WRST superintendent leaves under cloud

WSEN staff

Gary Candelaria has stepped down from his position as superintendent of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (WRST) and taken a position as Deputy Director for Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. There he will direct a team of technicians who provide audiovisual assistance throughout the National Park System.

Candelaria came to WRST in 1999. During his first several years he kept a low profile, forging alliances with the local environmental community, the Wilderness Society and the National Parks and Conservation Association, and quietly working to buy up land in and around the park with the help of various environmental land trusts.

Then began a spate of actions against the community and local residents, such as Candelaria's infamous McCarthy Green Butte Road closure, which outraged many McCarthy citizens and brought national attention to WRST. He also approved a SWAT-style helicopter team of heavily armed rangers and technicians that harassed the Pilgrim family for weeks while trying to find “damage” to park lands that could be charged against the Pilgrims. At the same time, Candelaria approved a damaging land survey, including a wide clear-cut swath around the Pilgrim property so the NPS could “keep an eye on the family from the air.” In so doing, the WRST destroyed more natural, undisturbed vegetation and left more visual impact in the McCarthy Creek valley then anyone likely has in the last 50 years.

Candelaria wrote an incredibly unprofessional and slanderous “Open Letter” in which contained untrue charges against the Pilgrims and ugly personal comments. Then Candelaria ordered his staff at the Kennicott Visitor Center to show it to tourists that asked questions about the Pilgrims.

Last year, while spending an admitted half-million dollars attempting to bring a case against the Pilgrim family, he authorized the closure of the newly-constructed visitor contact log cabin at the end of the McCarthy Road, supposedly because of “budget cuts.”

While Candelaria was superintendent of WRST, the park also spent $420,000 building and renovating thirteen “public-use cabins,” only eight of which are listed in the 2004 Superintendent’s Compendium. Some area residents have charged that the four unlisted cabins were built for exclusive use of NPS employees rather than the public.

On the north side of the park he oversaw a process where the WRST called a public meeting and workshop with citizens, ostensibly to come up with ways to repair and protect trails from ORV impacts. Slana resident Doug Frederick and other volunteers constructed an innovative trail protection demonstration and sent photos of their work to the NPS. Instead of thanking Frederick, Candelaria had Frederick charged as a criminal for building a structure in the park. In Frederick’s trial the NPS admitted it wasn't really interested in repairing or protecting the trails, it just wanted them closed and that the (undisclosed) purpose of the “citizen workshop” was to satisfy an ANILCA requirement that the NPS have a public meeting before closing trails.

All of these events as well as many other abuses on Candelaria's watch generated an unprecedented groundswell of local outrage and the formation of a new organization, the Residents of the Wrangells, or ROW. ROW took public testimony on NPS abuse in the WRST at several heated meetings and submitted its findings to the congressional delegation and the governor as well as asking for a Department of the Interior Inspector General Investigation.

When asked why Candelaria has left WRST, NPS spokesperson Jane Tranel said, “Gary took a promotion to take a position at the Harpers Ferry [NPS] Service Center.” Director Blaszak had this to say, “Gary’s with a soulmate that he’s going to marry this summer; now they’re both in the DC area and can be together.”