ANCHORAGE, Alaska (CN) — Capping off four years of legal wrangling, a judge blocked two sisters from taking over a portion of the historic Iditarod Trail that runs through their Alaska property.
Located in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, about an hour's drive by car from downtown Anchorage, the trail in question once connected two small communities called Knik and Susitna Station.
It runs through a 240-acre property in the Big Lake area west of Knik that Kelly Dickson and Donna Defusco inherited in 2007.
The sisters initiated a superior court case five years later, seeking a quiet title to the property, free of public easements and rights-of-way.
Alaska objected on the basis of the two rights-of-way traversing the property that the state said are public.
It said fur traders, miners, skiers, dog mushers and neighboring homesteaders made regular use of the Knik to Susitna trail since the late 1800s, and that use of the other, aptly named Homestead Road, began soon after Dickson and Defusco's father, Benjamin Cowert, applied for a homestead in 1958.
The case grew into a 27-day bench trial spanning from January through March of this year, with testimony from 20 witnesses and 400 exhibits.
Alaska's attorneys applauded after Judge Catherine Easter ruled for it on June 14.
"The state is extremely pleased with the outcome of the case and the court's confirmation of these important and historically significant public rights-of-way," Cori Mills, an assistant attorney general for Alaska's Department of Law, said in an email.
Now wound up in a 57-page decision, the case provided a glimpse into the evolution of land use in the state — beginning with Alaska Native tribes, Russian fur traders, gold miners and the early days of mail service by dog team, to the founding of the railroad, to the cookie-cutter subdivisions of modern-day homesteads.
Easter said Revised Statute 2477 entitles the public to use the historic Iditarod Trail across Dickson and Defusco's property. The 1866 law allows states and local governments to claim trails across federal land by frequent use, without any formal claim.
As for the Homestead Road route, Easter said long-term public use — known as a prescriptive easement — allows legal use by "highway vehicles, dog mushers, skiers, snowmachiners, hunters, hikers, bikers, off-road vehicles, and other low-impact recreational uses."
One complication the court had to resolve involved just which Iditarod Trail was in question: the historic Iditarod trail or the congressionally designated Iditarod National Historic Trail operated by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
Adding to the confusion, neither trail is part of the famed Iditarod, an annual sled-dog race that takes place partly on what is also called the Iditarod Trail.
Both sisters are longtime residents of California, having left Alaska 30 years ago, but Dickson, a teacher, had been using Google Earth to survey the property in 2007 when her mother died.
It was then that she first noticed the Homestead Road crossing a corner of the estate.
Dickson believed she had a right block off all use of Homestead Road in 2008 based on a poorly worded memo from a natural resource representative that suggested neither of the two routes crossing her family's homestead were part of the federally maintained Iditarod National Historic Trail.
She removed the blockade, however, during the pendency of the court case.