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Click to close Image by: Jen Jackson Bob Tyner (left) and Robert Beers, former CCC workers. Click to close Image by: Jen Jackson CCC workers on Reservoir Hill, the present location of Durango's Fort Lewis College: workers transplanted trees, improved the access road and laid waterlines. Click to close Image by: Jen Jackson Continuing the CCC legacy, Southwest Conservation Corps members use a grip hoist to move boulders and create a retaining wall to stabilize a section of the Dutch Creek Trail in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. Click to close Image by: Laurel Hagen The scenic "Hogsback" on Utah's Highway 12, forged by teams of young CCC workers.

They built 23,000 miles of hiking trails, 125,000 miles of new roads, and 47,000 bridges. They stocked 1 billion fish in waterways nationwide, strung 89,000 miles of telephone lines, and erected 3,470 fire towers. They spent more than 4 million man-days fighting forest fires, dedicated 7 million man-days to habitat restoration, and worked for 9 straight years on erosion control, water conservation, forest management and rangeland improvements. They are best known for planting more than 3 billion trees.
And, according to Robert Beers, a 93-year resident of Southwest Colorado, they killed a few porcupines, too.
They were the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the landscape surrounding us today stands in quiet tribute to the power of service and selflessness to shape a struggling nation.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of a program that remains relevant even in a vastly different age.

CCC

Robert Beers grew up on the edge of Mesa Verde National Park, exploring its hidden treasures with friends, one of whom was the superintendent's son. He tells of unearthing many finds, including a solid turquoise frog fetish now on display in the park's museum. His backyard was an archaeologist's dream. He even wanted to become an archaeologist, "but I found out that archaeologists were all starving, so I dropped out of it," recalls Beers with a laugh.
When the recruiters for the Civilian Conservation Corps - then called Emergency Conservation Work - came to town, Beers was one of 15 Mancos boys to sign on for work in the familiar territory of Mesa Verde. He was only 17 at the time.
Beers remembers the work as hot and hard, especially the effort to quell a massive beetle infestation that was killing the park's trees.
"That was a tough job, cutting down bugged trees and burning them and so on," says Beers. "We had to saw them up with a crosscut saw on real steep slopes and haul them away. I wanted to get back on the porcupine crew."
The "porcupine crew," as Beers calls it, was dream work for a teenage boy. And now, nearly 75 years later, he still recalls it with a wistful gleam in his eye. The crew's job entailed halting an invasion of porcupines with youthful enthusiasm and plenty of firepower. Apparently, porcupines enjoy dining on the tender inner bark of trees, sometimes causing trees to die. Thus, large numbers of porcupines, combined with a beetle infestation, can wreak havoc on a forest. This was the case at Mesa Verde.
"Myself and my friends from Mancos, we'd all hunted together, so we all volunteered bright-eyed for the porcupine crew. It was a lot of fun for us kids. We made pretty good inroads," he says with a smile, suggesting more carnage than he's willing to admit.
Beers also helped fight forest fires in the park, making for a summer of both rigor and respite. Despite its more onerous duties, the CCC provided the young man a welcome escape from an era of privation.

CCC

When he came to the presidency in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt inherited leadership of a country in crisis. The nation was in its fourth year of the Great Depression, with 25 percent of the country's workforce unemployed. Add in the ecological and agricultural crises of rampant over-grazing and over-logging, drought, and the subsequent Dust Bowl, and this was the bleakest of times for the United States.
Roosevelt acted quickly to implement a multi-faceted solution known as the New Deal. The Emergency Conservation Work Act, which created the CCC, was one component. In an impressive act of legislative speed and efficiency, the entire framework for this relief program was drafted and implemented the same month as Roosevelt's inauguration. The first CCC "boy," as they were all called, was sent to work April 7, 1933, just 37 days after the president came to office.
And so began an era of salvation through service. It was to last until 1942, with the advent of World War II.

