The Sign
The letters stand on a fenced, alarmed hillside on Mount Lee. There is no road to them, no public access to them, and every legal trail arrives behind them or off to one side. A flight past the front of the Sign is the one viewpoint the city cannot give you from the ground, and every helicopter ride Los Angeles sells that goes near Mount Lee is built around it.
Quick answer
You cannot walk to the Hollywood Sign. The letters sit behind chain-link and razor wire, watched by motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras, and getting to them is a citable trespass. The famous hiking trails — Brush Canyon, Mount Hollywood Drive, Cahuenga Peak — all end above or behind the letters, where you look at the backs of them. Flights from $159 pass the front.
Why the ground does not work
Every legal viewpoint is distant, steep or behind the letters.
Griffith Observatory. The postcard view, and the most popular. You are looking at the Sign from roughly two miles away across a canyon. It is small, it is hazy by afternoon, and it is side-on. Free, and worth doing, but it is a distant view.
Lake Hollywood Park. Much closer, from below. You are craning upward at a steep angle and the letters foreshorten into a stripe. The residential streets around it now carry restrictions and almost no parking, which is a deliberate response to visitor traffic.
Brush Canyon and Mount Lee Drive. A genuine hike of about three hours round trip that ends at the fence above and behind the letters. You get the back of the Sign and a good view of the reservoir. People are regularly surprised by this.
Cahuenga Peak and the Wisdom Tree. Steep, exposed, and it approaches the ridge from the west. Fine hike. Still not the front.
The letters face south, out over the basin. The only place you can stand square to them is in the air, which is the entire argument for a helicopter ride Los Angeles tour operators route past Mount Lee.
What you see on the Sign leg
The Hollywood Sign never fills a whole flight. It fills part of one, and these come with it.
Forty-five feet tall, in a line, with the transmission tower behind them and the basin falling away below.
The dark green water directly behind Mount Lee that almost nobody photographs, because from the ground you cannot see it and the Sign together.
Its copper domes on the ridge to the east, usually with a crowd on the lawn.
The white shell in its canyon, immediately below the flight path.
The backlot on the other side of the hill — streets, tanks and sets you cannot see from the public side of the park.
The neighbourhood underneath, and the reason the Sign exists: it was a billboard for a housing development.
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The history, briefly
A 1923 property advertisement, rebuilt in steel in 1978.
The Sign went up in 1923 reading HOLLYWOODLAND, an advertisement for a hillside housing tract. It was built of sheet metal and telegraph poles and was supposed to last about eighteen months. It was lit by around four thousand light bulbs, and a man was employed to live behind it and change them.
In 1949 the last four letters were removed and the remaining nine were repaired, which is how an advertisement for real estate became the name of an industry. By the 1970s the original letters were collapsing — an O had fallen down the hill. The sign standing today was rebuilt in steel in 1978, letter by letter, each one paid for by a different donor.
What you photograph from a helicopter, then, is not the 1923 sign. It is a 1978 reconstruction of it, in the same nine letters, on the same ridge, facing the same way.
The Sign is closed to the public, but the airspace above Griffith Park is not.
Getting the photograph→Common questions
No. The letters are fenced, alarmed and monitored, and reaching them is a trespass. Trails take you above and behind them, never to the front.
The fence line on Mount Lee Drive, directly behind the letters, after about a three-hour round-trip hike. You see the backs of them from there.
They fly past the front of it, over Griffith Park, at a legal altitude. Every Hollywood Sign flight on this page routes across that face, and a helicopter ride Los Angeles operators sell as a Sign tour is built around exactly that pass.
Forty-five feet, about 13.7 metres, and the whole sign is roughly 350 feet wide.
Ask the pilot at check-in which way the Mount Lee pass runs on the day. On most routings out of Burbank the Sign appears on the left, but wind and traffic change it.
Yes, if the Sign is the only thing you want. The $159 flight is built around that one pass. Twenty minutes adds Griffith Observatory, Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip for $40 more.
It is not lit. On the night flights you see the shape of Mount Lee against the light grid, and the city underneath is the reason to go up after dark, not the Sign.
Where the Sign appears on the flight
Four minutes of climb, forty seconds of Sign, then east.
On a twenty-minute helicopter ride Los Angeles leaving Burbank or Van Nuys you climb out over the valley, cross the ridge, and Mount Lee comes into the window about four minutes in. The pass across the front of the letters lasts roughly forty seconds and the aircraft is moving at ninety knots, which is why burst mode matters and why the second pass people hope for rarely exists.
After that the route turns east for Griffith Observatory and the reservoir behind the ridge. If the Sign is the only thing you came for, the ten-minute helicopter ride Los Angeles does exactly the same pass and turns straight back.
Four things about the Sign that surprise people
The letters are the famous part. These are the parts nobody photographs.
On the summit of Mount Lee, and it is in almost every helicopter ride Los Angeles photograph whether you wanted it or not.
They follow the contour of the slope, which is why they look staggered from an angle and level from the front.
Lake Hollywood, dark green and invisible from the city. Only the air shows you both at once.
Steeper than photographs suggest. The maintenance road switchbacks up the back, and from a helicopter ride Los Angeles you can follow the whole of it.
Go deeper
From $159 for ten minutes, and what the hour buys.
The verdictFourteen listings, and the four worth your money.
At nightTwo listings, and a completely different city underneath.
DowntownThe towers, the stadiums and the basin they stand on.
PrivateFrom $640 for the aircraft, and when it works.
How longTen minutes, thirty or an hour — what each one actually covers.
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