ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK — With steady hands and a mountain of patience, skilled masons Kalei Roman and Louis Browning are excavating and repairing historic stone walls built by hand in the 1930s and 1940s in Rocky Mountain National Park.
You might also describe the men as unofficial archaeologists and historic preservationists, unearthing rock work that is almost buried and intricately rebuilding it stone by stone.
This summer, he and Louis Browning have teamed up on a 150-foot stretch of wall along Trail Ridge Road, an area that overlooks the Never Summer Range, the Kawuneeche Valley and the headwaters of the Colorado River.
Rock walls were built throughout Rocky Mountain National Park in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them by Civilian Conservation Corps work crews. That program was established in 1933 under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to create jobs for young men during the Great Depression, employing about 3 million men during its nine-year tenure.
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