Youth Crews at Catoctin Mountain Park: From the CCC to Today's Conservation Corps

An Appalachian Conservation Corps trail crew cuts the ribbon on a finished trail. Credit: National Park Service.

Catoctin Mountain Park, a recreation area in Maryland's Blue Ridge Mountains, has been creating projects for young people since the 1970s. Its winding trails — more than 25 miles of them — waterfalls and scenery draw many visitors, and its history is long: Native Americans quarried rhyolite there for tools, and later came farming, charcoal making for the iron industry, sawmills and moonshining. Buildings left by the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and the site of the nation's first Job Corps Center, are reminders of how strong youth programs can strengthen the country's economic and social fabric. Today, through the Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) and Conservation Legacy's Appalachian Conservation Corps (ACC), young people are restoring the park's cultural and natural resources.

The Youth Conservation Corps

The park's first eight-week YCC program began in March 1971 with 26 young women and 24 young men. They lived in the park at first and:

• researched and restored the vertical sawmill at Owens Creek Campground;
• built a hiking trail in the northern part of the park;
• created a seventeen-mile snowmobile and bridle path;
• improved the Poplar Grove youth group tent camp;
• built a fire circle at Round Meadow.

In 1981 the YCC became a non-residential program, with local members commuting each day.

The Youth Conservation Corps crew. Credit: National Park Service.

The park still runs a YCC program every year, with five to six members aged 15 to 18. Most often they keep the park's 25 miles of trails clear of vegetation during the growing season and look after the sawmill boardwalk and the vegetation around camp buildings. They also help other local parks with projects, learning about those parks as they go.

The 2024 crew had six members — two of them second-year youth leaders — and a crew leader who had been a Community Volunteer Ambassador intern and is now a biotechnician at the park. A main project was helping maintenance staff re-stain the boardwalk at the sawmill exhibit at Owens Creek Campground, the same sawmill the first YCC crew restored in 1971. The crew also cleared vegetation at one of the park's cabin camps and helped treat invasive plants, string-trimming them and then applying herbicide to the cut stumps. Two long-established invaders, barberry and multiflora rose, need regular monitoring and control.

Youth Conservation Corps member Clara staining the boardwalk. Credit: National Park Service.

The Appalachian Conservation Corps

The ACC, part of Conservation Legacy, was founded in 2016 on a model similar to the original CCC. Catoctin began working with it in the fall of 2022 and has hosted two kinds of crews.

Trail crews. Each fall and spring, crews of six young people, led by an ACC leader and co-leader, maintain existing trails and build new ones, learning to build stone steps, grade dips and trail tread. One of the most time-consuming jobs is filling holes left by erosion: crews crush rock and cover it with soil so that visitors have a smooth surface to walk on.

Two Appalachian Conservation Corps trail crew members crush rock to fill holes in the trail. Credit: National Park Service.

Invasive plant crews. In the summers of 2023 and 2024, an ACC crew worked on invasive plant management, one of the pillars of the park's forest restoration — a response to growing threats to the regeneration of the native tree canopy, and to climate change. The 2024 crew managed more than a dozen invasive species across more than 100 acres of forest, including some G2 imperilled plant communities — those at high risk of extinction — mainly next to Greentop Campground.

The Appalachian Conservation Corps invasive plant crew. Credit: National Park Service.

Carrying the work forward

The work young people have done at Catoctin since the 1970s has been crucial to the park's success. Through its comprehensive trails plan, the crews have helped shape the park, and the park in turn is shaping the next generation of local land stewards.

Sources

Based on "Catoctin Mountain Park's Conservation Efforts Inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps Live on Through the Youth Conservation Corps and Appalachian Conservation Corps," published by the National Park Service, Youth Programs; rewritten in hubnx's own words.