McCARTHY-GREEN BUTTE ROAD leaves McCarthy at Neil Darish's lodge, traveling through an evergreen forest before breaking into a clearing and descending to the gravelly banks of McCarthy Creek. From there, you have a view up the valley to the imposing 6,000-foot peaks that line the valley's sides: Green Butte and Porphyry Mountain and Bonanza. Hillbilly Heaven lies about 12 miles farther up the road—a day's hike, more than an hour by horseback, or, if you're riding a snowmobile, as I was during the winter of 2006, about 40 minutes.

Visiting Hillbilly Heaven was something I'd planned on ever since 2003, when, during a trip to Alaska, I'd heard about the Hales on the local radio and found myself taken in by the story of their simple life. I'd begun obsessively following the local news coverage of their standoff with the Park Service, and when I got home to New York, I purchased a copy of their bluegrass album, Put My Name Down, from a Web site created by land-use advocates. On another site hosted by the family's supporters in McCarthy, I scrolled through photos of their pioneer existence—dinner at the homestead, band practice, even a ladies' bighorn-sheep-hunting excursion.

Over the next two years, as the fight with the Park Service began crawling through state and eventually federal courts, I twice postponed visits to Hillbilly Heaven. And by the time I did make it, the popular Swiss Family Robinson image of the Hales had been revealed as a charade. In October 2005, Alaska state troopers arrested Robert Hale on 30 counts of physical and sexual assault, coercion, and incest.

Hale's arrest left me wondering how his children—seemingly brainwashed their entire lives—had managed to break their father's spell. That fall, I made the first of five visits to Alaska to piece together what had really gone on at Hillbilly Heaven. Over three years, I tracked down individuals who knew Hale at earlier stages of his life—relatives and in-laws from Texas, fellow hippies from the Oregon commune, neighbors from the family's time in New Mexico. At first, Hale's wife and children refused to talk to the media, a stand that softened as the case worked its way through the courts. I would eventually meet and become familiar with the Hales—especially Joseph, the eldest son, who offered to serve as the family's spokesman—at their father's sentencing hearing in Anchorage in 2007. At that hearing, I explained to Joshua Hale how I'd initially been captivated by his family's seemingly idyllic life.

"That's what everyone says," he responded. "Everyone was always so in love with what they thought we represented—the wilderness family, the communion with nature—that they never bothered to find out about all the horrible things really going on."

When I made that January 2006 trip to Hillbilly Heaven, Country Rose and the children were living near Anchorage with another large Christian family, but John Adams, a longtime McCarthy resident and friend of the Hales, offered to show me their vacant homestead. We'd be joined by Kurt Stenehjem, an Anchorage real estate broker who'd crashed his Cessna during the 2003 airlift and ended up spending eight days as a guest of the Hales.

We set out from Adams's house by snowmobile in near-total blackness, speeding through McCarthy and onto McCarthy-Green Butte Road. The road closely follows the course of the creek, and we crossed the frozen water 13 times, stopping at a few points along the way. After several hours, we arrived at a small rise set back from the banks, where there was a cluster of wooden structures: Hillbilly Heaven. It was around noon, but the sun was barely higher than the surrounding peaks; the long winter in those cramped cabins must've been nearly unbearable—sub-zero temperatures, almost no direct light, miles and miles of waist-deep snow to the nearest neighbor in one direction, hundreds of square miles of forbidding rock and ice in the other.

As we parked our machines, Stenehjem described his stay with Hale and the family. Each night, the patriarch had taken a bath prepared for him by his children, who hauled water to fill the tub and chopped wood to stoke the fire. The children were allowed to bathe every third or fourth night, in their father's dirty water. At mealtime, Hale was always served first—by the sturdy and headstrong Elishaba—and was the only one to eat fresh vegetables. Because of the standoff with the Park Service, the mood at Hillbilly Heaven had been tense. One evening, Hale gathered the family in prayer. "Lord," he said, "if they come at us with guns, we pray that they would have a bullet for each one of us."

But what struck him most was the control Hale had over his children. "Pilgrim didn't want me to have my computer screen facing into the room for fear that they would become enraptured," he said as we approached the main cabin."He told them to ignore me, no eye contact."

On the eighth night of Stenehjem's stay, Hale got a gleam in his eyes. He wanted his children to play music and dance about. He told his visitor stories about his wild days in San Francisco. "Papa let his hair down—I could see the old hippie," recalled Stenehjem. The next morning, Hale demanded that Stenehjem leave. "He seemed threatened, as if I'd seen a part of him he didn't want me to." As Stenehjem waited for one of the airlift planes to retrieve him, he asked Hale why the sudden change of heart. "You and I have seen a lot in this world," Hale responded curtly, "but my children haven't. They're pure—I don't want them violated or corrupted."

Once we'd made our way back to town, I found that many McCar­thyites who had strongly supported the family were reevaluating their impressions. "All those bumps and bruises? I just figured that they were a part of the family's hardy frontier life," said Neil Darish. "I feel like an idiot for not noticing sooner."

Rick and Bonnie Kenyon, co-pastors of the McCarthy-Kennicott Community Chuch, had at first been close with the Hale children, who would occasionally stop by the Kenyons' log cabin for tea without their father's supervision. But in the fall of 2004, Kenyon found himself in a disagreement with Hale over some of the family's business practices. "It was typical for him to avoid arguments by just leaving," Ken­yon told me, "but that time, he raised his voice and became irrational before storming off. When next we saw the younger children, they averted their eyes. The older children would call us evil to our faces." At one point, Joseph told Kenyon to rot in hell, though he later apologized.

"Bob had convinced the kids that God doesn't love everyone," said Kenyon, "and he was God's mouthpiece on who deserved love."