Bob Mignogna ’70 remembers the walk: beyond the freeway, into the woods, across a century-old bridge above a winding mountain creek. Up a bluff, down a goat trail, past a blind railroad crossing, and through 10-foot-tall native reeds until, at last … the sand of Lower Trestles.
“You’re in a surf mood,” he says. “You’re not worried about your job or your work or what’s going on at home.”
Mignogna first made that walk in early 1975, months after landing a job at Surfing Magazine in Southern California. He’d spend the next 30 years there, eventually becoming publisher and growing it into the country’s bestselling surf magazine.
And he’d go on to help make surfing an Olympic sport in his role as director general of the International Surfing Association. Two summers from now, the 2028 Los Angeles Games will hold its competition at Lower Trestles, which will be officially dubbed Trestles Surf Beach for the Olympics.
”I got involved to build a better world through surfing.”
Bob Mignogna ’70
Mignogna’s been returning to those sands over five decades for what he calls the most consistent surf break in America: a cobblestone-and-sand reef shaped by 10,000 years of sediment from the Santa Ana Mountains. Swells arrive from across the Pacific, allowing surfers to ride its legendary A-frame waves more than 300 days a year.
The photo above was taken in 1995, when Mignogna was producing an instructional series for the magazine with Brad Gerlach, then the second-ranked surfer in the world. Lower Trestles was the obvious location: Mignogna knows it by heart and has spent decades fighting to protect it.
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As founding president of the San Onofre Parks Foundation, he helped lead a campaign to secure a 25-year lease extension from the Department of the Navy for the park, which includes Lower Trestles. That decade-long effort earned him a 2025 Ohana Inspiring Activism Award from the Vitalogy Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder.
“I got involved to build a better world through surfing,” says Mignogna, whose outsize footprint on the sport has grown from a solitary walk to the beach.
