(This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter on Aug. 17, 2017.)
[Y]ou’ve heard it plenty of times: they don’t make ’em like they used to.
That is, unless you’re talking about lean-tos, camps, bridges, bunk beds, sheds, staircases, ladders, patios, fire pits, roads and the culverts that go under them.
The hundreds of women and men who work each summer for the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps do, in fact, make all that, and more, in much the same way their forebears did all around the country more than 75 years ago.
And the Green Mountain Club has its own army of workers who keep the Long Trail and its attendant shelters functional and cozy.
“Taking a sledgehammer and crushing rocks to fill a wet spot in the trail is the same technique as it’s always been,” said Mike DeBonis, executive director of the Green Mountain Club. “A lot of the work is still done with a strong back and sweat equity.”
This week, a five-member work crew with the Vermont corps was on top of Mount Mansfield, constructing a new companion structure to the Stone Hut, which was built 81 years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The new woodshed is a hearty piece of work, bolstered by a frame made of raw foot-wide maple logs that should stand up nicely to all manner of brutality Mansfield’s weather patterns can toss at it. Fittingly frugal, much of the building material is leftover timber from the Stone Hut rebuild last year — a fire gutted the place at the end of 2015, partly because some people stacked frozen hunks of firewood against the hut’s woodstove to dry out, hence the practical necessity for new shed to keep the firewood dry.
During a lunch break Monday, the five-person crew of young 20-somethings sat in a cluster on the ski lift landing ramp, overlooking a quarter of Vermont and the outskirts of New Hampshire, eating pretzels and drinking water.
Maddie Shropshire, a corps member from Quechee, has been soaking up the views on work breaks the whole time: “We were putting the rafters in last Friday. And you’re just standing there, on top of this building that you put up, and you get to look out over those mountains. I can’t imagine a better place.”
Current corps values
The Vermont Youth Conservation Corps was started for less money than an enterprising teen could expect for shoveling a neighbor’s walkway.
The state Legislature established the corps in 1985 as a program of the Vermont forests department, with a $1 appropriation. A year later, the first five-person crew completed its first project and, a decade later, crews were being dispatched all over the state.
Now there are about 45 work crews doing any number of projects, from construction and erosion control to raising poultry and produce.
The organization — now a full-fledged nonprofit organization — was modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, set up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 as a way to put Depression-era men to work on public lands all over the country.
“Not to overuse a recent expression, but the CCC made America great again,” John Medose of the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation said this week. The Vermont corps is “trying to continue with that legacy, not by 100 percent mimicking what they did, but by making public places better for us, for the public.”
This crew atop Mansfield came to that job after a stint in the northeastern corner of the state, fixing more than a dozen lean-tos in Maidstone State Park. After the Stone Hut woodshed is completed, they’ll pack up and head on to their next project.
Earlier this summer, they installed red-worm composting privies — toilets — around the Waterbury Reservoir. After this project, they’ll be installing 300-pound bear-proof food storage lockers around Green River Reservoir, a task that includes hauling them out by canoe.
Mike Anderson, the crew’s team leader, said the small group has jelled over the summer, and earned their pretzel breaks and a good night’s sleep. He said while today’s corps has access to modern tools such as circular saws, you can use them only where there’s electricity, and there are plenty of places where they are using the same techniques as the old CCC crews.
“Last year we were hucking hemlock beams in for a project, and had to walk them in a couple of miles,” Anderson said. “I wouldn’t say it’s easy work. It’s burly. It’s great, though.”
This Mansfield project is part of a park restoration program within the Vermont Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. Frank Spaulding, parks project coordinator with the department, said the corps crews do the everyday work that the department just can’t get to.
“The projects they do aren’t big enough to necessitate a contractor, but are beyond our staff’s capacity,” Spaulding said. “And they’re a joy to work with.”
