There were enrollees from the streets of New York City and Ohio, as well as mountain boys from Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia. Regardless of where the enrollees were from, the camps were occupied by young men who had been through some extremely difficult times and recognized the emergency program as an opportunity for basic survival and even for advancement. The work of the CCC was varied. The corpsmen built trails, phone lines, campground improvements, fences, bridges, cabins, and low-standard roads; they built check and silt dams for flood control and the curbing of erosion; they dug out poisonous larkspur and other noxious weeds and instituted insect and rodent control. Several of the Forest Service's CCC camps began many of the loop roads through the canyons of the Wasatch Range. In addition to these jobs at which they regularly worked, the CCC force constituted a 5,500-man fire brigade, units of which could be mobilized any time for forest fire suppression.

In September 1933 the Herald Journal of Logan reflected the attitude prevailing at the time. "One of the most completely successful of all the items on the New Deal program seems to be the forestry work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. . . . So well is the project working out that a person is inclined to wonder if it might not be a good thing to make this forest army a permanent affair. . . . All of this of course would be pretty expensive but it might be money well spent. . . certainly the question deserves serious consideration. This forest army is too good an outfit to be discarded off-hand."