Its serpentine curves have entranced drivers for decades, and even lured some to their death.
For motorcycle and car enthusiasts, riding the hair-raising turns of the 2.4-mile section of Mulholland Highway known as “the Snake” can feel akin to a religious experience.
When the road reopened after a nearly seven-year closure in December, its devotees returned in droves.
“It is so gratifying, so tactual, it clears my head and reinvigorates my soul,” said Malibu resident Doug Baron, who fell in love with the canyon road while cruising it alongside childhood friend Chad McQueen in the late ’70s.
But locals who live at the base of this motorsports mecca have a very different view of the Snake.
“It’s always been loud. It’s always been reckless — now, it’s come back with a vengeance,” said Cristina Lopez, a 22-year resident of Seminole Springs Mobile Home Park. Her home faces the start of the route, which winds through the Santa Monica Mountains just outside Agoura Hills, roughly between Kanan and Sierra Creek roads.
Although many drivers come to enjoy the sweeping canyon views at a respectful speed, the route also attracts adrenaline junkies and social media clout chasers — who residents say have transformed the road outside their tranquil, Stars Hollow-esque community into a racetrack.
“Race car driving is like sex. Most men think they’re good at it, and they’re really not,” Jay Leno, a noted car and motorcycle collector, told The Times. Drawn by the strong community of motorsports enthusiasts, the former “Tonight Show” host has also been coming to the Snake for decades, and noted that it’s often the case that a few bad drivers ruin the fun for everyone.
Lopez struggles to sleep through the night as engines rev outside her window at all hours. She and her fellow residents, many of them seniors, are fearful of collisions as they exit the park. Some have taken to wearing reflective yellow jackets when crossing the intersection, which is near the base of a blind turn and has no stop sign or crosswalk.
After watching the Woolsey fire consume 110 of the 215 homes in the park, Lopez worries her community is one fiery crash away from another disastrous blaze.
The Snake was heavily damaged in the 2018 wildfire, which warped a bridge at its base and fried the asphalt. Rainstorms that winter swept entire sections of the damaged road away.
Where the roar of modified engines once echoed off of canyon walls, silence fell.
With Mulholland Highway closed just beyond the Seminole Springs community, local residents were in heaven. Car enthusiasts were in agony.
For owners of two historic institutions along the Snake — the Rock Store, a biker hang founded in 1961; and the Old Place, a restaurant and beloved car gathering spot opened by writer-actor Tom Runyon in 1970 — the closure brought an uneasy quiet.
And for Los Angeles County, it provided temporary relief from a decades-long problem of dangerous and deadly accidents.
The road reopened to pedestrians and cyclists in 2020. And on Dec. 2, the time finally came to let the motors return.
“We have kept this road closed following the Woolsey fire for as long as state law allows,” L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath said in a statement. “State law requires public roads to reopen once repairs are made, and the road doesn’t currently satisfy the criteria for closure.”
The county has implemented new safety measures such as rumble strips, reflective pavement markers and bright yellow signs marking the road’s curves, as well as stepped-up traffic enforcement.
The L.A. County Sheriff’s Department issued 124 citations to drivers on the Snake from Dec. 2 to 17 alone. Most were for speeding or unsafe driving. There was also one DUI arrest and a viral incident of a car flying off the road. The person survived the crash. The car did not.
Social media videos have contributed to teeming crowds, especially on weekends. At the same time, new car technologies such as advanced suspension systems that smooth the ride, anti-lock brakes, paddle-shift transmission to speed acceleration, and steering-wheel controls have made it easier for anyone to drive like a racer — even if they lack the skills and experience.
Though the influence of Instagram Reels and the latest technical innovations are new to the Snake, the history of motorsports culture in this unincorporated area of the county called Cornell is 100 years old.
Founded in 1911, the quaint mountainside community of Cornell quickly became a popular destination for those seeking to escape the bustle of the city — be it through a visit to Lake Enchanto, a dip in the Seminole Hot Springs or a ride through the canyon’s dirt roads.
Among its early fans was racecar builder Harry Miller, who designed cars that won the Indianapolis 500 nine times. From 1926 to 1933, Miller hosted Prohibition-era parties in his Cornell house, where he also kept a garage for experimenting with new inventions.
“It’s fascinating to me that an automotive genius and self-taught designer had his weekend retreat and was tinkering with cars out in Cornell, right along the highway that today is a motorsports mecca,” said local historian Brian Rooney.
In 1924, two years before Miller took up his Cornell residence, William Mulholland celebrated the opening of his namesake road winding 24 miles from the Hollywood Hills through the Santa Monica Mountains to Calabasas.
The road was intended to provide city dwellers with access to the gorgeous natural resources in the mountains. Four years later, the full 55-mile route was completed, extending through Malibu to the ocean.
During the sports-car-racing boom of the 1950s, Los Angeles’ first-ever purpose-built racing track opened just off Mulholland Highway on the famous western-movie set Paramount Ranch. The course was onnly open in 1956 and 1957, as a string of serious accidents and three deaths prompted insurers to cancel coverage.
In 1961, Ed and Veronica Savko opened the Rock Store in a building that was a former stagecoach stop. It quickly became a gathering spot for motorcycle enthusiasts and over the years attracted celebrities such as Leno, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tommy Lee and Harrison Ford.
