Motorized tours OKd for Cumberland Island, Ga.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Motorized tours are coming to Cumberland Island, where federal protections have long limited most visitors to hiking or biking.

National Park Service administrators have signed off on a study showing motorized tours would pose little threat to the protected wilderness and wildlife on the 15-mile island off Georgia’s coast.

Dennis Parsons, chief park ranger for Cumberland, said his staff is working on details for the new tours, which will begin as soon as funding is arranged for extra staff and vehicles. The tours will likely be conducted in trolley trailers towed by Jeeps capable of handling the island’s rugged and narrow dirt roads. Parsons said that will likely take several months.

About 43,500 people each year visit Cumberland Island, which is reachable only by boat. But only the hardiest hikers get to see much of the island’s striking mix of untamed maritime forest and luxurious 19th-century getaway homes built by wealthy industrialists, such as Thomas Carnegie, who owned Cumberland Island before the federal government bought it in 1972.

Environmentalists battled for years with the Park Service over whether it could legally offer vehicle tours on the island. Congress intervened in 2004 with a law mandating that the Park Service offer motor tours daily. The agency spent years studying the proposal’s environmental impact and gathering public comment.

U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., pushed the tour mandate through Congress, arguing that all Cumberland visitors, regardless of age or stamina, should be able to visit remote parts of the island far from the ferry docks — including the tiny, rustic church where John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette in 1996.

Critics say motor tours threaten to spoil the primitive tranquility prized by campers and hikers who visit the island to get away from modern conveniences.

“Wilderness values are really inconsistent with ‘Fantasy Island’ Jeep tours,” said Will Berson, a policy analyst for the Georgia Conservancy. “Cumberland is a unique treasure, one of the last such places on the Eastern Seaboard.”