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Life in the Camps – The Rogue River Road 

From an Interview with Vern Ford, March 25, 2008 

Jobs in remote areas were often prone to interruption by the whims of Mother Nature. 

Long distances or convoluted transportation between the camps and the job could also 

mean shorter days to do the work, and when weather related events brought things to a 

halt, crews might spend days waiting for an opportunity to get back to the line. 

Vern Ford, who joined the Bureau of Public Roads in 1954 and worked survey 

for the first five years of his career, said one of “the more prominent things I can 

remember was doing the survey for the Rogue River Road going from Gold Beach up to 

Agness on the Rogue River.” At the time, there were trails up the river, but no roads, and 

they contracted for the use of one of the mail boats to get to the job. 

Today, jet boats follow the mail boat routes, carrying tourists instead of mail 

along Oregon’s wild and scenic Rogue River. In those days, the mail boats were “the 

only method they had to get the mail up the river from Gold Beach.” Agness was one of 

the larger communities the mail boats served, but, Vern noted, “there were (also) several 

lodges along the river that were totally isolated. There were no roads to them 

whatsoever, so they relied on the mail boats to bring in supplies to them as well as the 

mail.”

 

Initially, the crew stayed at Gold 

Beach, and took the boat up river to the 

work site. “They’d just drop you off on 

the river bank and you’d scramble up the 

hillside from the river (to) where the line 

was going through.” Then the boat would 

return to bring them back out at night. 

They worked the project from Gold Beach, 

then from “the other end at Powers, going 

over to a spot on the Rogue River called 

Illahee.” Their camps were located at 

Gold Beach, “then Agness itself, and then 

the old China Hat Ranger station. 

We moved the crew into those three locations at (different) times just to get the 

survey done.”

 At that time there was a Jeep trail that ran from Powers to Illahee and then 

to Agness. “We later constructed all that,” Vern said. “That was always a big 

project...that was ongoing for a long time.” While his crew was working the stretch from 

Powers to Illahee and down the Rogue, they worked out of a Forest Service tent camp at 

China Hat, partway between the two towns. “We were in there in the winter time and it 

just rained constantly, but you just put up with it,” he said. 

Those crew members who were married lived in trailer houses in Powers and 

commuted to the camp and the project office. At the time, the crews drove Power 

Wagons, and Vern said “they’d go over anything.” However, it was not unusual to get 

stranded on the way to the job. “A lot of times the rivers were pretty much in flood 
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stage,” he said, and one morning one of the Power Wagons was hit by a slide when the 

crew from Powers was on their way into the camp. “It just almost tore the back off of it. 

Made a heck of a mess.” That group made it to the camp unscathed, but couldn’t get 

back out to Powers and their wives until the responsible local transportation agency had 

come in and cleaned up the slide. 

In about 1957, they moved the crew down to a Forest Service camp right on the 

Rogue River beside the town of Agness. “When we started that job, the Project Engineer 

negotiated the contract for one of the boats (and) that was assigned to us full time. So 

they’d take us in in the morning and drop us off. And the old captain would wait there 

until we came out at night. When we were at Agness he stayed in the camp with us, 

because it was quite a few miles from Gold Beach to come up to Agness. So it saved 

time and (it saved) money, he just stayed there at the camp with us (and had his meals 

with us). We had a hired cook there – that was quite normal, to have cook shacks on the 

job.” 

There were some bad storms that year, and Vern pointed out that “the Rogue 

River is famous for how fast it can come up and also how fast it can go down.” 

“We used to beach (the boat) there at Agness every day” and make periodic 

checks during the night. A couple of the guys would get out of bed “and we’d go down 

with flashlights to check on the boat and see if it was still tied up high enough, so we 

wouldn’t lose it.” If the river was rising, they’d pull the boat further up the bank and tie 

it off; if the river was falling, they’d let out on the mooring line so it wouldn’t be stranded 

ashore. 

“One morning, it was about 1:00 in the morning, and it was my turn to get up and 

check the boat,” Vern said, and he found the river had made one its sudden drops. The 

boat was “sitting high and dry....we had to go back to the bunk house and get everybody 

out of bed.” The boats were nearly 40 feet long, and it took the whole crew to get it back 

to the water. “We took the Power Wagon down to where the boat was at....and had to 

push with the Power Wagon on the bow of the boat to push it back...down into the 

water.” For the rest of the night, a couple of the guys would have to get up “just to check 

on it. Every half hour or hour we’d have to get up and retie the rope, and push the boat 

out further so it was (still) in the water.” 

Their camp was on the north side of the river, and for a time the work – which 

was on the south shore – was just a short distance downstream. “The whole crew piled in 

one morning and took off down the river,” Vern recalled. “The captain – he was a pretty 

savvy old guy ... but he misjudged that morning.” There was a place in the middle of the 

river called Twin Rocks, and that morning it was covered by the floodwaters. “You 

couldn’t hardly see anything but a ripple.” The boat hit the rocks and it “pushed the 

whole keel strap...up through the bottom of the boat.” 

The boat started taking on water, so the captain drove it up onto the south shore, 

getting it beached just as it filled up with water. “We always kept a 55-gallon drum of 

gasoline (aboard),” Vern said, “and it was floating in the boat,” as were the boxes 

carrying the transom and the level. 

“Guys were scrambling to get out of the boat. The Project Engineer on the job 

was Lyle Hewitt,” Vern said, and when he went to get out, he fell down. His feet hung 

up in the boat and “his hands were on the bank, hanging onto (it). This one big guy – 

Westwood – he used him for a gangplank, and went right across his back.”
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The spot they’d beached the boat wasn’t far from the camp, but it was on the 

opposite bank. Vern said, “we were stuck there until finally somebody came down to the 

gravel bar on the opposite side of the river.” They had to yell in order to make 

themselves heard over the roar of the flooding river to explain what had happened. 

One of the Forest Service guys had a rowboat with a motor and started ferrying 

them to the camp. “I think we could only get about three or four guys in it at a time, and 

we had probably about a dozen or more of us....then (he had to go back and get) the 

equipment.” 

For several days following the beaching, they were stuck in Agness because they 

couldn’t get across to the work. Even after another mail boat was brought up from Gold 

Beach, they still had to retrieve the wrecked boat, get it hauled onto the bank, pumped out 

and refloated. “They worked on that thing for a long time,” Vern said. 

“It was a pretty tenuous living situation,” Vern observed. “It’s changed so much 

now...you’ve got the road that goes clear up” to Illahee. At that time, you had to hike up 

a trail, and “if they were roads, they were Jeep trails.” 

After five years working surveys, Vern Ford went on to work in construction and 

later worked in the Vancouver Office. He retired in 1991. 

If you have comments about this story or would like to share your memories of the 

camps, please email them to me at marili.reilly@fhwa.dot.gov

-- Marili Green Reilly 

A construction camp on the shore of Lake Chelan (Chelan National Forest, 

Washington) from the final construction report for Lake Chelan Road, 1927-28. 

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