The National Park Service says it's moving ahead with plans for motorized tours of Cumberland Island after officials determined the tours pose little threat to the Georgia island's wilderness. Dennis Parsons, Cumberland Island's chief park ranger, said Friday the vehicle tours won't start for several months. The Park Service still needs to provide funding for vehicles and extra staff. At 15-miles long, Cumberland Island is one of the largest wilderness areas on the East Coast. For 25 years, its protected status has required most visitors to tour the island by foot or on bicycles. About 43,500 people each year visit the Georgia island. Congress ordered the Park Service to provide motor tours of Cumberland Island in 2004.
AP/CHRIS VIOLA National Park Service resource manager John Fry tells the story of the one-room First African Baptist Church on Cumberland Island. The church was the site of the wedding of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in 1996 and is the most popular spot on the island's north end.(Photo: Chris Viola/AP)
Fry mashes the brakes and curses under his breath as a pack of wild hogs scurries across the narrow dirt road, where spiky palmetto fronds claw at both sides of his National Park Service pickup.
It takes nearly an hour to drive the bumpy 13-mile Main Road on wild CumberlandIsland. Fry's truck passes within inches of burly live-oak branches drooping overhead. Backpackers hiking the route are forced to step off and let him pass.
"We lose a lot of mirrors and windshields here," says Fry, the Park Service's chief resource manager for the island, nodding toward the twisted mount for the truck's missing passenger side mirror.
Getting around has never been easy on CumberlandIsland, a federally protected wilderness off the Georgia coast that's larger than Manhattan. Reachable only by boat, and off limits to most wheeled vehicles, the island's inaccessibility made it the ideal spot for John F. Kennedy Jr. to ditch the prying paparazzi when he married Carolyn Bessette here in 1996.
For more than 25 years, government rules have required most of the 43,500 visitors who come each year to explore the island on foot. But under a mandate from Congress, the Park Service plans to change that early next year by offering daily motorized tours in spite of the tough terrain and cries of protest from environmentalists.
Fry says the tours will dramatically boost visitation to remote areas few tourists get to see.
Critics say the change threatens to spoil the island's primitive tranquility.
"The very last of anything is always the most precious, and there are no other places like CumberlandIsland," said Will Berson, a policy analyst for the Georgia Conservancy. "We think wilderness is an important idea that is incompatible with running people in jeeps through the area."
Cumberland Island. (Images: New Georgia Encyclopedia) Though wild horses graze on its marsh grasses, alligators lurk in its freshwater ponds and rare sea turtles nest on its pristine beaches, CumberlandIsland also has a long human history.
Park Service ranger Pauline Wentworth says she often hears visitors, particularly senior citizens, say they wish they could take a bus or van tour.
Most, she says, have a particular destination in mind: "They want to see the church where JFK Jr. got married."
The FirstAfricanBaptistChurch, built in 1937 for black servants on the island, is a tiny clapboard building with a torn and faded rug on the floor and handmade pews with splintered edges and corners.
The Greyfield Inn shuttles guests there almost daily in the bed of a pickup. Those tours and monthly Park Service van tours were targeted years ago in a lawsuit by environmentalists.
A judge ruled the Park Service had no authority to shuttle visitors through the designated island wilderness. The inn, on the other hand, could continue giving tours with a special permit.
Congress intervened in 2004 with a law removing Main Road and two others from the wilderness designation that protects the surrounding forest. The same law ordered the Park Service to provide daily tours. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican, got the measure passed as part of a larger spending bill.
"The way it was, only an 18-year-old backpacker could walk the 13 miles up the trail to see some of these historical sites,"Kingston said. "This island is not paid for by some of the taxpayers for some of the people. I don't think John Q. Taxpayer should have to walk 13 miles to see Plum Orchard."
Heated opposition has prompted the Park Service to move cautiously - too slowly, in Kingston's opinion - in the four years since Congress changed the law. It wasn't until September that the Park Service released a study outlining its tour plans.
The Park Service has been collecting the required public comments on the proposal from hearings in Atlanta and in St. Marys, the island's nearest inland neighbor. Berson of the Georgia Conservancy said it's unlikely any criticism will delay tours from starting in early 2009.
Several tourists visiting CumberlandIsland on a recent weekend said they favor motor tours for disabled and elderly visitors, but on a much more limited basis than Congress has prescribed.
Bill Parsons, 55, of Cornelia, Ga., was showing friends around the mansion ruins near the ferry dock and recalling his hike to the secluded north end for a camping trip five years ago.
"I didn't see anybody for three days. It was splendid - that's what I came here to do," Parsons said. "I don't want it to be a theme park, no Disneyland. There's already that stuff."
Much of CumberlandIsland just off Georgia’s coast is only accessible by foot… that may soon change.With the passage of the Cumberland Island Wilderness Boundary Act in December 2004,Congress created a way to give visitors more access.
Currently, walking is only way to get anywhere on the island once the ferry drops people off on the dock.Most don’t have the stamina to hike to some of the well-known historic areas.
Talks on how to implement the plan start this month in St. Mary’s and Atlanta in a series of public hearings.Those dates will be announced this week when a draft proposal plan is released.
State forestry officials say they are making progress in fighting a blaze burning into its second week on Cumberland Island. A spokesperson says more than 100 firefighters have about 35-percent containment on the fire. The blaze has charred more than 1,600 acres on the island's northern side. The fire is believed to have been sparked by a pair of lightning strikes on June 22nd. Cumberland Island has remained open to visitors.
The Cumberland Island fire continues to burn, over a week after it was ignited by a lightning strike in a wilderness area on the northern end of the island. The Savannah Morning News reports from officials this morning that up to 30 structures are being threatened, including the historic First African Baptist Church. Over 1,600 acres have been charred. Officials say the blaze is about 30-percent contained.
Georgia Forestry Commission officials confirm this morning that over 1,600 acres of federally-protected land has burned on Cumberland Island. Officials do not have an estimated time for containment of the blaze. The fire is burning on the northern end of the island, and is believed to have been sparked by a lightning strike last week. There are no reports of damage to structures or injuries. The National Park Service operates the island--officials say ferry service and operations on the island's south side are running normally.
