INTRODUCTION

      In 2005, I was scheduled for a back operation. I’d already had two complete hip replacements. I’d already had two spinal surgeries. This was to be my third, in three years. And I couldn’t face it. The prospect of another hospital stay, another surgery, and another rehab was just overwhelming.

      So I canceled the surgery date. I decided to try something different.

      I decided to try walking.

      Even though I was in terrible pain and couldn’t work or drive, I’d found that if I could get on my feet and move, I felt a little better.

      So I started walking. I went a single block the first day. I went two blocks the second day. I went a little farther the third. I walked all that week. I felt better. So I kept walking.

      When I felt stronger, I included some elevation. I started climbing the steeper streets around my house in Silver Lake. To keep it interesting, I started exploring the public stairways that laced the hills here. I resolved to plot out circular walks linking them together, for no other reason than to keep me walking.

      Those rudimentary circular walks became Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles, published in 2010, and Secret Stairs East Bay: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Berkeley and Oakland, published two years later.

      By then, I was healthy again. I never did show up for that third back surgery. I started playing tennis again. I took up snowboarding, and bought a motorcycle and began riding the trails and deserts again, for the first time in decades.

      As long as I kept walking, I kept feeling good. So I walked every day. To support the books, I began leading a free monthly stair walk, which soon was drawing sixty to a hundred eager stair explorers. Later, I got an offer to write the L.A. Walks column for the Los Angeles Times, and ended up working there full-time.

      As time passed and I designed more walks and met more walkers, it became evident that there were all kinds of people who wanted to walk, but couldn’t manage the stairs—elderly people, parents with young children in strollers, and people who were out of shape or recovering from injuries or surgeries.

      From this, the idea for Secret Walks was born. This is a collection of walks that anyone can do. Many are under two miles. Many are flat, with virtually no elevation change at all. Many can be done by someone using a wheelchair, or a family pushing a stroller. And they’re all great places to visit—interesting, little-known, hidden gems that will enhance anyone’s appreciation of the city.

      A reader familiar with hiking in the Los Angeles area might study the table of contents and conclude that I have left out many of the region’s most popular walks. That’s because I have. Early on, I decided there was no need to chronicle local hikes that are already well-known. So you won’t find Runyon Canyon, or Temescal Gateway Park, or Malibu Creek State Park here.

      Those walks have already been covered in other guidebooks, and are already so well-established that they’re crowded.

      These walks are the ones most people aren’t already walking.

      The litmus test was simple: if they were great walks that I had never walked or heard about, they were candidates for inclusion in this book.

      There was great pleasure in determining which walks to include. As was the case with both Secret Stairs books, gathering the information for this collection gave me a mandate to investigate parks, canyons, and corners of the city that I’d always known about but never explored.

      Some walks were familiar to me from years gone by—like Griffith Park’s Fern Dell, which my daughters loved when they were young. Some were familiar to me because I’d heard about them or had seen them from afar, like the giant steps at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, or the Naples Canals in Long Beach.

      But others were brand new. I found Peanut Lake just by looking at a map. Lovely! A friend told me about Paradise Falls. Fantastic!

      All of them were near at hand, very few required much of a drive, and almost all were easily accessible by public transport (for these criteria were part of the litmus test, too). Except for a few instances where there is a fee for weekend parking, all of the walks are open to the public, free of charge.

      I had low expectations when the first Secret Stairs book was published. During the years I spent finding the hidden stairs, mapping them, and designing the walks, I encountered almost no one. The stairs really felt secret.

      But in the years since, I have continued to be surprised and delighted by the book’s popularity and by the literally hundreds of people who have told me how much the book has meant to them. Some have told me how they got fit, lost weight, and began dating for the first time in years. A few have told me how they met a new friend, or a new partner, on the monthly stair walks. Dozens of people have said variations of, “I have lived here for thirty years, and I never even knew this place existed.”

      And many of them have told me that they had the same experience I did in the making of Secret Stairs—that