These several preliminary pages describe what it would have been like to cross Yosemite by car at the height of the New Deal. The roads were so nightmarish that some drivers panicked and froze at the wheel. Signs of New Deal activity would have been everywhere, though, including highway projects that produced the roads we travel today.

Before the Great Depression, the National Park Service and the park’s concessioner cooperated in attracting as many tourists as possible to Yosemite. Yosemite Valley became an entertainment zone featuring the nightly Firefall, a zoo, miniature train rides, and an annual rodeo. With more visitors came more stress on natural resources, calling into question how to balance preservation against unprecedented human impact.

Coming into the presidency at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt laid plans to conserve natural resources while conserving human lives. He directed that the federal government put tens of thousands of unemployed, destitute Americans to work in the national parks. Initially, the chief emphasis was on forestry, a personal passion of the president’s.

For Yosemite, the mainstay of this “work relief” program was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Some 8,000 young men ages 17 to 25 served there between 1933 and 1942. They came disproportionately from recent European immigrant families and from the South. Many others were Hispanic. And, in Yosemite, the CCC made a rare effort to integrate African Americans.

The park’s road system when Roosevelt took office had just begun a transition from narrow, snaking wagon tracks to modern highways. The New Deal poured in resources to speed up the process (while creating yet more jobs). Key decisions occurred on how to build highways in a way to avoid scarring the park’s iconic scenery – and, where that proved impossible, whether to build them at all.

Additional federal agencies began to enter Yosemite in 1934, including the Public Works Administration, which built massive projects still in use today. The CCC took on smaller-scale construction projects, fire prevention, and firefighting. It also battled a tree pandemic – white pine blister rust. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the park’s backcountry, a camping trip that became one of the highlights of her life.

The standard books on the Civilian Conservation Corps shortchange the human element. Focusing on the CCC in Yosemite to bring the story to light, this chapter draws on the “newspapers” that each camp produced, as well as on original correspondence, interviews, and personal memoirs.

Large-scale construction peaked, including development of the Badger Pass ski complex and other recreation projects. Efforts were also mounted make Yosemite look “prettier” – for example, the Fern Spring project. All this raised a question: How refined, as opposed to natural, should the park be? A national debate ensued about parks in general, with wilderness advocates questioning the conventional wisdom.

After 1937, Yosemite was beset by a series of disasters, including a massive flood that year that temporarily undid much of what New Deal programs had accomplished. After visiting Yosemite in 1938, President Roosevelt twice tried to make the CCC permanent, failing both times. Once World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, budgets for domestic programs like the CCC fell as the nation prepared for war. In 1942, the New Deal ended in Yosemite.

This final chapter traces the legacy of the New Deal in Yosemite down to the present. It focuses on what endures, especially the environmental ethic of the 1930s and the infrastructure legacy. The chapter also shows how things have changed. It tracks themes from the 1930s that continue to challenge us today – global warming, forest health, wildfires, and the question of how to balance visitation with resource protection. Finally, the chapter traces the later lives of those – from FDR to the young CCC volunteers – who made up the human side of New Deal Yosemite.