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

by Tom Kizzia

  It was the latter interest, perhaps, that led Candelaria to conclude he had come to Wrangell–St. Elias National Park at a crucial moment in American history. He knew this would win him no popularity contests. But from now on, Alaskans were going to need permits just like other Americans to do certain things on federal land. He arrived in McCarthy that April day in 2003 ready to argue the point.

  More than a dozen McCarthy residents were waiting in the lodge dining room. Some were eager to challenge the federal overlords, some merely curious. The Pilgrims refused to participate. The children stood across the street from the McCarthy Lodge with Papa, holding protest signs before their horse and wagon. One sign said IF GOD IS FOR US, WHO CAN BE AGAINST US? Another, held by the blue-eyed four-year-old named Lamb, said PLEASE LET ME GO HOME TO MAMA. There was defiance, too: A sign on a bulldozer read MCCARTHY CREEK TRAIL RIDES.

  The Kenyons and Rowlands led the argument. They demanded to know how the Green Butte Road up McCarthy Creek could be declared illegal, since it had been used for much of the century. Candelaria said the road had been erased by time and nature. The new road, rebuilt illegally, wandered off the original route.

  For more than two hours, temperatures rose in the lodge as the sides hammered back and forth. Kenyon had been researching the issue in fine detail. The discussion turned on technicalities involving legal access rights under two laws: the 1980 Alaska conservation act and a Civil War–era law regarding historic trails known as Revised Statute 2477. The Pilgrim supporters said the family had just been doing road maintenance on a legal historic route. Candelaria said access to inholding properties required a permit. No one had ever sought a permit for the Green Butte Road and the Mother Lode.

  Every time the park officials looked into the street, they saw the Pilgrims standing in front of the bulldozer. Candelaria finally pointed out the window and said, “Do you know who created your problem? Those folks created your problem.” The crowd hooted in protest, Kenyon wrote later.

  McCarthy Annie, in her more pungent account, said the parkies showed up for the community meeting “with their trademark park green bulletproof vests, and packing Sig-Sauer handguns and pepper spray.” She said the park rangers added insult to injury when they called the McCarthy residents “inholders.” It was another way of asserting control, she said—“Let me tell you, Control is the name of their game!”

  But, she said, the local folk had a measure of sweet revenge when the meeting broke up and a protest parade of vehicles started up the Pilgrims’ road: “After all, we mountain folks know our history and law.… When you’re on the right side, there’s no need to hide, apologize, or give in.” And there was no question who else was on their side—she pointed out that another of the Pilgrims’ protest signs said GOD IS BIGGER THAN THE NPS. WATCH OUT, HE’S GETTING MAD!

  AFTER THAT, no one in McCarthy could avoid getting drawn into the Pilgrim drama. Not even the flinty homesteading elder of the area, Jim Edwards, who had stayed away from the protest meeting at the lodge. He could never hear much of what people said on such occasions, for one thing, having spent most of his life around bulldozers and airplane engines. More important, he had no wish to take sides in a contest over who was tougher, God or the Park Service. He had always preferred to engage Nature in the Wrangell Mountains directly, without interference from either of those meddlesome outside parties.

  But one morning, as spring gave way to summer, Papa Pilgrim showed up at Jim Edwards’s door, clutching his cowboy hat to his chest, with two small children clinging to his coat. He had come to ask a favor.

  A bemused indifference toward the religious ferments of his neighbors had served Edwards well in McCarthy for fifty years. He had never been a churchgoer, not even after his wife, Maxine, was killed in the mail-day murders. His personal religion remained pretty much the same as the day he first flew a small plane into the country as a twenty-four-year-old and saw the Kennicott Glacier spilling off the mountains. You could call it nature worship, he said: the trees, the animals, the summits migrating all the way from South America. It about killed him to cut down two perfectly healthy spruce on his homestead so he could see through to a television satellite.

