commitment, that unnerved me. I wanted romance, freedom and to do things my way. The word “wife” induced an allergic reaction.
As Marty and I became parents and navigated adulthood together, my resistance to matrimony started to feel like an outdated quirk. The emotional equivalent of a person still rocking a septum piercing long after they stopped listening to punk music.
Marty had shown me, over and over, what it was to be a teammate. He’d rubbed my back through hours of labor, made late-night runs for infant Tylenol and was never afraid to cry at the sad parts of movies or take the occasional harsh piece of feedback about his communication style. And like all good teams, we kicked ass together. So why was I still resisting something that meant so much to him? To our family?
One random Saturday, at the Hawthorne In-N-Out Burger, after Marty ordered fries as a treat for our son, I finally said, “Screw it. Let’s get married.”
The wedding day was raucous and covered in glitter. We both wore white. Our son’s jacket had a roaring tiger stitched onto the back and was layered over his toddler-size tuxedo T-shirt. Loved ones from all over the country flew to meet us in a tiny pink chapel. A neon heart buzzed over our heads as we vowed to “love each other in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
I couldn’t have imagined then that the next chapel I’d be in would be the hospital prayer room. Or that I would have begged a God I struggle to believe in to please spare Marty’s life.
Unlike our decision to marry, acute leukemia came on suddenly. Over the course of a few weeks, Marty’s bone marrow had flooded his blood with malignant cells. Treatment was urgent. He was taken by ambulance from the ER to the City of Hope hospital in Duarte, a part of Los Angeles County we’d never had a reason to visit before.
Traditionally the 50th wedding anniversary is celebrated with gold, the 25th with silver and the first with paper. But we couldn’t even afford to look paper-far-ahead anymore. Instead, we celebrated that the specific genetic modifiers of Marty’s cancer were treatable, the good chemo days and his being able to walk to the hospital lobby to see our son for the first time in weeks.
Leukemia has taught me things such as: how to inject antifungal medication into the open PICC (peripherally inserted central catheter) line in Marty’s veins, how to explain to our son that “Papa will be sleeping with the doctors for a long while so they can help him feel better” and that to do the hibbity-dibbity with a person going through chemo, you must wear a condom. But mostly my husband’s sickness has taught me about healthy love.
When we had a child together, we’d committed to being in each other’s lives forever. But marriage was different. We’d already made a promise to our son, but when we got married, we made one to each other and ourselves. We had gone all in.
Since his diagnosis two months ago, there have been so many ways we’ve shown love for each other. People assume that I would do all the caregiving, but it’s more than that. Yes, I’ve washed my husband’s feet when he couldn’t bend down, been the only parent at preschool dropoff and pickup, and advocated on Marty’s behalf to his health insurance with only a few choice expletives.
But my husband has also taken care of me. Even when he was nauseous, sweating and fatigued, Marty showed up. He made me laugh with macabre jokes about how the only way for us to watch anything other than “PAW Patrol” on TV together was for him to get hospitalized. He insisted that I make time to rest and bring him the car owner’s manual, so he could figure out why the check engine light had come on.
We’d promised in front of our closest friends and Elvis herself to love each other “for better or worse.” And when the worst arrived sooner than expected, we did more than love. We truly cared for each other as husband and wife.
The author is a writer whose short stories have been nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and Best of the Net. She is working on a novel and lives in Redondo Beach with her husband and son. She’s on Instagram: @RachelReallyChapman.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
The missing 1916 painting Music, by Gabriele Münter. Its whereabouts have been unknown to the public since 1977. Oil on canvas. (Private collection. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
The Guggenheim, New York
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The Guggenheim, New York
This is a story about a missing painting, from an artist you may never have heard of. Though she helped shape European modern art, German artist Gabriele Münter’s work was quickly overshadowed in the public’s mind by her 12-year relationship with noted abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky.
She met Kandinsky in Munich in 1902, and with his tutoring, she “mastered color as well as the line,” she told a German public broadcaster in 1957. Together with other artists, they founded an avant-garde arts collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911.
Wassily Kandinsky’s Painting With White Border (Bild mit weißem Rand), 1913. Oil on canvas, Guggenheim Museum, New York City.
Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
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Allison Chipak/The Guggenheim, New York
At the time, most modern artists, like Kandinsky, were moving toward more and more abstract work. Not Münter. In her paintings, people look like people and flowers look like flowers. But her dazzling colors, simplified forms and dramatic scenes are startlingly fresh; her domestic scenes are so immediate that they feel like you’ve interrupted a crucial, private moment.
