The major destinations for the Long Trips between 1937 and 1941 were coal and steel areas of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Salvatore Vascellaro's dissertation includes interviews with participants from the 1938 Long Trip. He writes: "Rith Bigel (1938 I) describes the illegal mines: 'There would be an automobile near a deep hole in the ground. The automobile was held by big, big rocks in the back wheel. The pulley extended all the way down to the bottom of the coal mine...A man would sit on a bucket and the pulley would get him down there, he would fill the bucket, and then he would be pulled up.' To Bigel and the other students 'it was absolutely unbelievable,' 'how they were taking their lives into their own hands every time they went down there.' Bigel found this 'very admirable': 'They were desperate...[and] they took the reins of their lives into their own hands and did something about it.' Jean Todd Welch (1938) found that she 'could not understand how a man who wanted to feed his family would take such terrible risks'" (p. 167-168).