  On the other hand, he held no great affection for the Park Service. He remembered how things were before. Despite promises in the 1980 Alaska conservation act, the park had pretty much confiscated Edwards’s part-time placer gold operation on Dan Creek. They told him they didn’t have one thousand dollars to buy him out but could spend unlimited funds flying helicopters across the Nizina River valley to inspect his operation and explain the latest regulations.

  Edwards was a soft-spoken man with the shambling demeanor of an accountant, though his diffidence was misleading—he had a ropy strength, stubborn opinions, and unstoppable energy. He had ties as strong as anyone’s to McCarthy’s mining past. His gold claim had once belonged to a tough old Croat named Martin Radovan, a holdover prospector from the Kennecott days. Edwards had befriended Radovan in the 1950s and one summer led a geologist’s crew out on the face of a cliff above the Chitistone River to examine a Radovan claim known as the Binocular Prospect because not even European mountain climbers hired by Kennecott Copper had been able to reach its turquoise stains. Radovan got there, however, and told people he might have found the greatest bonanza of all. Edwards led the team along a ledge several thousand feet up, nudging scree with their toes to make steps. In places the ledge was ten inches wide. Where the rock bulged, they crawled on hands and knees. A hanging glacier hundreds of feet over their heads dropped blocks of ice that whistled like bombs. The survey crew got close enough to see the cotton mattress atop a boulder where the old prospector bivouacked, but rocks buzzing past the geologist’s head convinced him to turn back without actually reaching the pay streak. Radovan finally sold his interest in the claims to investors and continued working for the new owners into his eighties. After he died, a mining company helicoptered in, looked it over, and turned the claims over to the new park. Radovan’s lifelong dream of a mountain of solid copper blipped off the screen as a corporate tax write-off.

  Radovan’s placer gold claim disappeared next, a few decades later, when Jim Edwards, using it mainly as a hobby, surrendered it to the government. Now there was hardly any mining left in the park. The man at his door, Papa Pilgrim, the new owner of the Mother Lode Mine, was not even a hobby miner. It wasn’t clear to Edwards what exactly he planned to do with his hole in the mountain.

  Pilgrim said the family’s goats had escaped from the old mill-site property and were scattered somewhere in the high country. Edwards knew the Mother Lode valley well, having led packhorses up McCarthy Creek for a prospecting crew in territorial days—a hell of a difficult trip, he recalled, given how the road was grown over before Wigger cleared it again.

  Edwards always tried to think the best of people. Sometimes he lived to regret it. But he figured family cohesion like the Pilgrims’ was to be admired in this day and age. And he was hardly one to hold the newcomer’s bulldozing against him. Before Papa Pilgrim steered that Caterpillar D5 down from the Mother Lode, Edwards had been famous locally for the most audacious bulldozer ride in the history of the Wrangells.

  Back in the winter of 1961, when there was still no road to McCarthy, Edwards left Chitina for home on a D4 cable-blade dozer. He crossed the frozen Copper River and rumbled along the old tracks, finding just enough room to move between the iron rails. He crept across wobbling trestles, built detours around washouts, dynamited broken rails, and at one point hiked back to Chitina and flew to Anchorage to get a replacement front axle, approaching each new obstacle as calmly as a mathematician working his way across a chalkboard. Finally he crossed the Kennicott River, pulled up at his house, and presented Maxine, his wife, with her pale-green 1949 Chevy Deluxe sedan. He had pulled the car all the way to McCarthy on a sled behind his bulldozer. He had come sixty miles and it took him thirty days.

  In his seventies, Edwards was still flying his kit-built plane off
the grass strip he’d cleared on his homestead. He told the abjectly grateful Pilgrim he would fly up McCarthy Creek and have a look around.

  The escaped goats were easy to find. Edwards landed at the Mother Lode and described their location high on a flank of the Green Butte. He was warmly thanked, and invited back for a visit any time. The next time he flew there, he brought a guest, a hardy young German who had bicycled thousands of miles to Alaska. The visit to Hillbilly Heaven seemed to go well. Elishaba served fresh bread, and Pilgrim regaled them with stories. But when they got back to Edwards’s place that night, the German friend surprised him. He’d found the afternoon disturbing.

