Illustration by Ashley Quick and captions by Birch Malotky, with consultation and data from Bryan Leonard.

The legacy of public land grant-making in patterns

Perspective from John Leshy

Public land grants in a checkerboard pattern have a long history in the United States, and in some places their effects are still being felt and contested. From the nation’s early days, Congress used grants of public lands to support building what were then called “internal improvements”—infrastructure like canals and railroads that were crucial for US expansion across the continent. Because the Constitution gave Congress complete power over public lands, these grants were an effective answer to the argument that Congress lacked authority over such improvements.

The checkerboard pattern, whereby the US retained ownership of half of the lands while granting the other half, was first employed in an 1827 grant to Indiana for canal construction. The theory was that the US could, when it sold the retained lands, capture some of the value the improvements added to lands in the vicinity. Although the theory made such grants attractive to fiscal conservatives in Congress, it often did not work in practice. The improvements didn’t always add value to the land, and sometimes the federal government gave the retained lands away, sold them at a low price, or simply kept them.

Beginning in 1862, the checkerboard model was used in making massive grants to transcontinental railroads that eventually totaled more than 100 million acres. Congressional approval of such grants were often tainted by corruption during what became known as the Gilded Age, when wealth was concentrated in a few powerful corporations and individuals.

For example, in the arid, spacious West, wealthy investors often acquired private parcels from railroads and then, using recently-invented barbed wire, built fences around the perimeter of the checkerboard, thereby gaining effective control over large amounts of the interspersed public land. This provoked outrage from prospective settlers, and others, who were denied access to the public lands. This persuaded Congress to enact the Unlawful Inclosures Act in 1885, which prohibited enclosing public lands. Although the Supreme Court applied the act to strike down one such scheme in its 1897 Camfield decision, eliminating enclosures proved difficult and progress was slow.

More recently, a conservative, property-rights-oriented Supreme Court has taken a narrower view of the act. This has encouraged— in a time marked once again by vast differences between the very well-off and everyone else—a revival of private efforts to limit access to public lands. A prominent example involved a wealthy owner of checkerboard land in Wyoming, who sued hunters for nearly $8 million in trespass damages after they stepped from one parcel of public land to another by crossing the airspace of his land.

The congressional practice of granting school trust lands has also sometimes caused problems in the modern era. Beginning with the admission of Ohio in 1803, Congress gave newly-admitted states 640-acre sections of public land within every 36-section township and required that the state use any income derived from these lands to support public schools. Over time, many of these state school sections became inholdings scattered throughout public lands that came to be protected under such designations as national parks or monuments. These protections could be threatened by, and act as an obstacle to, state efforts to generate revenue for schools from their granted lands.

Conflicts involving both the checkerboard and state trust lands can and have been substantially diminished by reconfiguring ownership patterns through land exchanges and other means. For example, in the state of Utah over the last three decades, Congress has approved several negotiated, equal-value exchanges through which the US has acquired some 600,000 acres of scattered state inholdings in federal protected areas, and in return conveyed 300,000 acres to the state in configurations better suited to producing revenue.

Although considerable progress has been made in recent decades in reconfiguring ownership patterns to serve both development and conservation objectives, Congress recently took a little-noticed step in the opposite direction. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, contains unprecedented mandates to issue leases, on specified generous terms, to develop fossil fuels on tens of millions of acres of public lands. This is the first time the federal government has ever mandated the issuance of such leases on public lands, rather than just allowing or encouraging them. While leases do not convey full title, they do convey legal rights to the public lands that can last for many decades.

While any leases are in effect, they constitute private inholdings that can significantly complicate the management of large amounts of public land—including public land in the vicinity of the leased land that could be affected by any development of lease rights— much as the checkerboard does today, where it persists. In line with the idea that we are in a modern Gilded Age, these provisions were crafted in close association with the fossil fuel industry, which has made large political contributions to decision-makers, and were not made subject to extensive and rigorous debate in Congress before being enacted.

