Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  Lessons had been learned. One was that government agents had to be careful about provoking armed resisters. It would be foolish to discount the potential for violence in an area where nearly everyone carried guns. Only a few months before, Kenyon had annoyed Sharp with a headline pointing out that attacks on park rangers nationally had gone up 950 percent in 2001. Most of those attacks were drug related along the Mexico border, as the story conceded, but Kenyon went on to speculate that this could be the explanation for the disturbing “military image” that park rangers had adopted for the Wrangells. The gunsmith turned editor seemed oblivious to the irony that the same issue included a story under his own byline discussing the best handgun to carry around McCarthy in case of bears.

  Sharp considered himself a friendly law officer. He had written only a couple of tickets in his six years in the Wrangells. But he was not a big and burly officer like Hannah, and when pressed he sometimes found it necessary to compensate with an assertive toughness. He had attended the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center at Glynco, Georgia, where they taught not to let aggressive people get behind you or move too close. He was not at all comfortable with the way the young Hales tended to crowd in, guns at their sides.

  Sharp was of course aware of the tragic history of the McCarthy mail-day murders in the park’s first years. And just a few days before his winter patrol up McCarthy Creek, there had been yet another confrontation, this time at the footbridge, where voices were raised between a local and an Alaska State Trooper over the bollards. A few of the older Hales had been standing nearby, and soon another broadside was plastered on walls and trees around McCarthy—“Pilgrim Public Notice #3”—accusing the state trooper and a park ranger of harassment and assault. The barely suppressed fury directed at the officers was disconcerting.

  As they left, they passed us with smirks and pride. Congratulations, NPS and State Trooper, as you tried to turn McCarthy into a cement jungle where you think harassment and force is the rule and loving one another a dangerous moral. Such barbarous cursing and flagrant disregard for a person we had never seen before.… In our own outrage we do forgive, but do want you to know immediately what happened here to us because we work hard with our hands and mind our own business living a quiet life. Revenge is not ours, but understanding and compassion is. In Jesus Name we Say Amen! The Pilgrims.

  Understanding and compassion, indeed—Sharp’s understanding from the New Mexico State Police was that the Hale-Sunstar family had been considered an officer-safety threat during their twenty-three years in the mountains near Taos. Now, in Alaska, lawyers for the Interior and Justice departments had been passing memos back and forth for months, trying to decide how to handle McCarthy Creek. The federal prosecutor cited the remote location, difficult access, and possibility of armed resistance as reasons not to press criminal charges regarding the brazen bulldozing of federal land. The situation was too volatile. Instead, the government would prepare a civil lawsuit, seeking payment for damages to public resources. An expert from the NPS Environmental Response, Damage Assessment, and Restoration Branch in Atlanta had already traveled to Alaska to start the investigation. “Every hour of manpower and resources needed to respond, assess and restore the damaged area will be included in this lawsuit,” a park investigator wrote. “The numbers will be big.” By spring 2003, according to the plan, the effort would require up to forty-three personnel, including a heavily armed Park Service equivalent of a SWAT team, who would be helicoptered in to protect the crime-scene biologists.

  The first step was ground reconnaissance, hence the three-man February mission. Sharp remained professionally alert. How easy it would be, he thought, for someone to draw a bead on them from up high, or touch off an avalanche as the park rangers moved up the valley. As he scanned the silent mountains for clues to his fate, he said later, he realized how a cavalry scout might have felt in the days of the real frontier, traveling through hostile Indian country.

  NOW IT seemed the park rangers had gone as far as they could up the valley. A Pilgrim snowmachine was blocking their path. Five other family members joined the teenager straddling the trail.

  Sharp was certain they were still far from the private property. His training told him this was a situation that needed to be controlled. If Alaska State Troopers were here, he guessed, they would handcuff everyone and let the lawyers sort it out later. But that could quickly degenerate into pushing and shoving, with the family’s video camera at the ready. One misstep and the Pilgrims’ backers would have the Park Service on television news. On the other hand, if you showed people your back, they would be emboldened for the next confrontation. Either way, he could see events creeping toward another Ruby Ridge.

