PUBLIC LANDS AND FORESTS
311
recreation to the fullest degree. The work of the CCC camps gave the Forest Service the opportunity to telescope into a few years many years' worth of recreational improvements on the Dixie National Forest. After 1935, visitors found up-to-date campgrounds including toilets, shelters, wading pools, swings, teeter-totters, horseshoe pits, tennis courts, and volleyball courts at Navajo Lake, Pine Valley, Aspen Mirror Lake, Panguitch Lake, Mammoth and Duck Creeks, Brian Head, Blowhard Point, and Vermillion Castle. 19 Crews also assisted the Division of Grazing in range restoration, construction of dams, water troughs, and stock trails for livestock, and control of rodents, insects, and other pests. Increased federal activity of the 1930s from the CCC and other New Deal programs had real advantages for public lands, their users, and the men who worked in these programs. Thousands of idle men were gainfully employed in programs which provided wages, education, and a sense of accomplishment. Within just a few years, their work on forests and rangelands helped to restore much that had been lost by years of inadequate budgets, manpower shortages, and neglect. World War II brought a booming economy and high demand for the natural resources of the West. With laborers in short supply, certain aspects of pre-war forest management, such as recreation and conservation, were de-emphasized. Forest Service activities declined as employees were called into the service and funds became scarce. Recreational facilities fell into disrepair. Grazing and timber resource management increased with the wartime shift in national priorities. This use of the forests expanded, although the tendency to overstock rangeland and forests with livestock for meat production was not as dramatic or shortsighted as it had been during World War I. Timber production more than doubled on the Dixie National Forest. In 1944, when the Powell and Dixie forests were consolidated into the Dixie National Forest, the DNF supervisor's office was placed in Cedar City despite protests from livestock grazers in other counties. Studies had shown the forest could be most economically administered from Cedar City, a centrally located site to service the six-countyarea. 2o
