With an evacuation deadline looming, the protest camp at Standing Rock went up in flames.

For nearly a year, it had been the setting for a bitter showdown between opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project and the project's developers.

Crowds that once numbered 10,000 dwindled to dozens Wednesday after an evacuation order from North Dakota's governor. Stragglers faced arrest. Some set fire to the tents and teepees that housed them there in an act of defiance, native ritual or both.

Mark Clatterbuck watched footage of this from his home in Lancaster County. He'd gone to Standing Rock last year and been there during a violent clash between protesters and security personnel that helped thrust the protest into the international spotlight.

He's also spent years fighting a natural gas pipeline project in his own backyard, one set to cross through 10 Pennsylvania counties and 200 miles of terrain.

For Clatterbuck and activists like him, Standing Rock was a watershed moment, he explained, and its lessons and catalytic properties capable of being taken home and re-harnessed.

Just last week, Clatterbuck helped oversee the beginnings of a DAPL-inspired encampment on an Amish farm in Lancaster County atop the route of the proposed pipeline he's spent years working to stop.

He says hundreds of people, mostly locals, have also signed pledges "committing to civil disobedience to protect our homes, farms and properties" once pipeline construction begins. Hundreds have also taken "non-violent mass-action" trainings, he added.

Much of this interest owes to the pre-existing efforts of organizers like Clatterbuck and his wife Malinda, who've spent years relentlessly -- and sometimes controversially -- drumming up a local opposition. But the heightened profile and popular support for Standing Rock hasn't hurt either.

"Standing Rock showed communities all over the country that this is what it could look like... Grassroots action can make a difference," Mark said in a phone call with PennLive on Thursday.

And with smoke still rising over the camps there, Clatterbuck hoped that the end of Standing Rock only means the start of something bigger.

'Center of the resistance'

Mark Clatterbuck made the 1,500-mile drive from Lancaster County to Standing Rock over Labor Day weekend. He was joined by his high-school-age daughter and two other members of the Lancaster Against Pipelines group that Mark and his wife co-founded almost three years earlier.

In North Dakota, the foursome joined members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, representatives of more than 200 Indigenous nations from across the Americas and their supporters. Some had been encamped at the site for months by then in an attempt to block construction of the pipeline they say violates sacred sites and threatens the Standing Rock Reservation's primary water source.

That Saturday, when protesters attempted to block construction equipment at the site, a phalanx of private security guards met them with dogs and mace in a confrontation rebroadcast on news sites and social media networks for weeks after.

Clatterbuck says his daughter was at the scene of the melee that day. And while she wasn't injured, he was clearly shaken.

"That was a turning point," he said, "because it was like, this is what we're up against. ... There was just a lot that was made clear that day about who holds the power and what it's going to take and what kind of sacrifices local communities are going to have to make to protect what's most important to them."

Clatterbuck would soon return to Lancaster County and his teenage daughter to school, while the other members of their party stayed behind.

Clatterbuck would also resume what has been a years-long and some might argue quixotic effort to block construction of the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline project at home.

Since it was first proposed in February of 2014, the $3 billion project designed to move Marcellus Shale gas from northeastern Pennsylvania as far south as Alabama has come under fire from critics over eminent domain objections and concerns about the potential impacts on waterways, property values and historic sites.

In January of 2015, Clatterbuck was among eight people arrested for blocking equipment they said was being used to improperly drill test bores on sacred grounds along the pipeline route in Conestoga Township, Lancaster County.

In October of last year, a wooden structure -- picture a mix between a lookout tower and garden shed -- was erected nearby in an attempt to help opponents block future pipeline construction. Clatterbuck told NPR's State Impact website that they had been inspired to do so by the Dakota Access opposition.

But even long before Dakota Access became a household name, Lancaster County was the scene of numerous public meetings in which angry crowds denounced the Atlantic Sunrise project and a regulatory system seen as toothless at best and beholden to the energy industry at worst.

Now, with the latter project having cleared a gauntlet of regulatory hurdles and eminent domain proceedings officially underway in four Pennsylvania counties, those same opponents see the direct action and physical barriers mainstreamed and magnified in North Dakota as increasingly unavoidable.

"Standing Rock definitely inspired us to see what that resistance might look like and how a local community might come together in one place and kind of serve as the base or center of the resistance," Clatterbuck said.

As for the Atlantic Sunrise and Lancaster County, he added, "It's probably going to take civil disobedience for a long time."

'As long as it takes'

There are concerns about the potential futility of such an exercise, though, especially given the outcome in North Dakota and the support for similar pipeline projects currently emanating from the Oval Office.

"Given that Trump is in the White House and has free reign to appoint federal judges and FERC commissioners, I don't think that there is any likely way of legally stopping the Atlantic Sunrise," said Dennis Witmer, an energy analyst and Lancaster County native.

"And, as much as I sympathize with protesters, I have very little hope that they will be able to stop the pipeline in this environment."

Alex Bomstein, senior litigation attorney with the Clean Air Council in Philadelphia, said for agencies like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which oversees and already approved the Atlantic Sunrise project, he expects no radical shift under Trump.

Instead, he said the agency viewed as pro-pipeline under Obama may somehow find a way to become even more so.

"FERC under Obama was already a very pipeline-friendly agency, and a lot of people are wondering if there is any way it could get more friendly, and the answer is probably, yes, but it's already very friendly," Bomstein explained.

After several decades of approving every pipeline project it reviewed, FERC issued its first rejection in March of last year.

It is against this backdrop and new political climate that the smaller protest groups that coalesced around the Dakota Access cause find themselves returning to their respective corners of the country looking to seize some kind of momentum in the face of ever-mounting odds.

