Mountain Resorts and Trail Camps in Southern California's Great Hiking Era, 1884-1938

Abstract

Until approximately thirty years ago the San Gabriel Mountains held a different attraction for the tourist than the present overcrowded public campgrounds under the charge of the United States Forest Service, or the very few resorts and lodges to be found in its canyons. Trail camps and mountain resorts existed for the pleasure of the tourist-hiker, and the Sierra Madres (as the mountain range was then called) were noted for having places to visit and things to see that today's visitor can only read about. Those places are gone forever, picked clean from the face of the mountainsides, except for an occasional ruin. People who have recently arrived in Southern California, or who were born there since World War II, have no way of knowing about some of the changes the land has undergone. The easterner who recalls the resorts of New York State might assume that because of Southern California's climate, the mountains are there for more than just looking at or driving through. Apart from snow and ski enterprises and the park complex at the summit of Mt. Wilson, a search for local mountain resorts or privately operated trail camps would prove for the most part a vain one.1 The great hiking era in Southern California, to use W. W. Robinson's phrase,2 began with the influx of people in the real estate boom of the 1880s. One of the side-effects of this boom was the attraction of the varied environment in which the newcomers found themselves. The Pacific Ocean and the beaches formed a western boundary, and to the north and northeast ran the Sierra Madres.3 After the boom subsided, those who decided to remain in Southern California started to investigate their adopted homeland. People who were sick or infirm lived in the