Before the Highway 12 route was built, travel through this region was slow and difficult. As late as 1940, Boulder still received its mail by mule train for part of the year. The Civilian Conservation Corps completed Hell's Backbone Road between Escalante and Boulder in 1933, allowing vehicle traffic in summertime, but when winter snows closed that road, the only routes between the two towns were wagon trails through the canyons. In 1935, Civilian Conservation Corps crews began building the Lower Boulder Road, now part of Highway 12. Nicknamed the Million Dollar Road, it took five years, backbreaking labor, ingenuity, and many tons of dynamite to complete as crews blasted through sandstone ledges down to the Escalante River and up Calf Creek Canyon. On June 21, 1940, community members celebrated completion of the first all-season automobile road between Escalante and Boulder. During the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to provide work to young unmarried men, and between 1933 and 1942 roughly three million men received work and training through it while fighting forest fires, planting trees, and building roads, trails, dams, and recreation facilities on public lands. Used between 1924 and 1940, the Cream Cellar Route began near here and crossed slickrock canyons to Boulder; three times a week Boulder farmers shipped as many as 50 five-gallon pails of cream by postal service mule train to a Bryce Valley creamery, with the Boulder mail carrier storing the cream in a dugout cellar near here for pickup by the Escalante mail carrier.