  Sharp asked if the rangers could proceed just as far as the creek, where they would be able to turn their machines around in the open. Instead of answering, all six individuals turned their backs. Sharp waited for one minute, then repeated his request, this time on videotape.

  Unable to proceed, the rangers wrestled their machines around in the deep snow and started back.

  Three Hale-Sunstar snowmachines shot past them. When they got farther down the valley, the rangers found that two ice bridges they had used to cross open water that morning were now gone. The ice had been cut away with a chain saw. It took forty minutes to cross the creek at a second site.

  When he spoke later about that patrol up McCarthy Creek, Sharp said the prolonged river crossing had felt like a setup for an ambush.

  “Maybe I’m feeling a little paranoid. I’m sorry,” he said. He did not sound sorry.

  THE PARK rangers’ February 2003 patrol up McCarthy Creek was treated with derision in the next edition of the Wrangell St. Elias News.

  The story was the first in Kenyon’s paper to deal with the Pilgrims and the Park Service. It appeared under the pseudonym “McCarthy Annie.” In the months ahead, Kenyon would closely guard the identity of the author. Laurie Rowland, one of his parishioners, was the young wife of a local heavy equipment operator, who homeschooled her children and gave music lessons and participated in community activities. Under her nom de plume, she was biting and sarcastic, and wrote moreover in first person plural, as if speaking for all the exasperated people of McCarthy.

  The article was titled IN WHICH, NPS GETS A SPANKING—THIS STORY IS INCREDIBLE, BUT TRUE.

  Over time, we locals have gotten to know the Pilgrims, and what we’ve seen, we like. As a family, they are God-fearing, peaceable, hard-working, sensible, and the most loving people we’ve ever known. Not only that, they are musical as well!

  It has been with a growing sense of trepidation that our little community has witnessed NPS’s hostility and virtual harassment of our neighbors over the mountain. The rangers have been careful, however, not to do anything overtly illegal or outrageous to the Pilgrims. This, you understand, would be unwise. That’s why these latest events in the series have caused such uproar here in our sleepy, nearly deserted town.

  The rangers showed up on the day of the patrol “looking for some dirt,” McCarthy Annie wrote. The Pilgrims decided they should keep an eye on this “questionably motivated journey.” So they stuck to the rangers like trained hounds. “When the rangers smiled nervously at them, the Pilgrims beamed joyfully, confidently, right back.” She asserted that the family blocked the trail only inside their property line and that the rangers “turned tail and, with a last defeated glance over their shoulder, slunk down the mountain. I guess you can only push so much before folks start pushing back.”

  The reason the rangers were pushing the Pilgrims, Annie explained, was that the park resented the family’s freedom and coveted their land. “You see, nothing galls those National Park types more than private inholdings, especially when the landowners decide not only to clear a runway and develop and build on their property, but to go and live there year round with their dogs, cows, goats, sheep, chickens, horses and all fifteen of their children.”

  McCarthy Annie’s account included a s
tartling allegation. As the boys stood nearby, they heard the rangers get reports from headquarters that the Pilgrims were planning to follow the rangers—information, she said, the parkies could have known only if they were monitoring a phone call that morning between the Pilgrims’ wanigan in town and the homestead. She said one ranger looked involuntarily at the Pilgrims with a “guilt-edged face” as he tried to turn down the radio volume.

  “I don’t know about you, but whenever I think of government agents tapping citizens’ phones, I get just slightly edgy,” Annie wrote.

  Kenyon seconded this allegation in his editorial. He reported that a park ranger denied any government wiretapping. Then he wrote: “We are forced to decide who to believe: our neighbors, who have never told us a lie—or a Ranger who is taught in Ranger School that it is OK to lie.”

