“It seems to me the Park Service doesn’t have jurisdiction.“
Those were the last words Justice Antonin Scalia spoke from the
bench of the U.S. Supreme Court before his death earlier this year.
The case involved Alaska. And, indirectly, CIRI.
The Sturgeon v. Frost case pitted Alaska moose hunter John
Sturgeon against the National Park Service. It started back in 2007
when Sturgeon was prohibited from using his hovercraft on the
Nation River in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
Sturgeon didn’t have anything to do with CIRI and the hovercraft
incident happened far from CIRI land, but CIRI’s interests became
involved when the potentially precedent-setting decision out of the
federal courts, if they had survived, would have authorized the
National Park Service, and other agencies, to regulate private
lands within conservation units.
This episode of CIRIosity discusses why CIRI was drawn into the
case and what it did to protect future access to its land. To
listen to the actual oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court,
click
here. To read the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Frost
case