White Mountain National Forest — The Pemigewasset Wilderness and the Men Who Built It
Near Mount Washington Valley, New Hampshire
In the summer of nineteen thirty-three, young men began arriving at camps across the White Mountain National Forest. They came from the cities, most of them unemployed and in their late teens and early twenties, drawn by Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC was paying thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went directly home to their families. In nineteen thirty-three, that was real money.
The work they did over the following decade remade the mountains. Before the Corps, the White Mountain backcountry had been extensively logged. The great log drives of the eighteen eighties and nineties had stripped the Pemigewasset watershed nearly bare, sending trunks down the Swift and East Branch rivers to the mills below. What the loggers left was a landscape of slash piles, eroded streambeds, and a fire risk that alarmed the Forest Service from its earliest years. The national forest itself had been created in nineteen eighteen partly in response to that destruction.
The CCC crews built trails, footbridges, lean-tos, and the system of backcountry huts that the Appalachian Mountain Club still operates today. They constructed fire lookout towers on the ridges. They planted trees on slopes the logging companies had scraped clean. The labor was demanding, the camps were spartan, and the men who did it left behind the infrastructure that makes the Pemigewasset Wilderness one of the most accessible pieces of remote mountain terrain in the eastern United States.
The Pemigewasset Wilderness today encompasses approximately forty-five thousand acres. The trails that cross it, the footbridges over the Pemi's tributaries, the hut system along the ridge: all of it was built or substantially improved by young men who were paid thirty dollars a month during the worst economic crisis in American history. Most visitors who use the Wilderness today do not know their names, because their names were not on the signs. The trails were.
