‘Mountain Man’ of Utah gets 10-year sentence

ST. GEORGE, Utah – Troy James Knapp lived for years in the wilderness of Utah, avoiding people and eating small game he shot with weapons stolen during cabin break-ins. Sometimes, he’d raid the pantry and rumple the bedsheets before setting out alone again on snowshoes with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

For most of the next decade, the man who roamed freely through the woods will live behind bars in a federal penitentiary.

Knapp, 46, known by many as the “Mountain Man,” pleaded guilty Monday to federal and state weapons charges in an agreement that will likely put him in federal prison through 2024.

The pleas marked the end of a mysterious story of the California fugitive, originally from Michigan, who became a sensation in Utah. For seven years, local authorities investigated cabin burglaries in southern and central Utah, before in early 2012 they identified Knapp from cabin surveillance photos and fingerprints on a whiskey bottle.

Knapp spent winters holed up in snowbound cabins, and retreated in summers deep into the woods with a supply of guns, dehydrated food, radios, batteries and high-end camping gear. In April 2013, he committed the crime that got him the long federal sentence, shooting at federal agents in a helicopter when he was flushed from a home near a mountain reservoir in snowy Manti-LaSal National Forest and captured.