Parks square off with family in Alaska bulldozing battle

By Blaine Harden
The Washington Post

	BLAINE HARDEN / WASHINGTON POST Robert Allan Hale, left, known as Papa Pilgrim, and daughter Jerusalem stand on the front porch of their house inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in south-central Alaska.
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It began a year ago, when Pilgrim, whose legal name is Robert Allan Hale, drove a bulldozer 14 miles over an abandoned road inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, which encircles his ranch in the mountains of south-central Alaska. He said he did it out of love for his wife and 15 children, who needed food and other supplies.

Pilgrim's self-assigned road repair infuriated the National Park Service, which quickly closed the freshly cleared track. That infuriated land-rights activists, who have embraced Pilgrim and his family as photogenic victims of federal bullying. And that infuriated national environmental groups, which are demanding that the Park Service enforce laws against impetuous bulldozing.

A federal judge in Anchorage last week ordered all sides in the Pilgrim affair to, in effect, chill out.

"The showmanship and emotionalism that have characterized their interactions in the past must cease," U.S. District Judge Ralph Beistline wrote.

In the future, the judge said, he expects that all parties to the bulldozer imbroglio "will each respect the other and will communicate openly and candidly."

That seems extremely unlikely, given that the Pilgrims and some Park Service workers have made it quite clear that they do not like or trust each other.

The judge ruled Nov. 18 against Pilgrim and in favor of the National Park Service. If Pilgrim wants to run a bulldozer on the derelict road, the judge said, he first must obtain a permit from the Park Service. Pilgrim drove the bulldozer last year without applying for one.

Pilgrim, 62, who bought his 410-acre ranch inside the park two years ago, has said that if the federal government does not allow his family to use the road this winter, it is because it wants to "starve us out." He has characterized the dispute as a David vs. Goliath battle, one that pits his "simple family that never knew anything but how to live in the wilderness" against federal bureaucrats who have shown a "selfish, greedy and hateful attitude."

Park Service rangers have said they are fed up with the pushy behavior of the Pilgrim family, especially the sons who carry revolvers and rifles. "We are not going to back off," Hunter Sharp, chief ranger in the park, said in August.

Pilgrim's attorney, from a national conservative public-interest foundation, insists that under federal law Pilgrim does not need an access permit to bulldoze the road.

Russell Brooks, of the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a motion for reconsideration last week with the federal court in Anchorage.

Brooks noted that Congress "promised a right of access to landholders" inside the 104 million acres of parks and refuges created in Alaska in 1980.

"To us, it is pretty clear that the Park Service does not have discretion to deny access," he said.

Beistline, however, said in his ruling that Congress gave the Park Service the power to "reasonably regulate access routes that pass through park property."

Pilgrim wants to "open up a road that has been overgrown and abandoned for more than 65 years," the judge wrote. "This type of activity would naturally be of concern to the Park Service and would justify a reasonable investigation."

As for the Pilgrims, their attorney said winter is going to be hard. The family will run out of diesel fuel that powers generators, he said, and it has little hay for horses. One of the family's horses starved, Brooks said, and the others are too sick to walk to McCarthy, a town about 14 miles from the ranch.

A "Berlin airlift" to the family, organized by land-rights activists, flew in 66 small loads of food, fuel and other supplies this fall, Brooks said. But he said there is now too much snow for wheeled planes to land and not enough snow for planes equipped with skis.

"The situation will get pretty dire far before winter is over," Brooks said.

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