Baldwin Hills Steps
This is a pretty well-known place on the west side of LA, so I imagine that many people will find this blog post unremarkable, but I wanted to draw attention to a funny thing a few miles from where I live: a big dangerous staircase people climb up and down for exercise.
The Baldwin Hills are a semi-wild piece of land in the center of LA. Parts of them are covered in houses; parts of them are covered in a giant oil and gas field which Culver City is planning to shut down in the next few years; parts of them are a nature preserve. The nature bit has the staircase in it. It goes straight up the side of the hill.
This somewhat-oddly put-together travel video was probably filmed in the spring, because the plants are all nice. It has some good footage of both the staircase and some of the facilities on the hill, and it's a pretty good representation of how busy and popular this staircase is:
At 6:13, you can see how fucking weird the steps themselves are. They're all different heights and depths, and some of them are falling apart. I think this is kind of part of the reason people come here: climbing the hill is both difficult and achievable. It's a little harder than it has to be, so you can feel very accomplished when you finish it.
Wherever you can see the staircase, you can see tons of people, little dots, going up and down it at practically any time. I was there well after sunset a few days ago and there were STILL people climbing the steps. I have friends who climb them after midnight, sometimes. There are people climbing these steps nearly every hour of every day of the year. If you are riding along the Metro E line, you get an incredible view of it as you pass into and through Culver City, and you can see all the little dots of people climbing it from the train.
Often, when I mention this place to people who don't live near it, they'll say something like "Oh my god, I went there once like a decade ago, and it was fucking packed, it felt there were like a hundred people climbing the hill at once." This is typical for evenings and weekends!
This was the first public place we went after getting vaccinated in early 2021, because it was outdoors and presumably safe and we hadn't yet hit the max efficacy of our vaccine yet. Climbing this hill is what demonstrated to me that I'd become incredibly weak during 2020 and that I needed to start exercising to recover from my indoorsness. Which is what led to me getting super into bicycling. Now, when I climb this hill I often do it on my bicycle, via the road that leads to the top.
Views from the top are massive. You can see much of the basin from here, including Downtown... the gigantic light-up advertising billboard on The Reef is visible on some evenings.
Anyway, this is why I wanted to write this post. The Reef is this weird... event space... office... facility thing halfway between downtown LA and USC. That giant light up billboard on the side of it is 6.64 miles!!!! away from the spot I was standing on the Baldwin Hill Overlook when I took that picture.
The steps are funny because they have a ton of native Californian plants on them, they're genuinely quite wild for a city park, there's animals all over the place and at night it's got insanely loud bugs, and it really does feel like being "in nature" if you squint. But if you look in absolutely any direction, you're seeing gigantic views of the city and enormous LED billboards over six miles away.
I recently spent some time on the hill taking photos of plants and trying to identify them. It is a really weird and fun spot. There's a lot of both native and invasive plants there and it's interesting to wander around "nature" here and slowly realize how different the landscape you're seeing is from what it might have looked like before colonization. And, of course, you only have to turn around and look downhill to complete the realization.