Washington ? After three years of braving Alaska’s minus 50-degree winter temperatures and round-the-clock summer sunshine, architect Victoria Schmitz is taking a break. She’s going to summer camp for two months outside Boulder, Colo.

Schmitz, 34, won’t spend her time horseback riding, hiking or canoeing in the scenic foothills of the Rocky Mountains, however. She’ll be working from 6 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. serving meals to adolescent boys as an assistant cook in the camp kitchen.

Her summer foray into food service isn’t by choice. It was the only job she could find, as so many companies have halted or postponed construction projects because of the recession.

“I’m the lunch lady. Hoagies and grinders and navy beans,” Schmitz said, in a sly reference to the old Adam Sandler-Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.”

Across the country, the job shortage has created a buyers’ market for traditional summer employers who can now pick from an abundance of laid-off and older workers, such as Schmitz, whose experience, reliability and hunger make them more attractive as short-term seasonal hires.

However, the added competition has left the nation’s teenagers facing the worst summer jobs outlook in more than 60 years as millions of 16- to 19-year-olds must compete with better-qualified workers in the most depressed jobs market in decades.

While the long hours at Cheley Colorado Camps are similar to the ones Schmitz logged while she was helping to design the new Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska, there are no such similarities when it comes to her salary.

Schmitz’s entire two-month stint at the camp won’t pay as much as she made in one month as an architect. There are, however, other benefits.

“It’s going to be a lot easier than meeting with community advisers and checking over structural designs,” Schmitz said. “The only deadlines I’ll have are breakfast, lunch and dinner. And at the end of the day, I’ve done my job. It’s going to be a lot more mentally relaxing. I think everybody needs that once in a while.”

Paul Weidig, Cheley’s staff director, said there were so many out-of-work restaurant chefs that eight of 10 summer kitchen staffers had worked previously as cooks. That’s a first, Weidig said. Usually, the jobs go to young people and teens with little or no cooking experience.

“Employers are thinking, ‘If I can hire an adult who’s at least a proven worker, why would I hire a high school kid?’ So the job market for teenagers is going to be very soft this summer,” said Andrew Kehow, an economist at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va.

Last year, only 32.7 percent of U.S. teens ages 16 through 19 held summer jobs, the lowest level since the government started tracking the data in 1948, said Andrew Sum, the director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.

With jobs still scarce, the teen employment rate probably will hit a new low of about 30 percent this summer, Sum said.