“Gabriele Münter was so pioneering, so adventurous in her adherence to life,” said Megan Fontanella, curator of modern art and provenance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. “She is revitalizing the still life, the landscape, the portrait genres, and presenting them in these really fresh and dynamic ways.”
Yet, perhaps due to her relationship with Kandinsky, her work was rarely collected by important museums after her death in 1962 (she herself said she was seen as “an unnecessary side dish” to him), and so her paintings largely disappeared from the public eye.
Now Münter is having a moment, with exhibitions this year in Madrid and Paris, as well as one currently at the Guggenheim in New York. The New York show is an expansive one and includes American street photography in the late 1890s, alongside over 50 paintings, from her dazzlingly colored European landscapes to portraits capturing the expressive faces of people she knew.
Gabriele Münter’s Self-Portrait in Front of an Easel (Selbstbildnis vor der Staffelei), circa 1908-1909. Oil on canvas. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
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Bruce M. White/Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, N.Y.
Yet, when Fontanella was putting “Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” together, there was one painting she couldn’t find: Music, from 1916.
In it, a violinist is playing in the center of a yellow room, with two people quietly listening. It’s set in a living room — but because it uses her wild colors and flattened figures, it feels vibrant and dramatic, not cozy or saccharine.
Fontanella said this painting is important because it provides a window into Münter’s life after she separated from Kandinsky, who had gone on to marry someone else. She was struggling financially, and she was no longer the promising young person she once was. But Fontanella said the painting shows she had found a new creative circle.
“There’s something really uplifting about that. You know, it speaks to her resilience, her sense of adaptation,” Fontanella said. Instead of showing those years as dark and challenging, it is serene and warm, joyful. “I think that’s really important because especially with a woman artist, it’s so easy to get tripped up in her biography and really see it colored by her romantic relationships when, in fact, the paintings tell a different story.”
Fontanella said she used every tool available to her to find Music. She worked with Münter’s foundation and contacted owners of collections in Europe and the United States, from institutions to private collectors. She read correspondence and catalogs from past exhibitions.
Gabriele Münter’s From the Griesbräu Window (Vom Griesbräu Fenster), 1908. Painting on board. (© 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn)
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
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Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, on permanent loan from the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich
It’s not unusual for art to vanish from public view if it’s not held at an institution. Private collectors often want to keep their holdings quiet. If they don’t sell a particular work at an auction or lend it to a museum, only a very small number of people might know that it still exists and where it is.
Fontanella was able to trace Music to its last known owner — a German collector named Eugen Eisenmann, who had the painting in 1977.
“There was a moment where the collection was starting to be broken apart and dispersed and no longer being held by subsequent relatives or family members,” she said.
Then the trail ended.
Not the end of the story
But just because the painting hasn’t surfaced yet doesn’t mean it never will. Take the story of a piece called There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. —Washington, 26 December 1786, depicting Shays’ Rebellion, one of 30 works in the Struggle series by artist Jacob Lawrence. A 2020 traveling exhibition organized by the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., had brought the works together for the first time in 60 years.
Five of the paintings couldn’t be located, and the curators put placeholders where those paintings should have been: black-and-white photographs of the canvases if they existed, blank spaces if they didn’t.
“We didn’t have any image of it. There really was no trace,” said Sylvia Yount, the curator in charge of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She co-curated the Met’s presentation of the exhibition with curator Randall Griffey. “We had decided to leave the missing panels as kind of an absence, to really underline the absence. There was a blank on the wall.”
And, then, the miracle.
A visitor to the exhibition went home, contacted a friend “and said, ‘I think you might have one of these missing panels,’” Yount explained.
The friend did. When Yount, Griffey and art conservator Isabelle Duvernois went to see the painting — which was just across Central Park from the Met in an apartment on the Upper West Side — “we walked in and immediately knew it was right,” Yount said.
Within about two weeks, it was hanging in the exhibition. Incredibly, not long later, a second panel was found. Because that one needed some conservation work and a new frame, it didn’t join the series at the Met, but it did become part of the show later as it traveled across the United States.
That kind of thing “doesn’t happen every day,” Yount said, laughing.
Could it happen again?
But Fontanella hopes that it could happen for Münter’s painting. She included a photograph of it in the catalog so that people would know what to look for.
“What I always hope with stories like this is that the painting will resurface in its own time, you know, when it wants to be discovered,” Fontanella said. “But there’s been so much genuine interest in Gabriele Münter as an artist, as a person, that I feel it’s only just on the horizon that this painting will come to light.”
“Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World” is on view at the Guggenheim in New York through April 2026.
Ciera Crawford edited this story for broadcast and digital. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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