Roving retirees enjoy outdoors

ROMA, Texas — A cold wind whipped down the Texas plains on the night recently that Sharon Smith, 68, and her husband, Bill, 73, arrived here to be work-campers.

In the dark, they had trouble setting up their camper. But Sharon Smith, a former teacher's aide from Sioux Falls, S.D., said she looked up at the starry sky, shook off a few of the burrs she had picked up lying on the ground working on their truck and told herself it would get better.

It did.

The life of a work-camper, volunteering in places such as Falcon State Park in south Texas in return for free rent, is not without its bumps. But as Smith also quickly discovered, the rewards can be deep as well — like making cinnamon rolls as part of her job at the camp recreation center, where she and her husband are working as hosts for three months.

“We're here for three reasons,” she said, as she spread sugar on the dough. “No. 1, we like to travel. No. 2, we like people. And No. 3, we're on a budget.”

An itinerant, footloose army of available and willing retirees in their 60s and 70s is marching through the American outback, looking to stretch retirement dollars by volunteering to work in parks, campgrounds and wildlife sanctuaries, usually in exchange for camping space.

Cash-strapped park and wildlife agencies say retired volunteers have in turn become all the more crucial as budget cuts and new demands have made it harder to keep parks open.

Work-campers come together in one place — leading nature walks or staffing visitor centers, typically working 20 hours to 30 hours a week — then take off to their next assignments. As they move about, they keep in touch with one another through cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses and Facebook postings, creating virtual communities filled with the people they meet.

Camp life, especially in this bird-watching hotspot, revolves around the great outdoors: picking up trash, guiding visitors and, with luck, perhaps spotting the rare roadside hawk that has been reported in the Rio Grande Valley.

Night brings a round of socializing: wine around the picnic tables out by the bird feeders, an open-mike sing-along at the recreation center, an evening walk through the Texas scrubland.

Estimates of the number of work-campers nationally vary, but a spokesman for Kampgrounds of America Inc., a private company that franchises camps, said 80,000 or so might be a good guess, based on KOA's percentage of the camping market and the number of its work-campers.

“It attracts a certain kind of person,” said Wendy Forster, 70, a retired biologist who lives alone in her motor home and has been leading bird-watchers' walks here since January. “There's a lot of companionship and security.”

Recession has cut a fierce crosswind through the subculture, recreation experts and campers say. Some parks in California that once needed volunteers have closed, for example, as the state's budget crisis has intensified.

Many campers also are trying to stay longer in one place to cut travel expenses.

But other recreation managers say they have become more dependent than ever on a national network of volunteers, partly because of spending cuts and partly because remaining staff members have to prioritize what they can do.

“Basic trail maintenance, for example — picking up trash,” said Nancy Brown, who coordinates volunteers for the South Texas Refuge Complex, which includes three large wildlife areas. “It's important for wildlife purposes, but when you're faced with a choice of dealing with oil and gas permits or maintaining a trail, the trail is the first thing to go.”

In the last decade, Brown said, the number of campsites set aside for volunteers in the complex, including those at Falcon State Park, has risen twentyfold, to 65 from three.

In some places, the retired volunteers are about the only staff members left.

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