  “That Elishaba really hates her father,” the German said.

  THROUGH THE summer, the McCarthy Creek situation deteriorated. The U.S. Justice Department formally notified the Hale family of plans to seek an injunction against further bulldozer work in the park. A Park Service team was assembled to complete a summer assessment of the bulldozed road and prepare damage estimates. A second team would finally survey the Marvelous Millsite and other related Mother Lode properties to establish where the family’s clearing activities had violated park boundaries. All steps necessary to assure the teams’ safety would be taken, including dispatch of an armed Special Event Tactical Team.

  People started to worry. Nearly everyone in town, regardless of their comfort level with the Pilgrims, felt deployment of a half dozen flak-jacketed government riflemen was more likely to escalate matters than to calm them. The more vehement government critics fastened onto this resort to arms with a mix of horror and relish. E-mails began to fly from remote Alaska to national property-rights and other conservative mailing lists, describing how the “NPS is hunting this family like a wolfpack stalks a pregnant elk.”

  “Bear in mind that these folks are pacifists, very akin to the Mennonite faith,” Rick Kenyon wrote in one e-mail alert. “We plan to evacuate the children from the property and send observers up to the property, but beyond that, we need help. What should we do? We feel like the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park has become ‘occupied territory’ and is being ruled by a dictator.”

  The Alaska regional director of the National Park Service, Rob Arnberger, called Kenyon to try to clear the air. Arnberger’s exasperation was plain in a subsequent e-mail to several colleagues, reporting on the conversation: “[Kenyon] stated he felt the ‘NPS was coming in to do its work and kill some kids.’ I expressed my deep disgust with this kind of irresponsible comment as direct evidence of his intentions to inflame the process and that his assertions of fairness in representing the issue was a fallacy and fabrication. We both severed the call with a quick commitment to look for ways to better communications.”

  In midsummer, the park set out once again to close the last remaining tunnel entrance to the Mother Lode mine. It was an old ventilation tunnel that led from park land into forty miles of catacombs, where temperatures remained a few degrees above freezing year-round. The Pilgrims had chiseled their way in through the ice that blocked the entrance. A ranger flew out by helicopter and found a hand-lettered sign on the tunnel door: THIS ENTRANCE IS CLOSED TO ALL PUBLIC AND “PARK” OFFICIALS—LIABILITY LAWS ARE NOW IN EFFECT WITH THE NEW OWNERSHIP! WORKERS ARE INSIDE AT THIS TIME—AND THIS ENTRANCE IS PATROLLED DAILY—VIOLATERS WILL BE PERSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW! “PILGRIM” FAMILY.

  The ranger replaced the Pilgrims’ sign with his own—a skull-and-crossbones above a list of generic underground dangers: rotten structures, deadly mine openings, lethal gas and lack of oxygen, dangerous animals, unsafe ladders, cave-ins and decayed timbers, unstable explosives, deep pools of water. He padlocked the door. Two weeks later, tipped off about paying customers headed to Hillbilly Heaven, three park rangers returned to the mountain and spent a night staked out with binoculars. They watched Joseph climb to the tunnel. When they scrambled over they found the lock broken by a pickax and ticketed Pilgrim’s oldest son.

  Then in August they sent an undercover agent posing as a tourist to book a horse ride to the Bonanza Mine. The rocky trail, a full day’s hike on foot above the Kennecott ruins, climbs past abandoned timber tram towers and around ravines and rocky turrets that give the ridge a look of deep relief in the shadows of a long summer sunset. The trail leaves the state-owned roads around McCarthy and enters the park. At the end of the trip, Joshua was cited for operating in the park without a commercial permit.

  Federal court dates in Anchorage were set for the Pilgrim brothers later in the year. Kenyon complained that the potential fines could ruin the family. Carl Bauman, the conservative Motorhead lawyer, agreed to represent Joseph and Joshua for whatever money Kenyon could get by passing a hat.

