This story aired in the November 19, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
In the 1930s, the federal government’s Civilian Conservation Corps, or “CCC,” helped to create the East Bay Regional Park District that stretches across the East Bay.
The goal was to bring nature closer to the urban Bay Area… but it was a certain vision of “nature” that’s left its mark on the landscape.
Reporter Sheryl Kaskowitz makes some surprising discoveries about the Depression-era history of these beloved parks — and how the CCC’s work continues… just in a different form.
Next, we’ll hear the third episode of The Public Works, a series about how the New Deal transformed the Bay Area and what lessons we can learn from it today.
Press the play button above to listen.
Story Transcript:
Sound of birds chirping and footsteps on a dirt trail
REPORTER: One of the best things about the Bay Area is that we don’t need to go far to escape into nature.
Like today, I drove 15 minutes from the Berkeley flats, and now I’m on a trail in Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, in the East Bay hills. I’m pretty much right above the Caldecott Tunnel, but if I ignore the traffic sounds, it feels like I’m far from civilization — the sun is dappling through this canopy of oaks, bays, and Monterey pines.
Sound of work crew unloading equipment
CREW LEADER: You guys gonna take out the deck boards too?
CREW MEMBER: I think so.
CREW LEADER: All right. So two-person lifts. So make sure you guys work as a team.
REPORTER: About a half-mile in, there’s a crew working on the trail, with six people in hard hats.
CREW MEMBER: Drop it first. Take it all the way over. Ready?
REPORTER: They’re putting in a puncheon — that’s a small footbridge spanning across a creek bed.
CREW LEADER: Malcolm, have you used the impact driver before? MALCOLM JOSEPH: All the time.
CREW LEADER: So we're gonna put these lag screws two-and-a-half inches into each hole.
Sound of power drill
REPORTER: This trail crew is from Civicorps, which is a youth development nonprofit based in Oakland. They offer job training and education to young adults between 18 and 26, like Malcolm Joseph:
JOSEPH: I'm originally from Chicago, and I moved to California. So I like the conservation work, and most of the time it doesn’t feel like work.
REPORTER: The training that they get opens up career options, while also helping out in public places like these parks. It feels like a win-win.
Civicorps is modeled after a federal program created more than 90 years ago — the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. It was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs designed to put unemployed people to work and lift the country out of the Great Depression. And the CCC was connected to things that FDR cared deeply about — he loved nature, and he wanted to make it more accessible for people.
Back in the 1930s, the CCC hired unemployed young men to work on conservation projects all across the country. They did things like plant trees to fight erosion, build roads in national forests, and cut trails in state parks.
PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT (archival tape): In creating this Civilian Conservation Corps we are killing two birds with one stone. We are clearly enhancing the value of our natural resources and second, we are relieving an appreciable amount of actual distress.
REPORTER: During the Great Depression, unemployment was rampant, and a lot of young men ended up leaving home to ride the rails looking for work. In the CCC, they got three meals a day and $30 a month, most of which got sent back home to help their families. The program also included on-the-job training and education.
The CCC had camps in every state, and there were some scattered around the Bay Area — like at Mt. Tam and Muir Woods. And just north of Sibley, at Tilden Regional Park, in Berkeley.
Sound of children and ducks at farm
Today, this is where families come to see the animals at Tilden Little Farm, or check out the exhibits at the education center.
But in the 1930s, there was something completely different here: the CCC’s Camp Wildcat Canyon.
DAVE ZUCKERMANN: Right here, like right where we are. There were barracks buildings around us, but this was the central gathering area for the troops.
I’m here with Dave Zuckermann, who’s a retired naturalist for the park district, and Brenda Montano, who manages the historical archives.
BRENDA MONTANO: Here's a picture of that, here at the barracks.
REPORTER: She holds up a black and white photo showing two neat rows of steel beds inside a long wooden building.
But before this camp was even here, the CCC helped turn this place into a park.
To see that history, we head inside the education center.
MONTANO: So this is the map.
REPORTER: There’s a huge 3-D model of the East Bay hills that’s hanging on the wall.
ZUCKERMANN: What you're seeing here in this relief map with the highlighted green are the proposed park reservations that they first identified that, hey, we should save these hills from development.
REPORTER: In the early 1930s, water companies owned this land, and they were looking to sell. And a group of local residents wanted to turn it into a park.
That idea lined up with FDR’s goals to create more public nature areas, so the federal government made the CCC available to help. A small group of corps members made these maps of the proposed park district. They put them on display in all of the cities that would be voting on whether to create the parks. It was basically a PR tool, for residents to see what would be possible if they voted yes.
And it worked. In November 1934, the vote passed by huge margins.
ZUCKERMANN: Which is amazing — in the complete heart of the Depression, that people are voting to tax themselves for parks for the future.
REPORTER: That was the beginning of the East Bay Regional Park District. It started out with three parks: Upper Wildcat Canyon (now known as Tilden), Temescal, and Roundtop, (which was later renamed Sibley).
So this CCC map actually helped these parks come into existence. And then, these hills became home to CCC camps, like the one here in Tilden.
Montano pulls out a green hardcover book with bold lettering across it. It’s a kind of yearbook, with every CCC camp in the area, from 1938.
MONTANO: Here's Camp Wildcat Canyon, Berkeley, California.
