In July, 2018, Barbara and I followed Charles Fleming's hike posted in the L.A Times for our first hike at Paramount Ranch, one of the most famous of all Western movie and television settings for just about 100 years. Paramount Pictures purchased the 2700 acres of the old Rancho Las Virgenes in 1927 to use as a movie ranch, starting with "It Girl" Clara Bow in that year's Get Your Man. Filming continued through the war with films like Bob Hope's 1941. Caught in the Draft, through 1950's TV westerns like Cisco Kid, and became the permanent home to later series like 1993-1998's Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, and finally to HBO's Westworld, still in production in 2018. Barbara and I had no idea that three and a half months after our July hike, the Woolsey fire would ravage the valley and destroy the entire western movie town set with the exception of the church built for HBO's Westworld and the train station. Today, fences surround new building sets under construction, and, on posters near the entrance, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area promised to restore Paramount Ranch and the town to its prominence as a film location soon. Today's hike took us around the perimeter of the valley, showing us the jaw-dropping reasons why this beautiful area earned 571 film credits in IMDb and portrayed settings from the American West to colonial Massachusetts, ancient China, the South Seas, Africa, and San Francisco. The green valley is utterly lovely and lined with coast live oak and valley oak. Despite the absence of a western town to investigate, Mother Nature entertained us. The Westworld church (minus the steeple to prevent duplication) still stands, but with a clan of acorn woodpeckers busy pecking perfect, straight lines of holes on the cladding. Straight lines. Like they were typing out messages. The trail winding around the hills, still thick with mud from recent rains, are an easy trek but we had to keep our eyes on the ground, Paramount is a popular equestrian location—we met three riders and horses on the trail—but horses drop off their own kind of messages: green horse apples. I hear the gifts are lucky. A flight of parakeets squawked it up on a burnt tree. Also in the clear sky above, we watched a small black crow relentlessly chase a red-tail hawk away from a tree—and won. The sweeping views across the open grassland are enough. Paramount is great for hiking, biking, riding, and dog-walking. And, when the town is rebuilt, movie making. Fun hike.