MCCARTHY, ALASKA - The U.S. Department of Justice may soon file a lawsuit against a group known as the Pilgrim family for bulldozing a 14-mile road in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.
Described as a born-again religious family of 17 that lives off of the land, the Pilgrims bought about 400 acres inside the park from a miner in 2002. Soon after, park officials saw that the family had bulldozed a road leading from its homestead to the town of McCarthy and cleared surrounding parkland.
The Park Service is surveying the damage to the park and will present its findings to the Department of Justice, which will then request a civil action to recoup property damages. At the heart of the Park Service's case is the Pilgrim family's failure to get - or even ask for - state and federal permits needed to create road access.
"We strongly encourage the Department of Justice to take the next step," said Jim Stratton, NPCA's Alaska regional director. "There are hundreds of private land parcels in Alaska's national parks, and letting the Pilgrim family get away with this is a precedent we cannot afford to set."
"There are many other inholders who would love road access to their properties," agreed park superintendent Gary Candelaria, "but there is a legal process that must be followed."
In an editorial published in the Anchorage Daily News, Candelaria said that public lands in the park were "being trampled" by the Pilgrim family.
"They damaged public land for private interest," he said. "No one would condone someone blading an acre or two off the edge of Gettysburg - this act in Wrangell-St Elias National Park and Preserve should bring similar outrage and legal consequences."
The family's 62-year-old patriarch, who goes by the name "Pilgrim," said that the controversy surprised him.
"We knew this land was in the middle of a national park," he told the Anchorage Daily News, "but that just meant to us that our neighbors would be few and far between."
Defending its actions, the family has said that it did not bulldoze a new road, but rather cleared an old mining road. That brought into the mix an obscure federal law, R.S. 2477, recently resurrected by the Interior Department, which opened the door to right-of-way claims on public lands [Park Scope, March/April 2003]. The family's claim, which has not yet been adjudicated, is irrelevant to the Justice Department's investigation, said Candelaria.
"Even if the claim was listed as a right-of-way," he said, "we would still have to approve activities taking place on parkland. They did not have permission."