REPORTER: At the top, there’s a group photo of about 50 young men posed in three rows, all in their uniforms of work shirts, matching pants and work boots. This group was originally from Mississippi, trained in Florida, spent two years in Pennsylvania, and then came out to the west coast by train.
Looking at the yearbook, I can see that Camp Wildcat Canyon was all white. Because at this point, CCC camps were racially segregated. There was a camp for Black corps members at Camp San Pablo, in what’s now Kennedy Grove Regional Recreation Area in El Sobrante. So the CCC wasn’t immune from the racism of the time.
But corps members from all of the camps worked on creating these parks. They built roads and footbridges, dug trails, cleared poison oak, and built picnic areas and other structures.
We head outside to see some of that work up close.
Sound of sliding door
MONTANO: It's kind of a funky thing to say, like, “Yeah, well if you wanna see really authentic, amazing, historic structures and buildings here at Tilden, go to the bathrooms.” (laughs)
REPORTER: There’s one not far from the education center, by June Lake. We peek inside - and try out the sink.
Sound of running water
I hadn’t really paid attention before, but this bathroom is pretty impressive, with hand-built stone walls of different textures and colors that have stayed solid now for almost 90 years.
And these stones actually came from here in the park.
Sound of car doors opening
To see that, we hop in an official teal green SUV and drive to a spot just across from the Tilden Golf Course.
ZUCKERMANN: We're on Wildcat Canyon Drive, and we're gonna stop at a small canyon called Big Springs Canyon.
Sound of car doors closing, walking on trail
REPORTER: On the side of the hill above us, there’s some exposed rock that looks like it could just be a natural feature, but the jagged surface is actually another mark of the CCC’s work.
MONTANO: It’s one of the quarries that the rocks came from.
REPORTER: Where CCC crews came to cut the stones for those bathroom walls.
Sound of metal gate opening
Our last stop requires some off-roading, on a rocky trail behind a metal gate.
MONTANO: So, we are on the Vollmer Peak Trail climbing up, uh, the top to the top of Vollmer Peak.
Sound of driving on dirt road
REPORTER: The view of the hills to the east opens up.
Sound of getting out of car
Montano brought a binder of photos from the archive.
MONTANO: I always enjoy seeing these old pictures and trying to re-remember the landscape and what was here.
REPORTER: She opens up to one showing a CCC crew taking a break from what looks like cutting a road by hand.
ZUCKERMANN: It’s possible…
REPORTER: We have the old picture lined up with where they think it was taken from. And I can see the same curve of the road that they built, with hills behind it. But there’s a big difference.
MONTANO: And of course, we wouldn't have had the Monterey Pines, right?
REPORTER: The pine trees that dot the hills today, weren’t there in the 1930s. In the picture, the hills are bare. Because this wilderness of Tilden Park was — planted?
It kind of blew my mind, to be honest. I just assumed that all of this was here already, and the park district saved it from being mowed down and developed. But these hills had been cleared as grazing land for ranches and dairy farms by the turn of the 20th century. Long before that, it had been native grassland with oak trees, not forest.
Sound of driving
I couldn’t stop thinking about it, as we were driving back down to the education center.
REPORTER: So the redwoods — were the redwoods here?
MONTANO: No, no, no. Those were planted. Yeah.
REPORTER: It’s true. In 1937, they packed two thousand redwood trees on ships from Fort Bragg, brought them down the coast, and planted them here. Overall, the CCC planted tens of thousands of pine trees and redwoods here. Because that’s what creating a “nature” area meant.
MONTANO: You planted trees. It was shade — part of creating a natural landscape was with trees.
REPORTER: That was certainly FDR’s mindset. He was known to have a special fondness for trees and forests, like the ones he knew from growing up in upstate New York.
MONTANO: Definitely like an East Coast view of a natural area, are forests. The West Coast was just, almost like a wasteland desert feel, in comparison.
REPORTER: So, the East Bay Regional Park District needed trees to be a proper nature area, and the CCC’s job was to plant them — they were known as “FDR’s Tree Army” for a reason. The eucalyptus trees had actually been planted decades earlier, and then in the 1930s, the CCC added other trees like Monterey Pines to create a forest.
But now, 90 years later, the trees aren’t really standing up to the test of time. The pines - outside of their native habitat - don’t live that long.
ZUCKERMANN: They age out, and they end up costing a lot of money to take them down.
REPORTER: Because once those trees die and fall over, they’re dangerous — in terms of safety on the trail, and fire hazards.
Sound of power drill
Back at Sibley with the trail crew, I’m realizing it’s sort of come full circle. The CCC helped create these parks, and now Civicorps crews like this one are helping to keep them going. And that sometimes involves cleaning up what the CCC left behind.
TURK JOHNSON: We take out mostly like a lot of dead trees.
REPORTER: Turk Johnson has been with Civicorps for about five years, and he’s learned a lot about doing this kind of trail work.
JOHNSON: I have brush cutter certification, chainsaw certification …
REPORTER: The work he’s doing is modeled after the CCC, and the work the CCC did is what created this park district.
Sound of hawk, then a crewmember using a pickaxe on rocks
So maybe not everything the CCC planted has lasted, but a lot of the big ideas behind their work took root.
