The CCC and Cedar Pass Lodge

The infrastructure that makes Badlands National Park usable today was built largely by young men who needed work during the Great Depression. During the Depression years, the Civilian Conservation Corps established camps near the Badlands and put men to work building roads, trails, overlooks, and visitor facilities. The Civilian Conservation Corps was one of the most popular programs of the New Deal era.

It enrolled unemployed young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, paid them thirty dollars a month, kept twenty-five dollars of that for their families back home, and put them to work on conservation and public lands projects across the country. About three million men served in the Corps over its nine years of operation, from nineteen thirty-three to nineteen forty-two. The men at the Badlands camps built structures and campgrounds in the park area, including work around Cedar Pass.

They also built the viewing areas and improved the road through what was then a national monument. The work was done in hard prairie summers. They transformed a stretch of remote eroded terrain into a park that millions of people can visit.