The Nebo Loop climbs so smoothly over the back of the highest mountain in the Wasatch that it is easy to forget the road was an act of desperation. It was cut, by hand and by horse, by young men who had no work and no prospects, in the worst economic years the country has ever known — and it is only one of dozens of Utah drives, trails, and campgrounds that exist today because three million unemployed men were sent into the woods with shovels. They were the Civilian Conservation Corps; the papers called them Roosevelt's Tree Army; and for nine years the mountains of the West were their job site.
Thirty Dollars a Month
In 1933, at the bottom of the Depression, better than a third of Utah's workforce was out of a job — the fourth-worst rate in the country — and for those who still had work, wages had fallen by nearly half. The Depression hit the rural West harder than most of the country, and it hit it twice — once in the banks and once in the soil, where drought and overgrazing were stripping the land bare. Six weeks after Franklin Roosevelt signed the bill creating the Civilian Conservation Corps in the spring of 1933, the first camps were already going up.
The terms were simple and, for the time, close to miraculous. The Corps took unmarried young men, most of them between eighteen and twenty-three, fed and housed them in Army-run camps, and paid them thirty dollars a month — of which twenty-five was sent straight home to their families, whether the enrollee liked it or not. They planted trees by the millions, strung telephone line, fought fire (every man went to fire school his first week), built dams and bridges and cabins, and, most enduringly for anyone who drives this state, they built roads. The work was hard and the weather often worse; enrollees at the high camps remembered being snowed and hailed on clear through the summer and having the time of their lives anyway.
The First Camp
Utah's very first CCC camp went up about ten miles up American Fork Canyon — the same canyon that now carries the Alpine Loop past Timpanogos Cave. Forty enrollees started raising two barracks there on the seventeenth of May, 1933; by July the camp held two hundred men, the rest of them "local experienced men," out-of-work carpenters and miners and farmers hired to lead the crews. More camps opened that first summer — one of them up Logan Canyon — and from those footholds the work spread across the range. The Forest Service, the Corps' biggest employer in the state, set crew after crew to the same patient task: pushing graded, all-weather loop roads up through canyons that had known only wagon tracks.
What They Left
The Nebo Loop is one of those roads. The men who began it in 1933 knew it as the Red Creek road, a link between Payson and Salt Creek canyons; today it is thirty-eight paved miles over the shoulder of Mount Nebo, and the only hint of its origin is how improbably it holds to the mountain's back. The pattern repeats all over Utah. Down south, a Corps crew built the first road to the top of Brian Head and the trails and campground at neighboring Cedar Breaks National Monument. And in the slickrock east of Escalante, crews worked the better part of a decade — from 1933 until 1940 — to carve the all-weather road that finally tied Boulder to the rest of the world, and retired the mule strings that had packed the town's mail in until then.
Nine Years
The Corps was wound down in 1942, when the same young men were called up for a different and far grimmer kind of national service, and most of the camps were taken apart so thoroughly you would never know they had stood. What survives is the work — something like a hundred and sixteen camps' worth of roads, trails, campgrounds, and ranger stations, much of it still in daily use eighty and ninety years on, along with better than three million trees. Utah remembers the Corps mostly in passing now, a plaque here and a stone comfort station there, but you are reminded of it every time a mountain road carries you somewhere it seems to have no business going. The next time you crest the Nebo Loop or coast down the Alpine Loop, it is worth a thought for the eighteen-year-olds who built the view, sent the money home, and never put their names on any of it.