Ask someone who has lived in Signal Hill for a while where "the trail" is, and you'll get a pause before an answer. There isn't one trail. What residents actually do, especially in the hour before sunset, is stitch together a route through six separate small parks, none of which would be worth a special trip on its own, but that together turn two square miles of hilltop into a loop that feels like it was designed on purpose.
It wasn't designed. It's what's left over from an oil field.
The parks are small because the leases were small
Signal Hill's park system reads strangely on a map: a scatter of tiny green rectangles with names like Calbrisas, Hillbrook, Raymond Arbor, and Temple View, most under half an acre, tucked between residential streets with no obvious connective tissue. That's because they are not a park system in the traditional sense. According to Signal Hill's own history, the city sat atop one of the most productive oil fields in the world after Royal Dutch Shell's Alamitos No. 1 well erupted in 1921, and within a few years the hill was covered with more than a hundred derricks, enough that it earned the nickname "Porcupine Hill." The parks came later, carved out one former lease parcel at a time as wells were capped and land was reclaimed. Discovery Well Park, the largest of them at just under five acres, sits near the site of that original 1921 strike. The rest are pocket-sized because the parcels underneath them were never meant to be parks. They were meant to hold a pump and a service road.
That history is why the walk feels like a scavenger hunt instead of a hike. There's no single trailhead sign because there was never a single piece of land to put one on.
The order locals actually walk it in
If you ask around, the informal route goes something like this:
- Start at Discovery Well Park, on Temple Avenue near East Hill Street, where the wells that started it all are still visible from the gravel path.
- Climb Panorama Road to the Panorama Promenade, where the Unity Sculpture, a 12-foot piece on a 4-foot pedestal, marks a small seating courtyard dedicated to the victims of September 11.
- Continue to Hilltop Park at Skyline and Dawson, where the ground opens into a 360-degree view that reaches the San Gabriel Mountains, Long Beach Harbor, and on a clear day, Catalina Island.
- Finish at Sunset View Park, a small pocket park with a bronze sculpture called "Tribute to the Roughnecks," honoring the oil workers who built the city, positioned exactly where its name promises the best light at the end of the day.
The whole loop covers roughly two miles round trip and gains enough elevation that residents treat it as their evening workout as much as their view. It also has a known friction point that nobody puts on the maps: parking at Sunset View Park is limited to a few curb spots on a residential street, and the city has, at times, had to send a patrol around at closing to clear people out. If you're doing the loop for sunset, park near Hilltop and walk the last stretch instead of circling for a spot.
A free tour that nobody has to plan for
There's a second, less physical version of this same loop, run by the Signal Hill Historical Society, and it solves a problem the park system doesn't: it tells you what you're looking at. The Society runs weekend neighborhood walking tours that require no reservation and no ticket. You show up in comfortable shoes and join. The Crescent Heights walk, which meets at 1650 Crescent Heights Street, covers the historic residential blocks that sat in the middle of the oil field itself, with guides and homeowner speakers who let you inside a historic house or two. The Hilltop walk covers the same ground the evening loop does, but with the stories attached: the millionaires who built homes on top of an active oil field, and the era when Model T races and skateboard races ran down these same hilltop streets. Long Beach Heritage has also run a ticketed variation of this same walk through its Summer of Architecture series, meeting at the Hilltop Park picnic tables, which tells you the interest in this specific stretch of hillside isn't just a local curiosity. It's become a small institution.
Bookending the walk with two names worth knowing
The loop has an unofficial start and finish, and both are small, family-run businesses rather than chains.
Black Dog Coffee Roasters, on East Burnett Street, roasts on site, and the story behind the beans is part of the draw. The person behind the counter travels back to a family farm in El Salvador most years during picking season, hand-selecting the beans that get roasted in Signal Hill. It's a to-go operation more than a sit-down café, which fits the morning version of the loop: grab a cup before Discovery Well, not after.
Ten Mile Brewing, on East Willow Street, is the other bookend, and it's built for the after-sunset crowd. It's family-owned, dog-friendly, kid-friendly with the understanding that both stay close to an adult, and it runs live music on a rotating schedule posted to its Instagram rather than a fixed calendar. If the loop ends at Sunset View Park around golden hour, Ten Mile is close enough to walk the last leg to.
The view most people never think to reserve
There's a quieter alternative to fighting for street parking at Sunset View Park, and it sits inside a building most residents already visit for entirely different reasons. The Signal Hill Public Library, at 1800 East Hill Street, has an upper deck called Signal Point Terrace with the same coastline view the park loop is chasing, minus the walk and the parking gamble. It's reservable for adult events, holds up to 160 people, and requires a minimum three-hour booking, which makes it built for something specific, an anniversary, a milestone birthday, a small reception, rather than a casual solo sunset. The library itself keeps shorter, split hours: open noon to 8 on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and 10 to 5 on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, closed Sundays. If you've never asked about the terrace, most residents haven't either. It tends to get discovered by word of mouth rather than by walking past it.
What the loop tells you about the neighborhood
None of this is really about a hike. It's about what it means that a city this small, just over two square miles, has spent a century turning industrial leftovers into a genuinely well-used public realm without ever consolidating it into one park with a parking lot and a sign. The pieces stayed separate because the land under them stayed separate, first as oil leases, later as reclaimed lots too small to combine. What residents built on top of that fragmentation is a route that works precisely because it isn't one thing. You get the industrial history at Discovery Well, the quiet memorial at the Promenade, the postcard view at Hilltop, and the tribute to the people who made the whole city possible at Sunset View, each with its own personality because each was, at some point, its own separate piece of ground.
That's worth knowing next time someone new to the hill asks where the trail starts. The honest answer is that it starts wherever you want it to, because the city never built one path. It built six parks and let its residents figure out the order.
If a summer of hilltop sunsets has you wondering what your own piece of Signal Hill is worth these days, The Elmer Team can run an instant home valuation whenever you're curious, no obligation attached.