CCC

"It was a real depression at that time," remembers Bob Tyner, a 92-year-old resident of Durango, who joined the corps in 1935 and stayed on for two years. "It was the only thing a lot of us had, the opportunity to join the CCC."
Tyner spent most of his time with the Corps on Reservoir Hill, the present location of Fort Lewis College in Durango. Back then, the mesa was home to the CCC barracks, an air strip and the reservoir for which it was named. He transplanted trees up onto the mesa, improved the access road, and laid waterlines up the hill. It was the government's belief at the time that enlisting more boys was cheaper than buying heavy equipment for most projects. Thus, Tyner has memories of a rather arduous road-building effort.
"We had to load dump trucks with shovels, one at a time. It took a few thousand shovels-full to fill a dump truck."
Transplanting trees was no easier. Says Tyner, "That winter, there was a lot of frost in the ground, going down about 2 feet. We had to dig down through that frost, then loosen the tree, and two of us could just barely lift it out of the hole."
During the CCC's nine-year existence, more than 3 million men - 5 percent of the U.S. male population - participated in this kind of strenuous work in 5,000 camps nationwide. And they did it all for a dollar per day, with $25 going home to the boys' families each month. That left $5 for discretionary items and entertainment in local towns. Or, as Tyner recalls with a wry smile, it was poker money, and with enough skill, one could increase his income dramatically. In fact, during his CCC tenure, Tyner saved up the $300 that eventually paid for his education at Fort Lewis College.
With its strenuous physical labor and evening rounds of poker, the CCC was a boys-only club. Women were not eligible to enroll. This was an era when women were perceived to be the weaker sex and men the primary breadwinners. Thus, with this mindset - and in the midst of a national unemployment crisis - it was natural that the federal government would provide its finite supply of relief work to those deemed best suited for it.
The President's wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, objected to the exclusion of women from the CCC and eventually persuaded a reluctant administration to set up a parallel program for jobless women. A small number of "She-She-She" camps were set up, offering women some education but none of the pay or vocational training that the men received. The "She-She-Shes" were chronically underfunded, and the camps were eliminated by 1937. Today, the women's program and its 8,500 participants are largely lost in the enormous shadow cast by their male counterparts.

Due to the ardent lobbying of numerous Utah legislators, my home state received more than its share of CCC assistance. Moab alone had five different camps operating nearby, from the La Sal Mountains, across then-depleted rangelands, and down to Arches National Monument. The same winter that Bob Tyner was digging trees out of frost-hardened soil, the CCC saved 1 million Utah sheep from perishing in epic blizzards blanketing the state. The Corps also built the famous 1.1-mile tunnel through the canyon wall in Zion National Park. And the program dedicated eight years to connecting tiny, isolated Boulder, Utah, with the outside world.
The latter feat is an engineering marvel and a testament to the power of youthful determination. Boulder and its nearest neighbor, Escalante, are separated by the beautiful and broken canyon country of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. At first glance, the fierce topography seems impassable, a jumble of sheer canyon walls and jagged ridges - a road crew's nightmare. Yet, somehow, teams of young men - mostly under the age of 25 and hailing from Eastern urban centers where work with a pick and shovel was entirely foreign - forged a route for Utah's Highway 12, one of the nation's most scenic byways. While millions of tourists now appreciate the route's grandeur, Boulder residents at the time were simply grateful for an all-season connection to the goods and services of the region.
In fact, the rural West, long known for its sagebrush rebels and local-versus-federal government attitudes, embraced the CCC like no other federal program before or since. And for good reason. Western states benefited greatly from the CCC's achievements.
Underdeveloped and overgrazed, the arid West soaked up the program's contributions like much needed rain. Rangeland improvements and water conservation efforts helped pull run-down rural areas, including Moab, out of a cycle of grazing-induced natural disasters. New roads invigorated isolated economies. And the National Park Service estimates that the first two years of Emergency Conservation Work advanced the fields of forestry and park development by 10-20 years.
And yet, along with these land-based achievements, greater work was accomplished.
While promoting the idea of the CCC amongst his colleagues, President Roosevelt proclaimed, "More important, however, than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work."
And he was right. The program that put millions of men to work in service to the land may have laid the foundation for what we now call the Greatest Generation.

