Brush Creek Work Center Barrack

Twenty miles out of Saratoga, past the junction of Highways 130 and 230, a drive leaves the Snowy Range road for the Brush Creek Work Center. The third building on the right is a bi-level house built in 1981 for the Forest Service’s temporary employees. It has four bedrooms with two twin beds in each, a small living room, a large kitchen and dining area, and two bathrooms with showers and flush toilets. It is all electric and heated. The Brush Creek/Hayden Ranger District rents it to the public by the night. The house underwent an extensive renovation in 2023.

The kitchen has a refrigerator, stove, microwave, basic utensils, and cooking supplies. The living room has a television, though the reservation listing warns that reception is weak. Cell phone coverage in the area is fair. Guests bring their own food, sleeping bags, pillows, towels, dish soap, extra toilet paper, garbage bags, and a light for emergencies. All trash and food leave with them, and the house is cleaned before departure, which the Forest Service says helps discourage rodents. There are eight beds. The Forest Service page lists a ten-person maximum, while the reservation page holds the house to eight and charges extra for anyone more.

Brush Creek at 8,100 feet

The work center sits in a grassy clearing ringed by lodgepole pine, in a valley formed by the Barrett Creek and Brush Creek drainages on the western slope of the Medicine Bow Mountains. Brush Creek runs north and south through the grounds, with buildings on both banks. Dense pine closes in on the north and east. To the west lie the Kindt Basin and open sagebrush.

Snow comes early at this elevation. The barracks gets its first snow in early autumn, and by Halloween it is beginning to accumulate. The district plows the parking area around the house but does not shovel the walkway or the doors. Eight miles up the highway is the winter closure gate. Once the Wyoming Highway Department shuts it for the season, the road becomes a snowmobile trail. The Wyoming State Trails map, drawn new each year, shows more than 300 miles of groomed and ungroomed trail.

The Brush Creek Cross-Country Ski Trails start behind the barracks. They are loops through aspen, lodgepole pine, and reclaimed clear-cuts, groomed as often as weather and equipment allow. Sledders go to the old Ryan Park Ski Area.

Logs cut in 1937

Across the yard from the barracks stand the oldest buildings on the grounds. They replaced the original Brush Creek Ranger Station, about a mile to the northwest. That station was built in 1905 as the Drinkhard Ranger Station. The name was not thought appropriate, and in 1914 it became Brush Creek.

The first logs for the new station were cut in 1937. On February 13, 1939, about 70 acres were withdrawn from general Forest activities for the Brush Creek Ranger Station Administrative Site. Most of the major construction, from 1937 to 1940, was done by crews from the Ryan Park Side Camp (F-22) of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Ryan Park was a side camp of the Saratoga Camp (F-38-W). In 1941, crews from the Saratoga Camp and the Brush Creek Side Camp did some finishing work.

The National Register nomination names the men. Herb Hohn was foreman of the Ryan Park crew; the nomination also spells his name Hahn. Chris Jensen was a carpenter from Rawlins. Fred Potter, a rancher from the Encampment area, cut the stone for the sidewalks, foundations, porches, and the fireplace in the Dwelling. Urban Shantz, a Finnish carpenter from Chicago, built the cabinets in the Office/Dwelling and the Dwelling.

All three buildings follow standard Forest Service plans and are built of horizontal, saddle-notched logs under wood-shingled gable roofs:

• The Office/Dwelling rests on a rubble stone foundation, with an open stone porch on the south side. It holds a two-room office, a partial basement, a bathroom, and a two-car garage.
• The Dwelling has a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a full basement, and a living room with Potter’s stone fireplace. The windows of both houses open outward and carry horizontal board shutters marked with the CCC tree emblem.
• The Garage has two bays with wood-panel sliding doors, a two-room work space, a full loft, and a dormer centered on its north roof.

Two buildings from a prison camp

Over time the ranger station changed function. When administration of the Brush Creek District was consolidated in Saratoga, the station was converted into a work center, and the grounds filled in.

Two of the later buildings came from elsewhere. A storage building and a storage-bathhouse were built in 1942 as part of the Ryan Park Prisoner of War Camp. They were moved to Brush Creek in the 1960s. Both have horizontal board siding and nine-pane casement windows. The nomination counts them as noncontributing because they were not on the site when the CCC built it. A pump house went up in 1980 and a flammable storage shed in 1981.

The nomination also describes the barracks. It calls the building a one-story wood-frame structure with horizontal metal siding, a shed dormer, four bunkrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a full cellar, and dates it to 1980. The Forest Service gives 1981 and calls it a bi-level house.

James Heid, the Forest Archaeologist, dated his nomination September 18, 1993. He judged the complex significant for two reasons. It records the Forest Service’s shift from custodial superintendence to active resource management, and it is an example of the agency’s Depression-era rustic architecture. Among his sources were notes from a 1993 conversation with Herb Hohn. The Brush Creek Work Center entered the National Register of Historic Places on Monday, April 11, 1994.