An Idea Whose Time has Returned

Almost everywhere I go hiking or backpacking or camping in our National Parks, National Forests, or State Parks I generally encounter the work of the old Civilian Conservation Corps. Everyone who enjoys our wild and rural lands tends to know what the CCC was. But a lot of folk don't know.

The CCC was implemented by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to provide work for the vast numbers of unemployed men in the USA during the Great Depression. And it was the kind of work that would create infrastructure for our parklands that would last, quite frankly, for many, many decades. It has now been almost 100 years since the start of work by those CCC boys and the trails and walls and ponds and shelters and buildings that they constructed are still with us and still in use.

It would  be nice to see the CCC reconstituted and people put to work again doing the kinds of things that were done in those desperate years of the 1930s and early 40s. It was socialism at its finest and it worked well for all. And this is why it will likely not be put into operation again; not as long as corporate interests run our nation. But maybe some day.

Here are some photographs of a building constructed in Florida by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It's still in use and can be seen in O'Leno State Park.

 

Think of the dances!

The kind of finishing touches only folk in the CCC thought about.

Three Campsites

Carole and I love Florida parks. Everywhere we stay the facilities are generally excellent and most often superlative. There are few state parks or National Forest campgrounds anywhere we've stayed that even come close to the parks and forest campgrounds in Florida.

On this trip, we used three different campgrounds. Our first two nights were spent at the Salt Spring Recreation Area Campground which is a National Forest site. The US government bought it from private concerns in the 1970s and ever since it has been a Federal area. Because it was originally in private hands and was a commercial campground, it has one thing at every site that few other Forest Service campgrounds can boast: sewer hookups for travel trailers. This was the only public campground where we've stayed that had this option. It was nice to not have to pull up to a dump station and wait in line to dump the gray and black water tanks.

Our campsite at Salt Springs.

After the second night we moved on down to our primary destination, the Fort DeSoto Park in Pinellas County in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area. We'd found this park by accident on a joy-ride while visiting central Florida several years before. Back then we were floored by the park and thought that it was one of the most beautiful beach state parks we'd ever seen. It was (and remains) one of the most beautiful oceanfront public parks we've ever visited, but we were wrong about one thing:

It isn't a state park. It's a county park! Pinellas County has, in Fort DeSoto Park, one of the greatest county parks I've ever heard of. The place is pretty big (over 3K acres) and it's hard to believe that you're so close to such a huge urban area. The beach and forest areas are pristine, packed with wildlife, and there is so much to do that the idea of leaving the island seems to constantly be a bad one. At the risk of making the place more popular than it should be, I have to say that it's one of the finest parks we've ever visited. I can't say enough good things about it.

Campsite at Fort DeSoto Park, front view.

Casita and stuff as we were unpacking. (The accordion contraption is a clothesline for drying clothes.)

Rear view of the campsite at Fort DeSoto. The sites are really big to accommodate the enormous rigs rich folk have.

This was the view we had from our site, looking out into the bay.

One of the many, many, many bird visitors we had at our campsite at Fort DeSoto. They would generally arrive in larger numbers at low tide, as this ibis did.


After our five-night stay at Fort DeSoto we pulled up stakes and headed for O'Leno State Park. We chose this one not because of the park environs, but because it's so near Ichetucknee Springs State Park which was our main destination for the last two days of our vacation. Once more, we were rewarded by fine facilities in Florida State Parks. The site was spacious, shady, and had water/electric hookups. And we had only a nine-mile drive to the Ichetucknee Springs and River complex where we wanted to spend most of our time.

That said, O'Leno is a good destination in and of itself. The park is beautiful, has a lot to offer in the way of swimming, canoeing, fishing, hiking, photography, and history.

Just after our arrival at O'Leno State Park.

After a day of swimming at Ichetucknee Springs.

Brief video of part of our fantastic kayak ride down the deserted Ichetucknee River.