This rich history demonstrates how public land policy decisions can have long-lasting impacts. Especially in eras of concentrated wealth, even well-meaning land grants can fail to achieve their goals, have unintended side effects, and complicate efforts by land managers to conserve natural values on public lands for the benefit of future generations.

John Leshy is professor emeritus at the University of California College of the Law San Francisco, former General Counsel of the US Department of the Interior, and author of a comprehensive history of public lands, Our Common Ground.

Using Hamlet’s quest for justice to teach the corner-crossing case

By Kelly Dunning

In my undergraduate classes, I teach that the Wyoming corner-crossing case is one of the past decade’s most significant political developments regarding conservation. But I don’t teach it like a history, its series of events and consequences simplified and smoothed by hindsight. Instead, I preserve the human story—of individuals’ actions, motivations, and flaws—and emphasize the tension between Western identity, as shaped by private property rights and rugged individualism, and our collective stewardship of public land.

I do this with the aid of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, telling my students that classic stories can illuminate fundamental human experiences like love, conflict, and strife across different cultures, contexts, and time. Like Horatio, the scholar and observer in Hamlet, those of us who study public lands bear witness to these historical events and try to make meaning of them for our students, our peers, and ourselves. Viewing the corner-crossing case through the lens of Hamlet can give us several lessons that help with this meaning-making.

The first lesson is about the murkiness of truth in the face of uncertainty. Prince Hamlet learns from his father’s ghost that King Hamlet was murdered by Claudius, who now reigns as king. Doubting his senses, Hamlet feigns madness to investigate, creating several layers of uncertainty about what is true. At the heart of the corner-crossing case, meanwhile, are differing points of view over what exactly constitutes trespass and tradeoffs involving the right to access public land in a state that is strong on private property rights.

The next lesson is in the importance of courage in the face of power. Throughout the play, Hamlet tries to work up the courage to confront King Claudius, risking his own life by taking on the most powerful man in Denmark. The corner crossers similarly took on a powerful figure in an extended court battle characterized by strikingly mismatched access to resources.

Finally, Hamlet teaches us about the steep costs of inaction. While Hamlet hesitates, going back and forth on the morality and potential consequences of taking action—eventually leading to the deaths of nearly everyone in the play—the corner crossers acted decisively. Their action precipitated a chain of events that has given us more clarity over one of the most important issues in public land access and conservation in recent memory.

The Wyoming corner-crossing case, revisited through the lens of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet, reveals profound insights into the human condition and our relationship with the American West’s landscapes. Using this lens with students fosters empathy, helping them navigate the tensions inherent in the West and become better stewards of the land. By embracing the nuances of the corner crossers’ saga, we can forge a unified path forward as stewards of the land, ensuring it remains a shared legacy for all.

Kelly Dunning is the Timberline Professor of Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation at the University of Wyoming.

Header image: Elk Mountain. (kmoney56)

Conflict and collaboration in the checkerboard of Montana’s Crazy Mountains

By Shawn Regan

The Crazy Mountains rise sharply from the plains of south-central Montana, forming an island of rock and forest in a sea of prairie. Long a place of cultural and spiritual meaning for the Crow Tribe, the mountain range has also drawn hunters, hikers, and settlers for generations. But today, the Crazies are better known for something else: the legal and logistical knots created by their checkerboard landownership patterns.

The checkerboard in the Crazies is an accident of history—a legacy of 19th-century railroad land grants that awarded alternating square-mile sections of land to companies like the Northern Pacific in exchange for building rail infrastructure. Unlike other ranges, where homesteaders or the government later consolidated these parcels, the Crazies’ rugged terrain made their sections less attractive for settlement or buybacks. The result is a tight grid of private and public land parcels that largely remains today, forming one of the most heavily fragmented landscapes in the northern Rockies.

