From Camps to Lodges to Per Diem - 

Part One 

Compiled from individual interviews, Winter 2008 

While sharing Federal Lands memories, several of WFLHD’s retirees recalled 

their experiences while on survey crews or construction crews when they stayed in tent 

camps or leased quarters. Some of their recollections are best shared in individual 

stories, but the memories below provide a good insight into life in the camps. 

In the 1950’s much of the Federal Lands work was on timber access roads. “You 

folks don’t have (that work) any more,” Willis Grafe pointed out, adding that “the 

remoteness isn’t there.” He joined FHWA in 1948 and came to what is now Western 

Federal Lands Highway Division on the Junior Engineer training program. 

The remoteness of the projects made camps a necessity, but FHWA did not 

necessarily have to build them: sometimes they used camps that had been set up by other 

agencies or by the contractors. 

In Santiam, “Camp Mongol...was built for the Corps of Engineers,” Willis said. 

“It’s where the boat landing is now. They built a bunch of bunkhouses. We lived in 

there and used that as our office.... 

“A lot of your guys probably use mobile homes for the project,” he observed, and 

they sometimes did then, as well. He recalled his job at Twin Sisters as an example. “We 

had several trailers on that one because at least we were on the road.” The contract for 

that 22-mile project was over a million dollars, and was “all timber country.” 

When there were no roads, however, the 

barriers were compounded. Vern Ford, who was 

hired by the Vancouver office in 1954, remembered 

one tent camp where “you had to cross the river on a 

concrete slab....The water just ran over it, so you had 

to drive through the river to go across.” 

Vern ticked off a number of the locations he 

remembered: the Clackamas River highway; 

Steamboat Creek and Tokatee Falls on the North 

Umpqua Highway; Tiller on the Tiller Trail 

Highway; Camp Alma, west of Eugene. “They had 

them all over” 

The camps served for many seasons and 

Willis remembered they were used by both 

construction and survey crews, sometimes 

concurrently. 

“It used to be you’d build a piece like the 

White Pass, but meanwhile you’d do a location 

survey on the next couple of miles.” He said “we 

had an engineering crew worked out of there for 

several years.” 

Construction on the White Pass 

Highway, Washington, circa 1952. 

Photo courtesy Ray Westby. 
Willis recalled how he got assigned to the White Pass his second year on the job. 

It was 1949, and he got a call from Wendell Struble who was “head of this division, and 

he said, ‘Bill Hutz just fired his transit-man up at Packwood. Go up there, he’ll need 

help.’ About 3 weeks later I was...project engineer on a two-mile job, breaking through 

the White Pass, Route 12 in Washington....I never saw anyone else the rest of the 

summer. That was my Junior year.” 

He added “we had a camp at Courtright Creek, east of Packwood about ten miles. 

We ate at the contractor’s camp when I was there, up the road about two miles. Up at the 

top, the contractor had some big tents. We bunked in there with them and used their 

cookhouse.” 

Willis remembered being on a crew with four other men. “We went up and laid 

the road out. I had to redesign some of it because the grade had been laid too low and it 

was in the swamp.” 

Ray Westby came to work for FHWA in 1950 and was assigned to the White 

Pass Highway around 1952. “It had to have been started before World War II, because 

this piece of road was built up to Courtright Creek,” he said. “It’s a big arch bridge and 

it’s a real neat summit.” He also noted “there’s a ski lodge at the top of it. Federal 

Highway built the west side and the state of Washington built the east side up to the 

White Pass ski resort.” 

 The photos on these pages were some Ray brought of a bridge he worked on with 

Bill Hutz, whom, he noted, “was an old man then.” There was no water under the bridge. 

“We called it the rock creek bridge.” 

“We had just a lodging camp there,” he said. “Bill stayed there and I think his 

office man stayed there. I lived down in Packwood with my wife.” The contractors had 

a camp up on top....It was a pretty rough go.” 

Vern remembered it was Sam Cook who had the White Pass project “about the 

time I went to work here.” 

The crew on the White Pass Highway called this “rock creek bridge” 

because there was no water beneath it. Photo courtesy Ray Westby. 

John Bucholtz, who was hired straight from Clark College in 1958, was on the 

last survey tent camp out of this office. “If you wanted a bath you went to the creek,” he 

said. “We had a camp cook who was a housepainter by trade, so you can tell how the 

food was. But when you worked all day and were out in the woods, you were hungry, so 

you ate it.” 
Vern described the somewhat standard design for the camps: “Usually it would 

be a...compilation of bunk trailers and tents. They usually put up some kind of cook 

shack, because they always hired cooks to feed the crew.” 

As Willis pointed out, however, a camp cook wasn’t an absolute necessity. “At 

Alma, I didn’t (have one). I had to go hire a local lady to feed my survey crew. We had 

about 5-6 trailers in camp, and then we had 6-7 single guys in the bunk house....I didn’t 

want to have to get involved in starting a cookhouse – that runs into a lot of trouble.” 

He also noted that Alma was one of the camps they had to build from scratch: 

“There was nothing there; there was an old mill site. We built four bunkhouses which 

would sleep four guys each, then a big storage room and office building.” 

Ray noted that there is more to being Project Engineer than just managing the 

road work. You also had to manage the camps, and that sometimes meant monitoring 

domestic affairs. Willis made a similar observation: “A certain level of conflict can 

develop unless you program it pretty well,” he said. “I had...only one washing machine 

in the wash house. So you had to be a diplomat and make sure you kept the dust settled 

on it.” As Vern pointed out, most of the guys in the camps were single, so they did their 

own laundry. 

In spite of possible conflicts, the camaraderie was strong. “There was a high level 

of relationship among all the guys out there,” said Willis, “a bonding that takes place. It 

isn’t like you get just the guys. We lived out in the camps with each other and our 

families were out there. That adds a dimension to it. You get a bonding that you 

wouldn’t otherwise get.” In fact, he said, “My wife likes to come to those (reunions). 

“I had no quarrel with the camp life,” Willis said. “By the time we came back 

from the woods, we had three kids and were still in our 32-foot trailer.” 

“I don’t even remember the last camp that they had,” Vern said. Fred Rogers, 

who arrived in Vancouver after completing the training program, thought they were 

already a thing of the past we he got here in September 1961. 

“Of course by then,” Vern said, “they had built a lot of the roads and you had 

more access, so if you had to go back in there to do something, you at least had roads you 

could go in and out on if you needed to get back to town.” 

It was a different era, Vern reflected. “There was some interesting stuff going on 

back then. It seems so unusual to think back to what it was like then versus what it is like 

now. I question seriously if you could even get people (to work) like that any more. I 

don’t think so. It was strictly just roughing it. But we didn’t know any differently.” 

If you have comments about this story or the camps, please email me at 

marili.reilly@fhwa.dot.gov. 

Marili Green Reilly