Civilian Conservation Corps stonework at Gooseberry Falls State Park - Part IV

This post will finish my tour of the stonework at Gooseberry Falls State Park on Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior.  For newbies to the blog, the previous three posts are here:

Introduction and the "castle"

The old Visitor Center and the Water Tower

Buildings in the campground area

Steps, stairways, and walkways are ubiquitous in the park.  Some are purely functional in design, carved out of existing rock, but often, as exemplified by the top photo, the CCC workers took the extra step of using different colored rocks to add some visual interest to their work.

Elsewhere the "stonework" serves a simple utilitarian purpose, such as lifting woodwork off the ground to delay the onset of water damage and rot, as in this bench -

- or these in an amphitheater

For picnic tables, the stone becomes an integral part of the structure's design; in this case the rather wide cement between stones suggests to me that this project was given to new recruits who didn't have much experience in shaping stones to fit them together tightly:

I presume the workers moved up gradually from paving stones and bench supports until they had enough experience to work on the buildings themselves.  This water fountain and spigot might have been an intermediate step in the training:

Of all the non-building structures, the most dramatic is the chain fence along the edge of a promontory overlooking the lake:

These views show why the fence was considered necessary:

Because they are so close to the lake and are so often wetted with spray, they have accumulated a generous flora of lichens.

I'm in the process of deciding what to do with my category of Civilian Conservation Corps posts.  Life is too short for me to personally document the immense number of projects that were completed around the country.  I'm considering morphing this into some sort of group project, where interested readers might photograph and write up for their own blog a post about CCC stonework in their community or state, and then I could import selected text and images here with appropriate credit and links to the reader's work.  If you have suggestions, feel free to put them in the Comments.