That legacy has turned the Crazies into a case study in the challenges of checkerboard ownership. Publicly owned parcels are often landlocked and inaccessible by recreationists or even Forest Service crews. Privately owned sections can be just as hard to reach, requiring landowners to cross public or neighboring private property for routine tasks like grazing livestock, harvesting timber, or maintaining fences. And Crow Tribal members have been blocked from reaching sacred cultural sites that would otherwise be accessible but for the fractured pattern of ownership.

Those challenges have, at times, erupted into conflict. Property owners have clashed with hikers and hunters. Lawsuits have been filed over disputed trails. And Forest Service officials have been caught in the middle, trying to navigate a legal and geographic maze that leaves no easy answers.

Amid the contention, one approach—collaboratively negotiated land swaps—has started to cut through the gridlock. By consolidating fragmented ownership and untangling jurisdictional confusion, these exchanges are beginning to create more coherent, better-managed landscapes. The work is slow and rarely glamorous, but it’s effective. And as the lessons from the Crazy Mountains are carried into similar debates elsewhere in the West, they’re becoming part of a broader conversation about land management, access, and cooperation.

Checkerboarding in the Crazies makes nearly everything more complicated. A simple hiking trip can become an exercise in forensic cartography. Hikers might consult three sources—Forest Service plats, a GPS app, and county deed filings— only to find conflicting answers about access permission. Hunters often must study detailed legal documents and public easement records to avoid trespassing.

One flashpoint has been the ongoing debate over corner crossing—the act of stepping from the corner of one public parcel in the checkerboard to another. While the legality of corner crossing is settled in the states within the 10th Circuit Court’s jurisdiction, it is generally presumed to be illegal in Montana. That means large amounts of public land in the Crazies remain inaccessible, even if they lie across from another publicly owned corner of the checkerboard.

This complexity has fueled tensions across the range. For years, trails that cross a mix of public and private parcels—like the Porcupine-Lowline and North Fork Elk Creek on the west side of the range and East Trunk and Sweet Grass on the east side—have been at the center of bitter access disputes involving easement claims. Although these routes appear on some historic Forest Service maps, the agency never formally established easement rights where these trails cross private land.

Some landowners posted signs on their property declaring that the public cannot access these trails without permission. Hikers and hunters were occasionally cited for trespass in areas they said they thought they had access to, and locked gates and missing trail signs in disputed areas added to the confusion and distrust. Then, in 2019, access advocates sued the Forest Service, demanding that the agency assert access rights to some of these areas.

In 2022, a federal court sided with the agency, finding that no such easements existed. But the decision left relationships between recreationists and landowners strained. By the time the case was decided, years of fighting had deepened mistrust and hardened local divisions—all without producing a single new acre of public access. In some places, the push to open more access even backfired, spurring landowners to tighten control over their properties. Concerned about prescriptive easement claims—legal rights-of-way that can be established if the public uses a route openly, continuously, and without permission for a set number of years—landowners have responded by posting “No Trespassing” signs, locking gates, or otherwise making clear that access is by permission only. While legally prudent, these steps closed off routes that may have once operated under informal agreements, reducing access, eroding goodwill, and adding another layer of tension to an already divided landscape.

Beyond recreational access, wildfire suppression, habitat restoration, and routine forest management all become more complicated when agencies and landowners must navigate a patchwork of ownership. Without road easements to allow legal access through checkerboard corners, land managers must find costly workarounds to get themselves and their equipment to parcels needing attention. Even with access, coordinated work can require the consent of multiple entities, each with their own priorities.

Consider one example from the northeastern edge of the range where a ranching family sparred with the Forest Service for years over road access to private inholdings within the checkerboard. They wanted to conduct timber and fire management, at one point threatening to build a road with or without approval and even bringing the matter to Montana’s congressional delegation. Before the issue could be resolved, disaster struck. In 2021, a wildfire broke out, burning more than 20,000 acres of public and private lands in the same area where the family had been pressing to reduce fire risks by clearing dead and downed timber. The episode underscored how the checkerboard doesn’t just complicate recreation opportunities, it can also hamper proactive land management.

