Alaska's Fed-wary political leadership tried to challenge National Park Service oversight of the Yukon River after rangers took down Interior elderly riverboat operator Jim Wilde in an ugly show of force in the fall of 2010, but they backed off after a federal magistrate ruled he wasn't going to buy state ownership of the river as a defense against charges levied against Wilde.

Now, though, state officials seem to think they've found the perfect vehicle to challenge federal authority in a lawsuit filed by moose hunter John Sturgeon. A former state forester who's now an executive with Koncor Forest Products, Sturgeon has sued the federal government, charging it has gone well beyond its legal authority to regulate navigable waters in Alaska parks and preserves. By law, Alaska's navigable waters were supposed to pass into state ownership at statehood. 

But Park Service officials have held they -- not the state -- maintain the authority to dictate how those waters are used for travel in the Yukon-Charley National Preserve. That preservestraddles the Yukon downstream from Eagle, Alaska. Though now largely deserted, the Yukon River in this corner of Interior Alaska once throbbed with riverboat traffic.

Wood-burning sternwheelers belched smoke all the way into Canada as they hauled supplies and gold miners to the Yukon Territory's rich Klondike gold fields. The river corridor was denuded by contractors cutting wood to fuel the ships. A hundred years later, it's a different story.

In 2007, park rangers told Sturgeon that if he continued to run his hovercraft on the Yukon and Nation River, a Yukon tributary, they'd charge him with the operation of an illegal watercraft. They didn't like the looks or the noise of the boat. Hovercraft use large fans to generate a cushion of air between their hull and the water. Skirts hold the air in place, and the craft float over the water. 

State law allows hovercraft on Alaska public waters. Park regulations do not. Threatened by the park service, Sturgeon four years ago parked his hovercraft ashore and began simmering about the way he was being treated. By this fall's moose season, the simmer had reached a boil. Sturgeon, a long-time Alaskan, sued to regain hovercraft access to his favored hunting grounds.

The administration of Gov. Sean Parnell announced Wednesday it was jumping into the suit on Sturgeon's side. "This case is about the state's sovereign right and responsibility to govern its own lands and waters," a state press release quoted Parnell saying. "Federal overreach attains new heights when Alaskans can no longer legally access the waters that have for decades provided essential transportation routes in Alaska's remote areas." 

The park service, however, is not backing down. "Park regulations have applied on the Yukon River in Yukon-Charley since 1996, and continue to do so. The underlying question of jurisdiction was most recently answered by the federal court in Fairbanks,'' said spokesman John Quinley. "We expect DOJ (the Department of Justice) will respond to state's motion in an appropriate time."

The arguments of both sides are rooted in the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. ANILCA, as it is commonly know in Alaska, which created more than 100 million acres of new national parks, preserves, refuges and wildernesses areas when it became law in 1980. It also generally exempted from federal regulation state-owned water within park boundaries, but reserved the authority to regulate waters in some areas. 

The big question now centers on whether Yukon-Charley waters fall under the former or later provisions.

"ANILCA struck a careful balance between designating new federal conservation areas while also ensuring that Alaska and Alaskans could continue to responsibly develop Alaska's resources and engage in traditional activities,'' observed soon-to-depart Alaska Attorney General John Burns. "The federal government must respect Alaska's rights under ANILCA."