Lava Beds National Monument – Tulelake CA

Description

The CCC at Lava Beds built roads, laid the first power and telephone lines, and built a superintendents residence and headquarters building at Indian Well, which is now a Visitor Center. They built a campground (which is now the “A” loop at the park), the picnic tables at Fleener Chimneys, and built dozens of trails through the lava tube caves. Without using any heavy equipment, they were able to move over ten million cubic yards of earth and debris, largely by hand, from the caves near the Visitor Center and install ladders and stairways there.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Abe Boehm, a CCC enrollee (Company 3740) stationed at Camp Clear Lake in northeastern California between February and June of 1937:

“There were over a hundred guys in camp. We mostly split up into three groups: some guys worked on the Clear Lake dam, some guys worked in the Lava Beds, and the others worked on a rock crusher by Hotel Rock on the East-West Road. We crushed and hauled a lot of rock, to lay gravel on the Lava Beds; the CCC built the whole thing. You might as well say the CCC more or less developed the Lava Beds. There wasn’t anything there before the CCC came in. I don’t think they had anyone working out at the Lava Beds at all.

“One group of guys went to the Lava Beds everyday, and opened up a lot of the caves. We’d take a ball of binder twine and set it outside of the cave, and then we’d all hold onto that binder twine, with the leader in front. We’d go way back in there, and them we’d hit a fork and follow it. That’s the reason why we had that binder twine, so in case we got lost we could backtrack. We explored lots of caves – and we made rock paths to four or five of them. We explored those caves with nothing but a kerosene lantern. The leader of the crew would make a map of the cave, so whenever visitors came, they could see what they were running into.” (“A Good Deal – Life in the CCCs”)