rankles those parkies more than public use of a public road which winds through the heart of prime park land, it is private landowners’ use of a public road which leads to their private property in the heart of prime park land! You see, in the twisted view of those parkies, both the road and the inholders are perceived as some sort of “threat to park resources.”

And they are willing to do anythinginside or outside the law—to get rid of both!

It was about a week ago, on a Friday afternoon, when they made their move. The access issue was the hot topic of a town meeting that day, and some NPS rangers had attended.

They failed to mention to us McCarthyites what they were planning to do that afternoon. If we had known, the riot would have been on a little sooner.

After the meeting had concluded and most of us had gone home for the day, Rangers Hunter Sharp and Richard Larrabee, acting on orders from Park Super¬in¬tendent Gary Candelaria, quietly dropped a bomb on us, in the form of notices posted around our town. In these notices, Candelaria claimed that the McCarthy Green Butte Road was an “illegal road bulldozed on federal land,” and forbade the use of motorized vehicles on the road.

Now, if you’ve read history and the law, as I have, you already know that statutes such as RS2477 were written to protect citizens against just such federal “land grab” tactics as this. See, the parkies acted illegally on two counts: 1) The National Park Service has no jurisdiction over a state rightofway. Hence, NPS cannot legally close a state road, such as this one, to motorized traffic. 2) According to ANILCA, “the Park/Preserve was established subject to valid existing rights, including rightsofway established under RS2477.” Therefore, it is illegal for the Park to deny landowners access to their home when that access is a valid, existing RS2477 rightofway, as is the case with the McCarthyGreen Butte Road.

Evidently, other folks around McCarthy have been reading their law and history books, too, for before those parkies had dusted their heels out of town, all their notices had mysteriously disappeared.

A keen observer, however, would have noticed that, on the ground near where each of the signs had been, there was a very small pile of ashes. Except for one, that is—someone had torn it down, but hadn’t burned it. Gotta keep one for the record!