San Bernardino National Forest is both a destination and a workplace in Linda May’s story. In the forest’s pine-covered mountains northwest of Big Bear Lake, she spends a summer hosting a campground, earning a modest wage through the routine labor that keeps a recreation site usable. The landscape promises scenic escape, but Linda’s experience makes visible the work and economic necessity that sit behind the promise.

Mountain Setting and Arrival

The forest is described as a wilderness larger than Rhode Island, drawing thousands of warm-weather visitors for pleasure. Linda travels there for a different reason: in May, she hauls her small Squeeze Inn trailer toward Hanna Flat Campground, where she plans to stay through September. It is her third summer working as a campground host, and the forest is not a temporary vacation backdrop but the place where she will live and work for the season.

The approach makes the mountains physically present before the campground comes into view. On narrow roads with little or no shoulder, the pavement clings to slopes above open drops. Warning signs call attention to rock slides and a long stretch where drivers are told to turn off the air conditioning to avoid overheating. Linda remains composed, drawing on her experience as a long-haul trucker nearly two decades earlier. The difficult drive establishes a contrast between the forest’s inviting reputation and the practical demands of reaching and living in it.

Campground Work and Seasonal Economy

Linda’s position combines the responsibilities of janitor, cashier, groundskeeper, security guard, and welcoming host. She expects forty hours of work per week, and a returning-worker raise brings her hourly wage to $9.35, twenty cents more than the previous year; California’s minimum wage at the time is $9.00. Her employer, California Land Management, hires campground hosts at will, meaning workers may be dismissed at any time, with or without cause or notice. The job offers a place in the mountains, but little security in exchange.

Promotional materials present hosting as a cheerful outdoor retirement or a chance to get paid to camp. The less picturesque duties include dealing with drunk and noisy visitors, removing ash and broken glass from fire rings, and cleaning outhouses three times a day. Linda does not treat toilet cleaning as beneath her. She takes some pride in doing it well, explaining that campers use the facilities and that gloves and steady work are enough. Her matter-of-fact attitude counters the idea that campground work is simply leisure in a scenic setting.

Roads, Towns, and a Recovering Forest

The route passes through Arrowbear Lake and Running Springs, mountain communities associated with winter skiing and snowboarding and, in warmer months, mountain biking and hiking. Linda also passes the century-old dam at Big Bear Lake, a snow-fed reservoir whose northern shore includes bald eagle habitat, then continues by Grout Bay to Fawnskin. The general store there serves both everyday needs and outdoor recreation, stocking such varied goods as fishing tackle, tire chains, sleeping bags, and souvenir liquor bottles shaped like shotguns.

Fawnskin’s town park gives Linda a different view of the local landscape. Its fiberglass figures depict men in uniform and other masculine-coded roles, while a pair of oxen stands hitched to a covered wagon. Linda jokes that the oxen are probably female because they have no discernible genitalia and are the only figures doing any work. On later passes, she calls out to them as if greeting fellow workers. The small episode links the forest’s tourist culture to a recurring concern in her story: whose labor is visible, and whose presence is missing from public representations.

The final stretch to Hanna Flat leaves asphalt for the rutted, washboard surface of Coxey Truck Trail. Wildflowers and manzanita line the track, alongside blackened tree trunks left by the 2007 Butler II wildfire. The blaze burned more than fourteen thousand acres, including Hanna Flat, which remained closed for repairs until 2009. As Linda slows to avoid deep ruts, the Squeeze Inn bounces behind her. The campground’s return to use follows a landscape marked by fire and repair rather than an untouched wilderness ideal.

Narrative Significance

The forest’s most important role in the book is to complicate the image of outdoor escape. A campground advertised through lakeshores and wildflower meadows is also a worksite governed by low wages and at-will employment. Linda’s season there shows how nomadic life can combine access to striking natural settings with economic vulnerability and demanding service work. The forest is not merely scenery around her story: its visitors, facilities, roads, and seasonal rhythms determine what her labor consists of.

The journalist’s account also places Linda’s work in a broader inquiry into people living and working on the road. Rather than treating workamping as a quirky pastime, the reporting connects it to the collision of rising housing costs and wages that fail to keep pace. San Bernardino National Forest gives that tension a concrete setting: a place people travel to for recreation, where Linda stays for months because the job provides both work and a temporary home.