  There was more to McCarthy Annie’s story. The next morning, she wrote, the parkies found their trucks were missing. They had been parked beside the river on private land belonging to the Rowlands. Maintaining her third-person façade, she told how Keith Rowland towed the government trucks away because he was angry to learn that the park was monitoring local phones. The trucks were dragged a half mile to the McCarthy Road, with Rick Kenyon videotaping the process.

  Too bad they’d left the trucks in gear. The back tires now have less tread.… I hope they made it to Glennallen all right. I do worry about those worn tires.

  I guess between the Pilgrims and the Rowlands, the NPS got a spanking they’ll, hopefully, not soon forget. And, maybe, just maybe, they’ll someday mend their ways.

  But I’m not holding my breath.

  THE ANCHORAGE headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a brick bunker across the street from the downtown fine arts museum. On March 7, 2003, Special Agent Steven Payne received a visit from a bearded rural resident and seven of his children, including three adult sons. Robert Hale described his family’s peaceful Christian subsistence lifestyle inside a national park and then reported that the National Park Service was tapping the telephones of most, if not all, of the residents of McCarthy.

  “HALE portrayed the local NPS officers as arrogant, antagonistic individuals who view the local residents as squatters who have encroached on NPS land,” Payne wrote.

  Papa Pilgrim described two incidents in which overheard conversations suggested wiretapping. Payne explained the laws against wiretaps, and noted that the park might have a court order. Or, he said, it could be something as simple as a conversation overheard on a scanner.

  “HALE’s sons then advised that their family purchased the most advanced scanner available three years ago and conducted several experiments to determine if it could intercept the local radio/satellite phones, with negative results.”

  Pilgrim went on to recount in detail various harassments and transgressions by Park Service employees aimed at driving the Pilgrims off their land. He was particularly concerned by a rumor he traced to a park employee, accusing one of his children of carrying ammunition in a violin case.

  HALE was extremely concerned that NPS personnel would use this type of information to justify aggressive actions against his family, including “shooting my children” in a “Ruby Ridge” style siege. Immediately after each such comment by HALE, SA PAYNE reassured him that NPS officers were honorable people who would not engage in such conduct.

  HALE also indicated that his father, I. B. HALE, was an FBI agent from approximately 1938 to 1950. His father reportedly taught firearms at Quantico and was transferred to several other offices, including some brand new ones. I. B. HALE reportedly resigned from the FBI to accept a position as the head of security for General Dynamics Corporation, rather than being transferred to open the FBI’s new office in Butte, Montana.

  The three-page, single-spaced FBI report, a model of buttoned-down agency decorum, recounts how Hale was urged to communicate openly with local park officials.

  HALE and his children relaxed considerably during the interview, and at its conclusion he reluctantly indicated that he would write a letter to the NPS and that he would consider opening a dialogue with the local NPS officials. HALE appreciated SA PAYNE’s assistance with this matter, and as a joint show of gratitude and to disprove the aforementioned rumor about ammunition being stored in a violin case, HALE and his children sang a folk song immediately prior to leaving the office.

  Two weeks later, Special Agent Payne called Hale to follow up. Papa Pilgrim answered the phone “Hillbilly Heaven.” Payne informed Hale that he had investigated the complaint and determined the Park Service had not conducted wiretaps on anyone in McCarthy. Payne said he had also obtained considerable information on mining claims, rights of way, and park permits, and he urged Hale to return to the FBI office at some point so he could share his findings. But the genial patriarch had changed his tone.

  “HALE asked why he should meet with SA PAYNE, since the FBI and NPS are ‘brother’ agencies,” Payne wrote. Papa Pilgrim said he was not particularly interested in the results of any investigation that relied on information from the park. He informed Payne that he had not written the suggested letter to the park, nor did he intend to open a dialogue with local park personnel. He declined Payne’s repeated requests for a second private meeting.

  “HALE indicated that he would contact SA PAYNE if he changed his mind and happened to be in Anchorage. HALE seemed aloof, argumentative and insincere throughout this contact.”