"Is it discouraging to know that right now we have an administration that's very fossil fuel-friendly in place? That doesn't make one happy," said Ann Pinca of the Lebanon Pipeline Awareness group, another Atlantic Sunrise opponent. "But in some ways it almost makes you say, 'Well, we just gotta work a lot harder. We gotta keep at it.'"

Meanwhile, in Lancaster County, a Dakota Access-inspired encampment is already taking shape.

It's located at the site of the wooden structure (now structures) erected along the Atlantic Sunrise route in Conestoga last fall. For now, occupancy is fairly informal, but Clatterbuck expects that to change once construction on the pipeline begins. He said his group first began talking about setting up "sites of physical resistance" along the pipeline path last spring. The site they settled on is located on private property, and Clatterbuck added that local police have been informed of their "non-violent direct action" plans there.

"If we don't stop this one there is more on the way," Nick Martin, an organizer with Lancaster Against Pipelines and one of the campers, told PennLive recently.

Martin said the tentative plan is to use the camp as a home base and move near construction as it crops up.

Christopher Stockton, a spokesman with the pipeline's builders at Williams/Transco, said pipeline construction likely won't begin in Lancaster County until "sometime prior to the end of the year."

Protesters say they'll be waiting, with one adding, "We'll be here as long as it takes."

'Threats against the project'

Stockton said the company is prepared for that possibility, adding: "We're very aware of the threats that have been made against the project and the likely presence of protesters and certainly, as we do with any project, we have plans and procedures that we will follow to ensure that the pipeline is constructed and constructed safely and that any protesters are allowed to protest and that protests are done safely."

As he's done before, Stockton stressed the 400 route changes made during the planning process that he says were a "direct result of landowner feedback."

He added, "We also recognize there are always gonna be some people that are going to oppose you, and that no matter what you do you're not going to satisfy them fully."

In an editorial for LNP newspapers published earlier this month, Clatterbuck seemed to confirm this, writing: "Chris Stockton, the ubiquitous spokesman for Transco/Williams, loves to talk about all the adjustments they've made to the Atlantic Sunrise route due to public comments. He forgets to mention that our community doesn't want an explosive, high-pressure, fracked gas pipeline-for-export running anywhere through our county."

In that same editorial, Clatterbuck defended the efficacy of protest movements and acts of civil disobedience, declaring, "history has shown that large-scale, nonviolent civil disobedience is one of the few, and arguably most effective, ways of changing systems of exploitation when all other means have failed."

He pointed to the women's suffrage and civil rights movements as prime examples, adding, "The women's suffrage movement did not achieve success by patiently waiting for the Supreme Court to acknowledge women's right to vote. Nor did the civil rights movement overturn segregation by making timid, well-behaved appeals to Congress."

And while there are differences between the Dakota Access pipeline's opposition -- one buoyed by a deep-seated tribal sovereignty movement and historic tensions between the U.S. government and native peoples -- there are also parallels, as explained here.

FERC has also acknowledged the intersect between the proposed pipeline's path and historic indigenous sites in Lancaster County, but says the pipeline will travel under those sites as opposed to through them. This is of no comfort to the project's critics, including those Native Americans among them.

In the end, and if Dakota Access's success as a broader rallying cry is any indication, this tension may benefit and bolster the resistance planned in Lancaster County, some believe.

"Dakota Access organizers are certainly promoting folks to -- wherever you live across the country -- to really plug in locally and get connected and fight this fight where you live with your own community and that's what we're hoping for," Clatterbuck said.

"Different communities are affected and some of the impacts are unique, but the underlying threat is the same, and people really connected the dots."

'Physically stop construction'

But even Clatterbuck's supporters acknowledge that the odds of stopping the Atlantic Sunrise project are perhaps steeper than ever, although they're not resigned to that reality, even in the wake of Standing Rock's fall.

Just last week, Williams/Transco began condemnation efforts to obtain rights of way and temporary easements for the project from property owners who refused their previous entreaties. This is the first step in eminent domain proceedings.

According to an earlier PennLive report, the first 10 condemnation complaints were filed by Williams/Transco in U.S. Middle District Court for rights of way in Columbia, Lebanon, Northumberland and Schuylkill counties.

Another 13 have been filed in the federal Eastern District for property easements in Lancaster County.

Meanwhile, some 1,500 miles to the west on Thursday, law enforcement agents began rounding up the last of the Dakota Access protesters to begin a clean up of the Standing Rock site.

"The closing of the camp is not the end of a movement or fight, it is a new beginning," Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement. "They cannot extinguish the fire that Standing Rock started. It burns within each of us."

The $3.7 billion pipeline is slated to stretch through four states -- from North Dakota into South Dakota, winding through Iowa and ending in southern Illinois -- and is expected to move 470,000 barrels of crude oil a day across the Midwest.

The project is completed except for the contested portion under North Dakota's Lake Oahe, half a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's reservation, CNN reports.

President Trump signed an executive memorandum in late January meant to expedite that process.

In Pennsylvania, the Atlantic Sunrise project has received FERC approval and is currently awaiting approval from the Department of Environmental Protection and Army Corps of Engineers.

And after years of unsuccessfully lobbying regulators to pull the plug, and with the chances of a successful legal challenge before construction begins largely debunked, opponents like Clatterbuck say they fully expect the project to clear those final hurdles as well.

They are prepared for that eventuality, he added. Meanwhile, with the experience at Standing Rock still ringing in his ears, Clatterbuck said he's also preparing for much, much more.

"It's only going to be the community demonstrating mass action that will physically stop construction," he added, citing a fundamental loss of faith in the regulatory and legal systems.

"And we're prepared to be here for months, through the spring, summer and fall. We all live here, so we're not going anywhere. We're prepared to do that as long as it takes to chase Williams out."