Civilian Conservation Corps 1933-1942 (Camp FS-42: The Spring)

Camp FS-42 sat by a spring outside Escalante. Its work is still the way over the mountain. Before 1933 no road ran to Boulder — just wagon tracks and mule trails through some of the roughest country in the Lower 48. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to the job, and from 1933 to 1941 they cut Hell's Backbone Road along a knife-edge ridge, throwing a wooden bridge across a fifteen-hundred-foot chasm. The road they built is gravel to this day, and driving it is still the reason Boulder is no longer the most isolated town in America.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Escalante Interagency Visitor Center — 1.1 mi
  Your essential stop before heading into the backcountry
• Escalante — 1.2 mi
  The town that gave Grand Staircase-Escalante its name
• Escalante Petrified Forest State Park — 1.3 mi
  Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees
• Lower Calf Creek Falls — 9.2 mi
  A 126-foot waterfall hidden in a desert canyon

More markers nearby

• First Public Building — 1.1 mi
• Escalante-Boulder Veterans Memorial — 1.1 mi
• L.D.S. Tithing Office — 1.2 mi
• Escalante — 1.2 mi