Despite the long history of disputes, the Crazies have also become a proving ground for collaborative solutions. In recent years, some of the most significant progress hasn’t come from lawsuits or agency decrees, but from landowners, conservationists, Tribal representatives, and public officials sitting down to negotiate win-win proposals that can improve both access and land management. These efforts take time, require compromise, and rarely satisfy everyone. But they have shown that, even in one of the West’s most divided landscapes, it’s possible to move beyond the checkerboard stalemate.

One example is the South Crazy Mountains Land Exchange, finalized in 2022. The deal consolidated land ownership in the southern part of the range by trading approximately 2,000 acres of inaccessible public parcels for a similar amount of scattered private inholdings. The exchange also secured two additional easements to improve public access to the southern end of the range. The result was a clearer boundary, improved management, and more public access, all without reducing the overall acreage of public land. The agreement took more than a decade to complete and drew little fanfare, but it ultimately created a landscape that is easier for both landowners and recreationists to navigate.

Years later, a more ambitious proposal on the east side of the range built on this same model. After years of stalemate over disputed trails and hypothetical prescriptive easements, a coalition of hunters, conservationists, Tribal representatives, landowners, and access advocates—working together as the Crazy Mountain Access Project—sat down to work out a deal. The proposal called for the Forest Service to trade seven inaccessible public parcels to private landowners in exchange for 10 private parcels that would become public and could be reached without crossing private property. Combined with existing holdings, the acquired tracts would create a 30-square-mile block of contiguous public land and secure formal access for the Crow Tribe to Crazy Peak, one of the most culturally significant sites in the range.

The deal also included the construction of a new 22-mile loop trail, designed to give the public reliable access to this area without trespass disputes. In a creative twist, the deal funded this by incorporating a smaller exchange of several parcels in the nearby Madison Range, where a ski resort sought to expand its terrain. As part of the package, the resort agreed to cover the cost of building the new trail in the Crazies more than 70 miles away—tying together two entirely different mountain ranges through a single negotiated exchange. The Forest Service ultimately adopted the group’s proposal as the East Crazy Inspiration Divide Land Exchange, and after several years of public review and environmental analysis, it formally authorized the swap in 2025.

Not every solution requires trading land. In some cases, cooperation has focused on adjusting how the public reaches the land that is already theirs. In the Porcupine Ibex area on the west side of the range, the Forest Service worked with private landowners to reroute a popular trail that had previously crossed a checkerboard of public and private parcels. The old route had been the source of repeated trespass disputes, as sections passed through private property without deeded easements. Rather than fight over historic use, the parties agreed to construct a new trail that stays almost entirely on public land, while the landowner donated an easement for the trail to cross a portion of private land. The result is a trail that connects visitors to the high country but eliminates legal uncertainty.

And when it comes to crossing private land, the Forest Service has increasingly focused on negotiated solutions rather than contentious efforts to assert access rights in court. That approach is beginning to pay off. In one recent case, negotiations with a ranching family produced a permanent, legally recorded trail easement that opened public access to the northeastern edge of the range. The agreement grants a two-mile corridor across private property to reach thousands of acres of previously inaccessible national forest land, demonstrating how cooperation can succeed where confrontation has failed.

For all their potential, land exchanges and other cooperative arrangements are not a silver bullet. They are complicated, time consuming, and often politically sensitive. The South Crazy Mountains and East Crazy Inspiration Divide swaps were the product of years of negotiation, legal reviews, appraisals, and public meetings. To finalize an exchange, the Forest Service must clear a series of procedural hurdles under federal law, including environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act and appraisals to ensure the exchanged parcels are of equal value. Each step can take months or years to complete, and these drawn-out timelines can be enough to discourage otherwise beneficial land swaps.