  Special Agent Payne then contacted Hunter Sharp, chief ranger for Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, and apprised him of the conversation.

  The Hale family, New Mexico, 1992 (photo credit 8.1)

  SOMETHING SEEMED amiss with the picturesque hippie family living in the mountains above Mora. It wasn’t just how they drove around town in their brightly painted Jesus Jeep with born-again exhortations on the hood, on never-ending scavenger hunts for spare parts, the children ducking their eyes if anyone came along. It was how they wouldn’t let anybody get close. After a decade in the Sangre de Cristos, the look in Bob Hale’s eyes had changed, according to nearby rancher Editha Bartley. Calls were made to child welfare and the state police. Something just wasn’t right about those cute little blond boys and girls, and those teenage sons riding horses through the canyons with rifles and fence cutters.

  A few people got to know the family just a bit. Karen Brown had bought a piece of high-country land next to Jack Nicholson’s place back in 1983 and visited for a week or two every year to work on a little cabin. She and her husband were intrigued at first by the young family with their notched-log home, a hand-dug well, an icehouse, and an outdoor bathtub set up on stones and cement above a firebox. The Hales hunted and gardened and got by on a little cash from breeding Great Pyrenees. Plenty of hippies dreamed of living in the mountains, but few made a real go of it.

  But the more Karen Brown saw of Preacher Bob on her trips up from Albuquerque, the less she cared for her neighbor. His wife and children sat silently in his presence, speaking only when prodded to confirm something he’d said. Bob Hale seemed to think of himself as a kind of modern-day Noah, preparing to repopulate the world after its sinful demise. He smirked and painted a sign that he placed down the Jeep trail, NOAH’S LITTLE ARK, to sell his dogs and sheep and goats. Bob would peel away her two little girls and tell them how worried he was that they would go to hell like their parents. Karen Brown got him to stop by insisting on equal time alone with his children.

  Some people found the father colorful and harmless. Lloyd Parham, an insurance agent in nearby Las Vegas, New Mexico, recalled that Hale kept a macaw on his shoulder and wore moccasins of buckskin tanned with animal brains. Parham’s home became a regular town stop for the Hale family, providing the kids’ first tastes of pizza and strawberry shortcake—“They were ravenous”—and notarized statements for birth certificates that were essential to obtain the food stamps that helped sustain the pioneer dream. The Hales came down the mountain in an old ton-and-a-half truck with a house built on back
, complete with a woodstove and a section partitioned for a mule. “The people at the office got a big kick out of ’em,” Parham recalled.

  The family never lacked for charitable donations, especially bags of used clothing from churches. Karen Brown found the younger children sleeping on the cabin floor atop piles of used clothes. One winter, when the sheep were starving and had lost their wool, the animals were wrapped in donated sweaters and shirts as the children led them in search of grass.

  Years later, Papa Pilgrim blamed his troubles in New Mexico on cultural misunderstandings with the clannish local Hispanics. One land-grant descendant he got to know well was an outlier—a young Mora businessman leaving the Catholic Church and drawn to the persuasive flow of Scripture from Preacher Bob. “I thought, wow, this fellow has spent some time studying the word of God,” Jacob Pacheco recalled. He and his wife rode up on horses to visit. The children all ran barefoot and the family got by on next to nothing—“right out of a romance novel,” Pacheco said. “He would cure the kids with horse antibiotics. If that didn’t work, it was because you had sin in your life.” Their friendship broke up after Hale wrote to say he had discovered through prayer that Pacheco’s wife—who had disputed some of Hale’s Bible interpretations—was demonic.

  One day in the summer of 1987, the Hales’ trip down the canyon to town was stopped by a new fence. A family from Santa Fe had bought a piece of the old land grant for a country home. Scott Vail walked down to the creek to meet this rustic clan and agreed to put in gates so they could travel as they always had. Bob Hale thanked him profusely, holding his cowboy hat over his heart in a silent prayer that went on so long Vail started to regret his offer.