CCC

Although the federal government ceased funding the CCC in 1942, the ideals born of the Corps are carried on today as thousands more young men - and now women - continue to work in service to the land. In the absence of a federal program - and with the presence of growing conservation and community needs - many local and state-based conservation corps have sprung up across the country in the past 50 years. Today, 113 corps programs operate in 41 states under the umbrella of The Corps Network. This network enrolls more than 21,000 young people annually in conservation projects.
The CCC may be long gone, but a living legacy exists, continuing the environmental and societal work first implemented 75 years ago.
The first of these CCC-inspired groups to appear was the Student Conservation Association (SCA), established in 1955 by a Vassar College student. Over the years, SCA has evolved from simply fielding young trail crews to now offering a variety of sophisticated internships within land-management offices across the country. SCA interns are entrusted with giving interpretive talks at national parks, removing invasive species on BLM lands, contributing to archaeological research, and completing trail work from high in the San Juan Mountains to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
"We believe that kids need the parks and the out-of-doors just as much as the parks and out-of-doors need those kids," says Jay Watson, Western Regional Director for SCA. "There are just so many diversions for high school kids today, I think it's invaluable to see them slow down and be in the backcountry, working as a part of a team to actually accomplish something positive for our public lands."
With all the discussion today of "nature deficit disorder" - the idea that kids are spending less time outdoors, resulting in myriad behavioral problems - Watson hits on an important component of today's conservation corps work: While the CCC of 75 years ago was implemented to address a shortage of employment, today's corps are a means of correcting a new generation's trajectory away from the natural world.
Harry Bruell, CEO of the Southwest Conservation Corps, echoes the sentiments of Watson. Bruell's organization offers programs based primarily in the Four Corners, and approximately half of the participants could be labeled "disadvantaged" youth. Projects range from day-long community service activities for 14- and 15-year-olds, to 11-month leadership programs for college graduates.
"I love that we can help young people change their lives," says Bruell. "All of us here care about public lands . . . but ultimately, for all of us, it's about seeing the transformation of the person that walked in with their chin attached to their chest, that won't make eye-contact, and that six weeks later is talking confidently and walking strong. That is the most exciting thing, to see lives changed for the better in a very significant way."
According to Bruell, the key is in how we look at our youth. One commonality between the CCC and today's corps programs is that, where others see needs, these groups see assets. During the Depression, President Roosevelt turned the needs of the unemployed into the resources that would restore and conserve our natural heritage. And today, a new generation of organizations is looking at our youth, not as a demographic in trouble and in need of services, but as a service in and of itself - a national asset, not a problem. It is yet another transformation that the corps movement provides - a transformation of perspective.
"Young people want to do this, they're attracted to it," notes Bruell. "For many, it is the first time in their lives that society views them as resources rather than recipients."
Current land managers are also influenced by the transformative nature of these conservation programs.
"It's challenging to work in public lands management today," says SCA's Watson. "It's rife with controversy half the time, and people spend far too much time responding to lawsuits to actually get out on the ground and accomplish something that's for the good of the land. So people tell me they've never had as much fun in their job as they did while working with young people who care and are excited about what they're learning and doing." Watson adds, "There are people who have dedicated their lives to this kind of work, and to know that someone is there to follow in their footsteps means a lot to the agencies' staff."
With such positive effects on corps participants, the natural world can't help but respond in kind.

CCC

At the age of 22, and feeling slightly adrift in life, I accepted an SCA internship. After college graduation, I had gravitated toward seasonal work in the service industry, and while this work provided excellent recreational opportunities, it offered little depth of meaning. I needed something more. Unexpectedly, I found it in a little-known national monument, 36 miles from the closest rural Utah town.
Somewhere in the midst of accepting entrance fees, shoveling snow, painting trail signs and monitoring archaeological sites - all for $50 a week - I had a revelation: I was madly in love with the Colorado Plateau. And I had to do something to give back for all that it had given me.
After my internship was over, I took a job with Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. I largely credit my tenure with SCA for putting me on the conservation track. And while I did not enter my internship as a disadvantaged youth, nor was I suffering any kind of nature deficit, I was someone in need of lessons on service, selflessness, and the sweet fragility of this planet we all share.
Although I will never know what it was like to suffer through the harsh uncertainties of the Great Depression as Bob Tyner and Robert Beers did, nor what it means to take on such conservation work out of necessity and not choice, I believe I understand the transformative component of the CCC, what Roosevelt referred to as "the moral and spiritual value of such work."
Work in service to the land remains important to me. Each fall, I wend my way over CCC-built Highway 12 to lead a service project on the Escalante River for Wilderness Volunteers, a non-profit organization. It is no youth corps - many participants are of retirement age, people who enjoy an 8:30 bedtime and a helping of Ibuprofen with breakfast - but the volunteers' thirst for transformation and healing - of land and of self - has not been slaked. For some, it is a lifelong commitment.
After a long day of invasive species removal on the Escalante, when my tired body is snug in my sandy sleeping bag, I feel entirely content. I have given the land I love all that I have to give. And I have still received even more in return.
This, I believe, is the enduring legacy of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

(For more information on work in service to the land: Student Conservation Association, thesca.org; Southwest Conservation Corp, sccorps.org; Wilderness Volunteers, wildernessvolunteers.org; The Corps Network, corpsnetwork.org.)

Jen Jackson writes from Moab, Utah, a town still benefiting from the heroic efforts of the CCC.