But bureaucratic hurdles aren’t the only challenge. In many cases, the parcels the public gives up are lower-elevation lands that offer better wildlife habitat for hunting than the higher-elevation, rock-and-ice parcels the public receives in return. Yet those lower-elevation parcels are also the ones most valuable for ranching or development, making them prime candidates for consolidation into larger, contiguous private holdings. Balancing those competing priorities can be one of the most contentious aspects of any proposed swap.

Another sticking point comes from conditions the Forest Service often attaches to the private parcels it conveys. In many swaps, the agency seeks to require that landowners place conservation easements on their newly acquired parcels to protect habitat or prevent subdivision. While such restrictions may align with public goals, they have made exchanges less appealing to some landowners, who may be reluctant to limit how their land can be used in the future. Negotiating these conditions—which are not required by federal law—adds another layer of complexity that can derail or slow down land swaps.

For these reasons, successful land swaps remain the exception, not the rule. Ultimately, such exchanges are as much a relationship-building exercise as a real estate transaction. It takes years to get there, and in the Crazies, that patience is slowly, but steadily, paying off.

Much of the Crazy Mountains remains checkerboarded, and that won’t change overnight. But the recent examples of rerouted trails, negotiated easements, and land exchanges offer a glimpse of what progress can look like. It all starts with collaborative approaches that allow for genuine public-private partnerships.

It also requires better information. Groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and onX are helping map landlocked parcels and provide information about public access gaps. Transparency helps identify priorities and build support for finding creative ways to close those gaps. These tools not only promote access but also increase awareness about how checkerboarding impacts both recreation and conservation.

And it takes forums for discussion. The Crazy Mountain Access Project brought together diverse groups to look for common ground. These efforts don’t eliminate disagreement—they create space for productive conversation. And they help establish norms of engagement that can replace the threat of litigation with the possibility of cooperation.

The Crazies show that even in one of the West’s most divided landscapes, cooperation can prevail to resolve conflicts in the checkerboard—one trail, exchange, or agreement at a time. The lessons learned here can inform efforts to untangle checkerboards across the West.

Shawn Regan writes from Bozeman, Montana. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Header image: The Crazy Mountains. (Ecoflight)

In Wyoming’s Red Desert, the checkerboard has fueled a wild horse stalemate

By Mike Koshmrl

A dozen or so wild horse advocates and photographers were gathered on a ridgeline near White Mountain in August 2024 when news started spreading that federal land managers got the OK from the courts to eliminate two entire herds, and a part of another, from 2.1 million acres of the area known as the Red Desert. Cheyenne resident and amateur photographer Robyn Smith was immediately bummed. “Argh, oh crap,” she said. “That’s a lot of horses.” More than 3,000 horses, US District Court of Wyoming Judge Kelly Rankin had ruled, could go.  

The group of activists were gathered to oversee an unrelated horse roundup in the so-called checkerboard region of southwest Wyoming, a 40-mile-wide swath of land where one-square-mile blocks of private and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) property meet at the corners. Fences are few in the region, so thousands of horses pass on and off the private land daily. These walkabouts, and the underlying land ownership pattern, have proven a land management quagmire that has been the source of a half century of conflict, despite sporadic coordination.  

Rankin’s ruling in favor of horse removal was just the latest development in the debate over whether and how many mustangs should be allowed to roam the checkerboard. The back and forth involves woolgrowers and cattle ranchers who don’t want the free-roaming horses on their private land, the BLM, an agency that’s required by the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act to maintain them on the federal property, and wild horse advocates, who want to protect the animals and health of the herds.  

Some 14 months later, however, the herds slated for elimination were still there. They’d even grown larger. The reason is litigation, which has dominated the 54 years since horses in the Red Desert became federally protected. As herd sizes continuously exceed goals, frustrations have grown. But middle-ground solutions have failed to gain traction as the camps in the checkerboard horse dispute have become gridlocked, leaving today’s land managers and horses at an impasse. 