Indeed, most of the crew seems happy and chatty — one seems a little shy and sullen, but is right at home in the rafters. Paul van Apeldoorn, a master carpenter with a mix of Australia and Cape Cod in his soft-spoken voice, is on hand during the summer to teach the crew members technical skills.
Most of them don’t start their summers with carpentry experience. Many can barely swing a hammer straight, coming from urban childhoods or from college.
“But I’d rather take an unskilled laborer who really wants to be here over a lazy skilled worker any day,” van Apeldoorn said.
Medose said crews will usually lose a person who quickly discovers that a summer of hard work and mean accommodations just isn’t for them.
But there’s usually someone to fill the spot, and most people really want to be out in the elements, working and learning.
And after their stint with the corps is done, they’ll be able to confidently walk onto any work site, list all the skills they learned, and get a job.
“It’s all about attitude and being a good team member, learning the social skills with being in a community and on a team,” Medose said. “Back in the ’30s, if you left, your family didn’t eat.”
Much of Vermont’s infrastructure was made possible by nearly 41,000 of the 3 million men who joined the CCC during its decade-long existence, from 1933 to1942.
Crews built three dams in Vermont following the 1927 flood, including the 2,000-foot Waterbury Dam. They built fire lookout towers and cut some of Mount Mansfield’s most famous trails, such as Perry Merrill, Lord and Nosedive. And they planted about a million trees in Vermont, out of some 1.25 billion planted nationwide. There’s a reason some people referred to the CCC as “Roosevelt’s Tree Army.”
Part of the landscape
Vermont’s Long Trail, the 273-mile “footpath in the wilderness,” was cut between 1910 and 1930, before Roosevelt established his tree army. Vermont’s army was the Green Mountain Club, which used the same types of techniques the CCC would use during the Depression years.
It’s still hard work to reach some of the more remote sections of trail, but back in the first half of the 20th century, there weren’t nearly as many access roads as there are today, and certainly no ATVs or snowmobiles.
Take Puffer Shelter, a fairly mean lean-to just below the northern side of the Bolton Mountain summit. It’s fully open on one side — offering stunning sunrises over the Nebraska Valley and Worcester range — and comes equipped with a small wooden cabinet. Cozy, simple, and it took a hundred people to build it, because they had to hike in all the timber for it. It sleeps a dozen, snug side by side.
On the northern side of Mansfield is Taft Lodge, a popular spot due to its proximity to the state’s highest peak and less than 2 miles from Route 108. It’s the oldest — built in 1920 — and the largest — it says it can sleep 70, but good luck with that — shelter on the Long Trail.
Shelters have burned down over the past century, which is why most of them don’t allow campfires anymore. Mike DeBonis, the Green Mountain Club head, said it’s always a judgment call on whether to replace a destroyed shelter, or put one in a more suitable place.
Earlier this summer, DeBonis hiked the length of the Long Trail as it would have looked in 1917, with gear from geared out like someone a century ago.
Along the way, he sometimes noticed parts of the trail, here and there, that needed a little work, whether it was a stretch where the white paint blazes were in need of a fresh coat, or where some places were eroded.
But mostly, he didn’t notice anything, and that’s a good thing.
Said DeBonis, “I think when it’s done right, that rock staircase, that tread work, people pass by it in seconds, and it sometimes takes days and weeks to get done. And when it’s done right, it should be seamless with the environment.”
Wilderness areas get less work, by design, because people who take long forays on the trail want to get away from the din of modern life. So, you may see fewer white blazes marking the trail and fewer bridges, staircases and ladders.
Still, hiking trails are not a naturally occurring thing, and if they aren’t maintained every year by the Green Mountain Club — and hiked on by thousands of people each year — nature will take it over within a matter of a few seasons.
Medose cut his teeth with a different “three Cs,” the California Conservation Corps, spending much of that time doing trail work in Yosemite National Park. He said he had an old supervisor who shaped his views on how a trail should be.
“Make it look like it grew there,” he said. “Make it look like it’s been there forever.”
