bike rides.

Unfortunately, when we sit out back at dusk we inconvenience the neighborhood cardinals, who seem to prefer evening for visits to the feeder.

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Over weeks, months, and years, young men in drab-olive uniforms began clearing trails, planting trees, building visitor centers and campgrounds, and completing countless other improvement projects across the country. In just the first five months of the CCCs program’s life, it reached its maximum enrollment of 300,000 young men. And in 1935, when Congress renewed it, the quota was increased to over 350,000. In its nine years of existence, it’s said that the Civilian Conservation Corps planted between two and three billion trees, cleared thirteen thousand miles of hiking trails, built more than forty thousand bridges and three thousand fire towers, helped establish more than seven hundred new state parks, made improvements in ninety-four national parks or monument areas, and developed fifty-two thousand acres of public campgrounds. And while all the work happened nearly a century ago, many CCC projects are still used today; in fact, much of the signage and architecture seen in national forests and parks even now harks back to original CCC designs.