Boy Scouts get road to wilderness site

PALMER — It’s been a long, 8-year haul, but the Boy Scouts of America think they finally have a plan in place to get a road to their proposed wilderness adventure camp near Denali State Park.

The Borough Assembly has approved a plan the Great Alaska Council of the Scouts had put together after negotiating with their neighbors in the area.

The council would sell a piece of the land to Alaska Hotel Properties, which that company would add to its Denali Princess Lodge site. Another 10-acre piece would be leased out for 10 years to a horse-riding excursion company that currently operates in the area. The 10 acres would be used for horseback excursions and to hold a base camp for the horses.

Once that’s done, Princess will allow the Scouts to run a road through Princess land to their 2,200-acre parcel that sits between the Chulitna and Susitna rivers just south of the lodge. Currently, to get to their land the Scouts have to drive through a Princess parking lot, which generally fills up during the busy summer tourist season.

The borough sold the 2,200-acre parcel to the Scouts in 2002 but had a deed restriction on the parcel saying that it could not be used for anything by anyone but a non-profit. To sell the land to the for-profit Princess, the Scouts had to come to the assembly to tweak those rules.

Nancy Cameron with the borough’s Land Management Department said that through a series of meetings on the issue the borough had come up with a change to that deed restriction that seemed to take into account most of the concerns local residents raised.

On the east side of the lodge is a small subdivision, referred to as the Son-Glo subdivision.

Two Son-Glo residents testified that they opposed the change to the deed as it was written.

Randy Williams, who owns a 5-acre parcel just north of where the horse camp would go in and just east of where the Scouts’ road would come through said he worried about losing his land’s park-like setting. He asked for a larger setback between his property and the horse camp as well as a change to bend the proposed road around where he intends to build his retirement home.

“It took us two years to find this piece of property. There’s no others like it,” he said.

Denis LeBlanc, immediate past president of the Great Alaska Council, said the Scouts are committed to being good neighbors to the Son-Glo residents. He also said that the deal on the table was the result of many tough negotiations with Princess.

Initially, he said, the company’s position was, ‘If we had access across their property, they had access across our property to the Susitna.”

So, he said, they looked at other options. Water access. Float plane access. They even looked at building a bridge across the Chulitna River. Eventually, he said, Princess seemed to get the message that the borough wouldn’t ever allow them to move across Scout land to get to the river and the current proposal was hammered out.

He said the plan for the camp calls for a base camp on Blair Lake, unobstructed views of Denali and a full-fledged “high adventure” camp serving Scouts from across the state.

“The youth that come to this facility will think they’ve died and gone to heaven,” LeBlanc said.

He and others from the council who came to testify pointed out that the Scouts’ current camp is at Mirror Lake, where urban development is quickly enveloping their site.

Eventually the assembly voted to approve the change to the deed restriction but not before expanding the setback between the horse camp and the subdivision.

Assemblyman Mark Ewing said he was made uneasy by the way negotiations went with Princess.

“I’m a firm believer in compromise and I don’t think Princess is a firm believer in compromise,” he said. “They’re taking advantage of you, but you’ve got no choice.”

Assemblywoman Cindy Bettine said she didn’t think Ewing was being fair to Princess. After all, she said, the lodge was there first and is a huge asset to the area, a wonderful place for visitors and Alaskans to visit Denali.

“I can’t help but resent that we’re talking about anybody taking advantage of anyone,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.