

Camps 



During 1938 more than 30 million visits were made to national forests. Excluding sight- 

 seers and those simply passing through, approximately \4y 2 million of these visits were by 

 people who stopped on the forests for recreation. 



Many forest visitors stop at hotels, summer resorts, and dude ranches. Others go to summer 

 homes built under special-use permits. But most national-forest visitors head for camp- 

 grounds equipped with fireplaces, pure water, and simple but sanitary conveniences. There 

 are now more than 3,500 of these developed campgrounds in the national-forest system. 

 The CCC has been a big factor in developing campgrounds, and roads and trails leading 

 to them. Annual Report of the Chief, Forest Service, 1938. 



BY A CLEAR FAR CREEK on the Choctawhatchee National Forest in 

 Florida is a small clearing which seems at first sight to contain nothing 

 humanly useful. But there is a camp here. 



It is a poor but beautiful forest, the Choctawhatchee — pine, scrub oak, 

 and palmetto growing mainly in deep sand. On occasional strands of ham- 

 mock land which reach out into the still, bright waters of Choctawhatchee 

 Bay and its dreaming bayous, there remains good timber — virgin stands of 

 straight, clear pine, wide-spaced. But most of the forest was pretty badly 

 cut-over and turpentined-out while in private ownership. Since it became 

 Government property it is healing, but at the same time it must yield sus- 

 tenance for a resident or nearby population of some 1,500 persons. At 

 present it yields a fearfully thin living, largely because of the thinness of 

 the soil. 



It is in dry, not in wet, weather on the Choctawhatchee that your wheels 

 get to spinning and your car slides and stalls. The soil of Camp Pinchot, the 

 original ranger station of the forest, for instance, is so coarse and thin, so 



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