How a Health Guru Helped L.A. Discover its Hiking Trails

Long before yoga pants made their first appearance in Runyon Canyon, a health guru helped Angelenos discover their local mountain trails.

Beginning in 1924, on the first and third Sunday of each month, members of the Wanderlusters Hiking Club followed Paul C. Bragg into the hilly terrain around Los Angeles. Dozens of them traipsed through Altadena’s Millard Canyon or hiked up Griffith Park’s Mount Hollywood. Men doffed their shirts. Women wore bathing suits. Sunscreen had yet to be invented.

Hiking was nothing new in the Southland. Bragg’s innovation, rather, was to sell it as a fitness activity: “Hiking is a wonderful sport to keep you young and fit and recharge your physical battery from the sun’s rays.”

But the images accompanying this article – commissioned by Bragg in the 1930s and recently digitized by the USC Libraries with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities – reveal a man unable to conceal his affection for Los Angeles and its trails.

“There is a veritable Paradise in the mountains lying adjacent to Los Angeles,” Bragg wrote in another of his columns, “and yet few people avail themselves of the opportunity to frolic in the sunshine.”

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