The Boys Who Built This Trail

Here's a question for you as you climb: who built this trail? Because a graded, bridged path cut across the side of a mountain didn't just happen — and the answer is one of the finest stories the Great Depression ever gave this country.

Go back to nineteen thirty-three. A quarter of the nation is out of work, and young men are riding the rails looking for any job at all. And President Franklin Roosevelt starts something called the Civilian Conservation Corps — the CCC. The idea was simple and beautiful: take hundreds of thousands of hungry, idle young men, put them in camps out in the wild country, pay them a wage to send home to their families, and set them to work building the public lands — trails, bridges, campgrounds, planting trees by the millions.

And in nineteen thirty-five, a company of those CCC boys came right here and pitched their camp at Beacon Rock. This trail you're walking — the whole Hamilton Mountain trail, its bridges over Hardy Creek, its switchbacks — those young men built it, by hand, with picks and shovels and sweat, in the worst hard times this country ever knew. They cut the Hadley trail and the Little Beacon Rock trail too, they built the restrooms and the picnic shelter back at the trailhead, and they even went and improved old Henry Biddle's trail up the rock itself.

So every graded step under your boots, every bridge you cross, is the work of a Depression-era kid who needed a job — and who left behind something still carrying hikers, ninety years on. Not a bad monument to leave from the hardest of times. Walk it with a little gratitude.