Mount Washington resident leads the "Big Parade"

Here are some important definitions to know for the weekend of May 21-22, 2011.

“Hobsession” (noun) -- a cross between a hobby and an obsession.

Dan Koeppel (person) -- the Mount Washington resident who coined the phrase “hobsession” while mapping Los Angeles staircases over the course of five years.

The Big Parade (event) – the culmination of Dan Koeppel’s hobsession: an annual urban hike/walk that covers 34 miles and climbs 100+ staircases over two days with a movie party in between.

If you’re already feeling faint (or faint-hearted) at the thought of this intriguing but daunting excursion, fear not. This Big Parade’s for you too. Koeppel, a freelance writer and journalist, has broken the event up into looped segments that allow eager but time/interest/fitness-challenged enthusiasts to join the jaunt at any time and to walk only as far they feel comfortable.

As befits the grandly titled trek, the Big Parade starts and ends at Los Angeles landmarks. On Saturday, the parade, now in its third year, begins bright and early downtown at Angel’s Flight, the world’s shortest railway, and ends at the Hollywood Sign on Sunday in time for sunset. 

In between, depending on where and when you join and what you want to do, Koeppel has arranged for Parade participants to: take a behind-the-scenes tour of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels; stop at an on-the-grid, off-the-land urban homestead; experience the mysterious and “terrible" “Stairs of Darkness”; see a Frank Lloyd Wright home; watch a Laurel and Hardy movie at its original location; eat from food trucks; and be serenaded by  two great L.A. bands--I See Hawks and Triple Chicken Foot.

And that’s just scratching the surface….

The Big Parade is no forced march of fun, rather, it is a meander through L.A.’s history, a celebration of its ever-increasing walkability, and, if Koeppel has his way, a preview of a Los Angeles that is less anonymous urban sprawl and more interconnected neighborhoods.   

In a phone chat, Koeppel, who first wrote about the first Big Parade for Backpacker Magazine, says that he started searching for staircases when he lived in Silver Lake, which, along with Echo Park, has one of the highest concentration of stepped walkways in the city. Those staircases are holdovers from the days when the Red Car was king and residents needed public access throughways down the steep slopes to transit stops.

Koeppel reveals that there’s an “official city staircase list” but says he’s “really, really happy” that he didn’t know about it.

Instead, the self-described “map freak” marked off quadrants and systematically walked “every street in Silver Lake” to find and connect all of the neighborhood's stairs. According to Koeppel, navigation systems, whether they be old school Thomas Brothers guides or high-tech Mapquest GPS systems, depict stairs as streets. However, the “Stair Master”, as Sunset Magazine dubbed Koeppel,  became adept at figuring out which “streets” were actually stairs based on access and grades.

After Koeppel published the Backpacker article, fellow stair fanatics got in touch. Larry Gordon, co-author (with Adah Bakalinsky) of Stairway Walks in Los Angeles (1990), jokingly asked Koeppel why he hadn’t included any of their walks. And this year, authors of two separate stairway guides (both published in 2010) will lead sections of the Big Parade. Charles Fleming, author of Los Angeles Times bestseller Secret Stairs, will lend his expertise to the Silver Lake loop. Robert Inman, author of Guide to Stairways of Los Angeles, and the man Koeppel describes as a stairway “god” and “my stairway inspiration" will prep Big Paraders with a Metro-accessible, ten-mile “Prologue” warm-up walk through Northeast Los Angeles on Friday. (A three-and-a-half mile “lunchtime” loop is also an option for workers-who-walk.)

Although Mount Washington doesn’t have the high concentration of stair-walks found in its Silver Lake and Echo Park neighbors to the west, Koeppel, who moved to the Hill a year ago after he and his wife married and had a baby, says that the open spaces of Mount Washington are a worthy payoff. An avid biker/pedestrian/public transportation rider, Koeppel also loves the local school and appreciates the ready access to the Gold Line. 

Best of all, as a resident of Avenue 49, Koeppel is mere minutes away from his “favorite staircase in Los Angeles:" the steep, wooden-stepped Eldred Stairway, which he runs up and down multiple times a week. 

Small wonder that, for Koeppel, this weekend’s Big Parade is a walk in the park.