I live in Southern California. I grew up here. On the ocassional clear day in Los Angeles, you can see the Hollywood sign from places where I’ve lived.

Growing up and seeing the Hollywood sign in the distance seems like a pretty cool deal to me, but the reality is that I rarely thought about the Hollywood sign when I was growing up.

Still, it is iconic and on a recent assignment I actually got to see the sign up close.

Seems the land around the sign was up for sale and rather than let greedy developers get the land and turn it into evil luxury homes, a group of investors (led by Hugh Hefner) snapped it up and donated the land to a conservancy.

The land is now safe from development and the view from and to the Hollywood sign is going to remain free from distractions.

I can remember once or twice in my misspent youth having thought it would be a cool idea to drive up to the Hollywood sign and just look at it from up close.

It wasn’t a great idea (I’ve had better), but it seemed cool at the time and this was back in the days when security was considerably less than what it is these days.

These days, they are way SERIOUS about security up there. Remote cameras, motion detectors, LAPD helicopters and bioengineered velociraptors.

Okay, that last item isn’t really a thing, but the fact remains that security is pretty heavy up there.

My reporter and I were sent up to cover a press conference that announced the land deal. I gotta admit, I thought the idea of actually getting a chance to see the sign up close was cool.

Kind of a chance to cross off an item on the unfufilled dream list.

What wasn’t so cool was the climb down the hill to the sign. The hill was steeper than I would have thought and the 330 pounds of gear I carry every day on flat land was, well, challenging to carry down the hill.

The only thing worse was the dang climb back up the hill from the sign.

Scary? Yeah, a little.

At no time that we were actually shooting around the sign did I feel like we were in a completely safe situation.

That’s okay. My job isn’t always supposed to be safe.

Some days the best I can say is that I didn’t slip and fall a hundred feet off the side of a mountain.

I admit I’m setting the bar pretty low there, but it’s all worth the bonus that I got to take in a nice view of the surrounding land from a place where most people never get a chance to see up close for themselves.

That (and not falling down the mountain) made it a pretty good news day for me.