In 1970, another institution was born just down the street. Tom Runyon and his wife, Barbara, purchased the shuttered Hank’s Country Store & Cornell Post Office and transformed it into the Old Place restaurant.
The establishment was a favorite of Steve McQueen and wife Ali MacGraw in the 1970s, when Bob Dylan could occasionally be found hunched over his guitar in a dark corner. Today, it remains a beloved meet-up spot for car enthusiasts, especially on Sunday mornings, when you can find everything from a 1960 Porsche to a 2026 Lamborghini parked in its lot.
During the 1980s, the Snake became the go-to spot for motorcycle racing in the canyons. A bull’s-eye was painted on “Splat Rock” near a sharp turn in the road often referred to as Dead Man’s Curve.
In August 1989, five months after a motorcyclist died at Splat Rock, the county launched a pilot program to limit the Snake to resident-only access on the weekends in an effort to reduce crashes and illegal racing.
The program came after residents at Seminole Springs Mobile Home Park, where Lopez lives today, collected 400 signatures seeking a solution to the racing problem.
“There are people who would not go to church because they were afraid to leave the park,” resident Bonnie Couch told The Times in 1989. “Motorcyclists have a right to ride, and we have nothing against them. But when they jeopardize and endanger lives, it’s a problem.”
But problems on the Snake persisted through the 1990s and 2000s.
In 2009, a YouTube account called RNickeymouse began documenting motorcycle crasheson the Snake, collecting millions of views on videos showing a rider flying over the guardrail, a motorcyclist slamming into bike riders and a car smashing into a canyon wall.
Deana Kerns, a 27-year resident of Seminole Springs, said there was a “dramatic uptick” in people misusing the road around 2016, about the same time that videos of the Snake became increasingly popular on social media.
“Nobody here has a problem with regular usage, but all of a sudden it was 2 o’clock in the morning on Tuesday and Wednesday and 4 o’clock in the morning on Thursday,” she said. “Yes, we live on Mulholland, but we’re still entitled to sleep.”
The Seminole Springs residents used a phone tree to take turns reporting the loud and dangerous driving to the California Highway Patrol and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. In May 2016, the county Board of Supervisors voted to ban vehicles from stopping along the side of the highway in an attempt to eliminate races that drew spectators.
Then on the night of Nov. 8, 2018, an electrical failure sent sparks into dry bush near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory. Whipped by fearsome winds, the hungry blaze charged through the Santa Monica Mountains, arriving at the Snake just before dawn.
Evan Sawyer pulls his British Racing Green 2006 Lotus Elise into the turnout at the top of the Snake on a bright and dewy Sunday morning in December shortly after the road is reopened.
“Hey, it’s the Canyon Carver!” someone shouts out their window as they whiz by.
Sawyer is a local celebrity, and his videos of the reopening of the Snake and the ensuing drama have received millions of views on his Canyon Carver Instagram account.
Sawyer, who admits he too enjoyed some zippy driving in his youth, is now trying to position himself as an ambassador of the car community, urging caution to fellow drivers in hopes of ensuring the road can remain open for all.
“I try to preach to people: Don’t cross the mustard,” he said, noting that the blind turns are too dangerous to attempt passing.
Malibu resident Baron, who has also stopped to marvel at the view in his reconstructed 1975 Porsche Carrera, agrees that drivers must be part of the solution.
“If all of us would just drive the road legally, not race it, stay in our lanes, be respectful to the community around it, I don’t think it would be as big a problem,” he says. “What’s happening now, however, is loud cars driving too fast, hitting signs that are turn signs, going into fences, going off the road.”
Parker Nirenstein, who runs a popular YouTube channel reviewing cars, said that part of the problem stems from younger drivers who are just discovering the road.
“There’s this whole new crowd,” he said, “and they’ve been told through TikTok or Instagram that this is the hype road.”
Back at the base of the Snake, Cristina Lopez, Deana Kerns and her husband, Jeremy, prepare for another day of relentless noise.
“Since it reopened, it’s just been an automotive roller coaster,” says Jeremy. “It’s a beautiful road to ride, but I don’t think they [drivers] understand the impact it has on everybody around them.”
Jeremy describes pulling out of the mobile home park as harrowing and said he would like to see the speed limit lowered there. He fears a driver or motorcyclist whipping around the blind corner could hit someone.
Deana has taken on a role as a public advocate for residents’ concerns despite the fact that speaking with the media has led to her receiving a barrage of vitriol on social media. She feels that some who post the videos purposefully stir up the tensions between drivers and locals in hopes of getting more views.
“Drama and negativity feeds that algorithm, not happiness and camaraderie,” she said.
She has little optimism that racing and other risky behavior can be eliminated but would like to see the Snake limited to resident access only at night as a compromise.
Supervisor Horvath did not comment directly on whether she would consider such a step but noted that her office was working closely with the county Public Works Department, the CHP, and the Sheriff’s Department to protect residents.
“I have directed safety upgrades, enhanced enforcement and data tracking,” she said, “I look forward to Public Works’ additional recommendations at six and 12 months.”
As December drew to a close, an unusually powerful storm system soaked Los Angeles, closing some mountain roads and keeping racing behavior at bay, said Deana.
For brief periods, it was as if the Snake had been tamed.
But each time there was a break in the showers, it wasn’t long until the deep and familiar motorized rumble returned.
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