The Wisdom Tree
Los Angeles, California, United States
A lone tree on a bare hillside below the Hollywood sign where hikers leave written wishes and notes, the center of a folk community that a folklorist has studied as a case of urban communitas.
On a brushy hilltop between the Hollywood sign and the San Fernando Valley grows a single tree, visibly alone against the bare hillside, and around it has grown one of Los Angeles' strangest and most sincere folk shrines. Hikers who climb the fire roads leave notes, wishes, memorials, and small offerings weighted to its branches; a box at its base collects thousands of them. When the 2007 Griffith Park fire burned the hillsides around it and the tree lived, its reputation solidified.
The CSU Northridge folklorist who wrote a master's thesis on the site described the community that has formed around the climb, the trail etiquette, the shared silence, as a tangible communitas: an unplanned sacred place made entirely by repeated acts of attention. Whatever one makes of the wishes, the practice is the thing, and it is alive.
Visiting
Reached by the Wisdom Tree Trail from Wonder View Dr or the Hollywood sign ridge; steep, unpaved, open dawn to dusk. No facilities. Leave no trace and take nothing.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wisdom_Tree,_Los_Angeles,_United_States_(Unsplash).jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories