![]() Who knows what would have happened?" said Rick Kenyon, publisher of the McCarthy-based Wrangell St. "You know these things bring out people with extreme views. The Park Service dropped plans to send armed rangers along with surveyors this month to assess damage along the old mining road. Officials also hope to reduce tensions among some local residents, who have fanned the Internet recently with warnings of a confrontation brewing between the Park Service and the pacifist Pilgrims. State officials are scheduled to meet with McCarthy residents today to discuss the lengthy process necessary to establish legal access for park inholdings. senator, Frank Murkowski fulminated against federal efforts to block access, complaining it was like "waking up one morning to find that the federal government has declared your yard a national park and refused you access across your driveway."īut as governor, Murkowski has not sprung to the Pilgrims' defense, in part because the state is being careful how it approaches the legal and political issues of access across federal lands. "We're worried that if inholders in other parks see them get away with this, they'll start doing it too," said Jim Stratton, Alaska director for the National Parks Conservation Association, an environmental group.Īs a U.S. The National Park Service was anxious in part because the bulldozed trail followed a historic mining road, giving the Pilgrims a faint legal toehold under an arcane, century-old law with potential repercussions across Alaska. Until the past few weeks, the two sides were communicating only through fliers nailed up on trees. The Pilgrims told the rangers not to trespass and to quit scaring their goats with surveillance helicopters. The rangers ordered the settlers not to use motorized vehicles on the new route. Some of those new neighbors were national park rangers. "We knew this land was in the middle of a national park, but that just meant to us our neighbors would be few and far between." "We're not a political family," he said by telephone from the town of McCarthy, his voice still carrying a slight drawl from his Texas youth. The family's 62-year-old patriarch, who goes by the name of Pilgrim, professed surprise this week at the furor. Justice Department investigation, high-level political negotiations and Internet warnings to property-rights groups of a potential "Ruby Ridge confrontation" that officials have been scrambling to defuse. Recent weeks have seen an escalating U.S. It was the kind of action environmentalists, land-rights activists and state and federal bureaucrats had been bracing for ever since 1980, when Congress transformed Alaska by creating 104 million acres of parks and wildlife refuges here. ![]() The problem was that the Pilgrims had just bulldozed a trail across 13 miles of Wrangell-St. ![]() But when the devout, tight-knit family set out for the nearest town on a bulldozer last fall, all hell broke loose. God brought the Pilgrim family to Alaska and delivered Papa Pilgrim, Mother Country Rose and their 15 children last year to a mining claim in the remote heart of the Wrangell Mountains.
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