California Land Management

California Land Management is a private concessionaire that manages public campgrounds and hires seasonal hosts, including Linda May. Its role sits between public land and the workers who maintain and oversee campgrounds: hosts welcome visitors, collect fees, clean facilities, care for grounds, and perform other practical work, while the company sets their employment terms. The book portrays that arrangement as both an entry point into a mobile working life and a source of conflict over hours, pay, safety, and responsibility for labor complaints.

Role and seasonal work

The U.S. Forest Service hires private concessionaires to manage public campgrounds. California Land Management is one such contractor, employing camp hosts at sites including Hanna Flat Campground in the San Bernardino National Forest and Junction Campground near Yosemite National Park. The job could combine janitorial work, cashiering, groundskeeping, security, and greeting visitors. In practice, the duties and hours varied by location and season.

Linda’s experience illustrates the appeal and the limits of this work. After reading about Bob Wells’s seasons as a camp host for the company, she applied and secured a position near Yosemite. She had previously waited six months for an opening at Home Depot in San Clemente, where even that opportunity was a transfer. Seasonal hiring, by contrast, appeared to offer a faster route back into employment for an older worker confronting age discrimination. Linda marveled at how quickly an applicant with an RV could find work online.

In June 2013, at sixty-three, Linda began her first season with California Land Management at Junction Campground, two miles from Yosemite National Park’s eastern entrance. She was hired for thirty hours a week at $8.50 an hour. Even if she could obtain full-time work continuously throughout the year, the book calculates, her annual pay would amount to $17,680, without benefits. The campground’s remote setting and rent-free site reduced her expenses, but did not change the modest scale of the wages. A generator borrowed from her supervisor powered her RV, and a water truck replenished its fifty-five-gallon tank each Tuesday.

The work could be relatively light at Junction: it had thirteen first-come, first-served sites and two outhouse toilets to clean. Linda also agreed to cover nearby Tioga Lake for part of her stay. By the time she was working at Hanna Flat, it was her third summer as a campground host. She expected forty hours a week and looked forward to a returning-worker raise that would bring her wage to $9.35 an hour, twenty cents more than the previous year. California’s minimum wage at the time was $9.00. The written employment policy classified hosts as at-will employees, meaning they could be dismissed at any time, with or without cause or notice. The combination of seasonal opportunity and insecure terms defined the work: a job could support life on the road, but offered little protection against the employer’s discretion.

Complaints about hours, pay, and safety

Reports cited in the book describe a sharper side of campground work. In 2014, Greg and Cathy Villalobos, both in their mid-sixties, said that while working for California Land Management and another concessionaire, Thousand Trails, they had been expected to work more hours than they were allowed to record. Greg said he wanted to publicize the practice to help other seniors, and objected that federal agencies contracted the companies involved. A different California Land Management employee, reviewing the company in 2015, alleged that she and her husband often worked twelve-hour days but could submit no more than eight hours.

A fourteen-year employee’s letter to the U.S. Forest Service described concerns about both safety and pay. The employee said coworkers working in the heat were not provided with water. The letter recounted the case of a host assigned alone to Upper and Lower Coffee Camp in the Sierra Nevada foothills during 109-degree weather; he had already been transported by ambulance twice for heat exhaustion. It also alleged that he had worked overtime but was told by a site manager not to put those hours on his time card, and suggested that other employees faced the same treatment.

A former host’s account of work in the Sequoia National Forest supplied more detail about the alleged workload. The worker said that a job described as forty hours a week at $8.50 routinely required fifty to sixty hours for the same pay, without overtime or even additional straight-time compensation. The work, the complaint emphasized, was not merely standby duty: it included intensive raking, debris removal, cleaning several campgrounds, repeatedly servicing pit toilets and fire pits, clearing roads, and handling registrations until nearly nine at night. The worker also reported being scheduled for six consecutive days of eleven- to twelve-hour shifts during the first week. After raising concerns, the host said, a supervisor insulted him and told him to return to Oregon.

These accounts did not establish that every California Land Management job had the same conditions. They do, however, show the distance between a seasonal position as advertised and the hours, physical tasks, and vulnerability that some workers said they encountered. For older hosts relying on the income, alleged unpaid labor was not an incidental bookkeeping problem; it reduced already limited wages while extending physically demanding work.

Company response and oversight

California Land Management president Eric Mart disputed the complaints in correspondence with the book’s author. He said the company’s policies, training, and standard operating procedures contradicted the workers’ allegations. According to Mart, the company had investigated at least three complaints and found them without merit, although one worker did receive reimbursement for unpaid hours. Mart also said the case involving alleged shortchanging and the supervisor’s insult prompted a separate U.S. Forest Service investigation.

In a later email dated December 26, 2016, Mart set out the company’s stated policy against off-the-clock work. He said that working off the clock for any reason violated company policy and that employees who did so could face discipline up to and including termination. He added that in the company’s thirty-six years of business it had investigated many employee complaints, that it often found the facts differed from the allegations, and that it took corrective action when it found evidence of management abuse. The company employed more than 450 people at the height of the summer season. Mart also pointed to a high proportion of seasonal workers returning from year to year as evidence, in his view, that company personnel policies did not permit the conduct alleged.

The Forest Service’s account of its own role complicates that assurance. After receiving complaints, the agency said it forwarded them to the concessionaire being accused—in these cases, California Land Management—and did not itself investigate labor-law, discrimination, or other complaints against private employers. The agency’s press officer explained that the Forest Service lacked authority to conduct such investigations. Yet the agency issued and renewed concessionaires’ operating permits and remained responsible for management of the public lands on which they worked. The book thus identifies an accountability gap: workers could direct grievances to the federal agency overseeing the land, but the agency’s stated process returned those complaints to the private employer.

Place in the book’s account of workamping

California Land Management’s significance extends beyond one company’s employment rules. The book uses Linda’s seasons to show how campground hosting could make a mobile life economically possible: she earned wages while living at the worksite, without paying rent, and had a succession of seasonal positions to seek when one job ended. When a job she expected for spring was eliminated, another California Land Management opening elsewhere later became available, leading her to work as a host in the Sequoia National Forest. The instability was not only a matter of an individual placement; it shaped the recurring search for the next place to work and stay.

The author also contrasts cheerful public portrayals of workamping with the material pressures that had brought many workers to it. Some coverage presented seasonal RV employment as a sunny hobby of travel and camaraderie, while campground-worker complaints documented long shifts, unpaid hours, and unsafe heat exposure. The author’s reporting followed workampers across several states and eventually involved living in a vehicle and spending extended periods among nomads. That method brought employment conditions into view alongside the friendships, mobility, and pleasure that workers could also experience. California Land Management therefore appears neither only as an employer enabling an alternative life nor only as the subject of accusations: it is a central intermediary in a system where access to public camping places and the means to remain there depend on seasonal work whose conditions are disputed and whose oversight is divided.