I was thrilled to see this story by Janet Cromley in today’s LA Times, “StairMaster with a view: Hiking the stairways of Echo Park, Silver Lake.” Not just because finding and hiking the stairways in my neck of Hollywood has become my own personal obsession, but because the subject of the story, Dan Koeppel, took me on an abbreviated version of his 16.2 mile hike a few years ago.
Dan’s a freelance writer with outdoor inclinations (and, if I remember correctly, the calf muscles to match). But his step obsession began while writing the memoir To See Every Bird on Earth. The book is about his father, who basically left their family to become one of the pre-eminent birders in the world (he’s seen over 7,000 species). Dan needed something to help him escape his own head, so he started hiking and cataloging a route that started outside his front door. When Dan and I took our walk, he was working on Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World (which came out last year) and peppered our hike with at least 50 fascinating banana anecdotes. I got the feeling Dan might need more than a simple stairway hike to download after he finished that book.
I still have a paper version of the map that Dan gave me, an eight-page document rainbow-coded to elevation gain (red=thigh burn), along with a spreadsheet that gives directions and tips (”Tricky, make sure you’re on Lucile!”). Now Dan’s put the map online so fellow stairmasters can join in the hike. When we parted ways almost three years ago I swore to create a route linking my stairs with his. The stairs are there—I’ve got a solid route from my neighborhood all the way west through Beachwood Canyon, and I’ve hiked some in Los Feliz Estates, throughout Franklin Hills, right down into to Silver Lake and Echo Park, and beyond into Eagle Rock—but I failed to keep up my end of the bargain. Maybe I need to write a book.
