Alaska resident John Sturgeon won a victory in the SCOTUS when it tossed a Ninth Circus ruling applying a National Parks Service (NPS) ban on hovercraft in national preserves.
A couple years ago, John Sturgeon, an Alaskan hunter was accosted on the Yukon River by a pair of park rangers who wanted to board his hovercraft mid river. Sturgeon was hunting moose at the time. Mid-river boarding is one of the most dangerous ways to board, so he pulled into the shore. The rangers didn’t appreciate his lack of instant compliance and pulled firearms on him, accusing him of evading arrest.
Upon reaching the shoreline, he was thrown on the mud, cuffed, roughly treated for “resisting arrest” and hauled to jail. The rangers took him to Fairbanks, charged him and got a court date. They refused to allow him to operate his hovercraft out of the reserve, so he incurred the additional expense of recovery and transport out.
The excuse of the rangers for this sort of behavior was NPS does not allow the use of hovercraft in the Lower 48. They were noobs in state and unfamiliar with differing federal law here in Alaska. Here in Alaska, we are governed by 1980’s ANILCA which allows the state of Alaska to regulate travel on rivers within park and preserve boundaries. NPS has long chafed at this lack of control and regularly seeks to expand its scope of authority by actions such as they took with Sturgeon.
As the case worked its way thru the federal courts system, it eventually went to the Ninth Circus, which rewrote federal law saying that ANILCA no longer applied to the waters of Alaska. It was on this point that the SCOTUS issued an unanimous decision (including Sotomayor, Ginsberg, Kagan and Breyer) overturning its ruling and sent it back for retrial.
This is a big victory and Sturgeon did well this time around. But it is not over yet, as the NPS has vowed to keep on doing what they have been doing. There will be another trial.
The Ninth Circus will likely attempt to rewrite federal law again and it will be appealed back to the SCOTUS again. All the while, NPS will keep moving to deny Alaskans the right to use national preserves regardless what the courts say in the end. If this keeps up, things can get nasty.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
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