  A crew of federal surveyors flew to Hillbilly Heaven, but the park backed down on sending a team of armed guards. The surveyors cleared a swath of trees around the Pilgrim perimeter, which turned out to be pretty much where the park expected. The Pilgrims had indeed been clearing park land, but from the air, the rectangular perimeter in the forest was a more jarring sight than the homestead itself. The logging was a tool of rough frontier justice. A line was drawn through the wilderness, and the Pilgrims had been told not to cross it.

  The property line ran through the middle of the Pilgrims’ kitchen.

  WITH AIRPLANES and horses their only options for going home, the Pilgrims spent more time around town that summer. It was their second summer in McCarthy, and locals were starting to feel less charitable. One day the horses got loose and scattered across the runway. Natalie Bay, a formidable Australian who owned Wrangell Mountain Air with her pilot husband and managed the complicated logistics for dozens of backpacking and hunting parties every summer, lashed into Papa. It was bad enough that the horses left piles of manure by the community’s drinking water spring, and that the family’s horse-drawn wagon, competing for Kennicott tourists with the air service shuttle van, had now evolved into a rasping dune-buggy taxi. Cute little Pilgrim children were posted by the footbridge to direct tourists to their own “Jelly Bean” rig. Natalie had even heard reports of the children trying to solicit footbridge-crossing fees. She had put up with all this, in part because she appreciated having the Pilgrim girls around to play with her own young daughter. But endangering the pilots was over the line. She went up to the airstrip with a rifle and threatened to shoot the horses.

  Pilgrim apologized. It wasn’t long after, though, that he ignored Natalie’s wishes one afternoon and snuck her daughter away to play with his girls in the wanigan. Then he tried to prevent Natalie from going inside to retrieve her. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” Pilgrim told her, blocking her way. He was wrong, it turned out. But the rest of the afternoon several Pilgrim boys followed Natalie and her daughter around town, taking videos.

  At the Hardware Store, where the summer college program was again under way, Ben Shaine worried that the escalating antagonism might leave permanent scars in the community. Kenyon was blaming every problem not on the Pilgrims but on the Park Service blockade. It was brilliant political theater. Shaine marveled at Pilgrim’s performance art the day Papa stopped by the Hardware Store and monopolized an open house, drawing the college students about him with his tales of bush living. The occasion left Shaine’s daughter, Gaia, indignant. She had graduated from college back east and had come home for the summer to guide whitewater rafting trips. Gaia found it insulting to hear the Pilgrims, in only their second summer in the Wrangells, refer to McCarthy as “our town.” They didn’t understand that the town had always gotten along by common law and respect for neighbors. By forcing the park to get nasty about rules, she felt, they were changing the place in ways that would last even after the family’s wilderness experiment failed and they moved on.

  Neil Darish at the McCarthy Lodge continued to serve as the family’s go-between with the park. But even he began to wonder whether the description of “colorful” was quite adequate. Pilgrim rejected his suggestion that the family manufacture copper wall hangings of salmon a
s a cottage industry, saying it would be idolatry to fashion the image of a living being. Pilgrim’s source was Deuteronomy, in which Moses extended the commandment against graven images to cover specifically the likeness of any male or female, or beast on the earth, or winged fowl or fish or anything that creepeth on the ground. When they lived in Fairbanks and drove through the highway town of North Pole, Pilgrim made the children look away as they passed the Christmas factory with the giant Santa Claus.

  All that was fine with Darish, though he shared the estimable Ayn Rand’s atheism—even charming in its eccentricity. But Pilgrim’s attitude about law enforcement was another matter. The police never just come over and celebrate your birthday with you, he told Darish. They justify their lies with their higher purpose. He had grown up around law enforcement, he said. There’s nothing you can tell an officer like Stephens Harper that can help you. They’re only out to get you.

  SOMEHOW IN the midst of the commotion surrounding his new park job that summer, Stephens Harper and Tamara Egans got married. Tamara’s parents flew to McCarthy in July 2003, and Kelly Bay took everyone on a flight over the vast ethereal emptiness of the largest subarctic ice field in the world. They landed on a river bar and Bay read the essential words off a fluttering three-by-five card and took off promptly because the wind was picking up.