Mulholland Highway isn’t the same road as Mulholland Drive, and the distinction matters. Drive gets the Hollywood postcard shots overlooking the city. Highway is the part actually worth driving, a canyon road that winds through the Santa Monica Mountains from the inland valley out to the Malibu coast, built for exactly the kind of car this site is about.
The route
Start at the Rock Store in Cornell, at 30354 Mulholland Highway, and head west. The stretch from here toward Kanan Road and on to the coast is the part locals actually mean when they talk about “running Mulholland,” tight, technical, and genuinely scenic, not just a connector road between two better-known highways.
About three miles west of the Rock Store, the road narrows into the section known as “the Snake,” roughly between Kanan Road and Sierra Creek Road. It’s the most technical stretch on the route: a continuous run of tight curves through shaded canyon walls, the kind of road that’s made this stretch a fixture in car and motorcycle culture for decades.
Past the Snake, Mulholland opens up into longer sweeping sections with real canyon views before eventually meeting Encinal Canyon Road and continuing toward Leo Carrillo State Beach and the Pacific Coast Highway. The full run from the Rock Store to the coast covers a little over 20 miles.
Worth knowing before you go
The Snake was closed to all traffic for nearly seven years after 2018’s Woolsey Fire and the mudslides that followed, and only reopened in 2025. Los Angeles County has since added curve-advisory signage, rumble strips, and hardened centerlines specifically on this stretch, because it also has a real history of serious accidents, the kind of road that rewards a careful, attentive pace far more than it rewards pushing limits. Treat it accordingly.
The stop
The Rock Store isn’t a detour, it’s the actual point of the drive for a lot of people. Open Friday through Sunday, it’s been run by the same family since the early 1960s, built out of volcanic rock as a former stagecoach stop, and it’s as close to a living car-and-motorcycle-culture landmark as Southern California has. Weekend mornings bring a genuine, unstaged parking-lot car show, everything from vintage bikes to whatever happens to roll up that day. Go for breakfast, not because it’s fancy, but because that’s when the place is actually itself.
When to drive it
Early weekend mornings are the move, for two reasons: the road is at its emptiest before mid-morning traffic and the weekend motorcycle crowds arrive, and the Rock Store’s best version of itself is the breakfast rush, not the afternoon. Weekday runs are quieter still, if solitude on the road matters more to you than the scene at the stop.
Road status current as of publication. Mulholland Highway, including the Snake section, is fully open as of this writing, always worth a quick check of current conditions before heading out, since canyon roads in this range are prone to periodic closures after storms.