Before 1971, when the Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act passed, ranchers in the checkerboard who run cattle and sheep as a collective under the Rock Springs Grazing Association took wild horse management into their own hands. “They removed excess numbers, and at that time they went to slaughter, for the most part,” says Christi Chapman, who’s a longtime wild horse advocate: She co-founded the all-volunteer Wyoming Wild Horse Improvement Partnership. “They did a good job, because they cared about the land and they wanted to have enough room for their livestock. But they liked the horses—they didn’t want to see them go completely away.”  

After the Wild Horse Act passed, management shifted to federal officials. The law protects free-roaming horses from “capture, branding, harassment, or death,” prohibits commercial sale for slaughter, and declares them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.” It passed both chambers of Congress unanimously and was shepherded by the matriarch of wild horse advocacy, Velma Johnston, who was known as Wild Horse Annie.  

At that time, wild horses and burros roamed free on roughly 54 million acres of federal land, mostly BLM property. The new federal law didn’t demand blanket protections for equines everywhere. Land managers inventoried the West, looking at factors like vegetation and water, and ultimately defined 179 “herd management areas” covering nearly 32 million acres in 10 states where the landscape was considered able to sustainably support horses. In another 20-million-plus inhabited acres, free-roaming horses weren’t thought of as practical long-term residents because of habitat constraints or resource scarcity—these were labeled “herd areas” and are not managed for horses. In southwest Wyoming’s Red Desert and Green River Basin, nine HMAs were established, some of which included hundreds of square miles of the checkerboard.  

A key provision of the Wild Horses and Burros Act instructs agencies to “remove stray wild horses from private lands as soon as practicable” when asked by a landowner, who are prohibited from removing or destroying horses on their own. That made the broad swath of interchanging public and private land that forms the checkerboard tricky, and negotiations essential. Shortly after it passed, members of the Rock Springs Grazing Association met with Johnston and the BLM to discuss management for horse herds in the region. In the new era, the association had plenty of incentive to work with the BLM to keep horse numbers in check. Their livestock depended on the same rangeland and would have to compete for forage with the free-roaming horses, which can reach 1,000 pounds and face little predation. “They had a great conversation,” Chapman says. They even came to terms on population targets.  

But the horses thrived and the herds grew in the absence of rancher management—unchecked, herds can swell by 20 percent annually. The association’s ranchers tried to get the BLM to step in with large roundups to no avail, and by the late 1970s they sued. A negotiated legal settlement came out of it, and that deal was for four herds totaling no more than 1,600 animals in the Red Desert region. “BLM-Wyoming complied without delay, but it took from 1980 to 1985 to reduce the number of horses from almost 7,000 to 1,600,” Rock Springs Grazing Association Manager Don Schramm testified to Wyoming lawmakers in 2023. The herds had sprawled across the landscape and gathering them was difficult and costly—as was finding a home for them, because the free-roaming animals could no longer be killed.  

Horse populations fluctuated in the two decades that followed. Roundups would drive numbers down to near the 1,600-animal target, but then years would go by. “They would double by the time of the next roundup,” Schramm said in his testimony. “We did our best. We had the support of the state, BLM, wild horse interest groups, the Washington office employees, administrative officers and RSGA. It was a team effort.” But it wasn’t enough, and the wild horses spent far more time above the agreed-upon population limits than near or below the threshold.  

“I will say this: I feel like it’s not the BLM’s fault,” Chapman says. She pinpointed two reasons, naming constant litigation and a lack of resources for federal land managers to carry out their horse-removal duties. Wild horse management has proven to be an extraordinary drain on BLM coffers. Roundups, which rely on helicopters and big teams of wranglers, are pricey, but most of the expense goes toward paying for the horses to live out their days. Some rounded-up mustangs are adopted and domesticated, but most end up in long-term corrals and in off-range pastures where board, feed, and veterinary bills cost more than $100 million annually.  

Finally, in 2010, frustrated ranchers revoked their consent to tolerate horses on private land in the checkerboard, asking that the herds be removed entirely. The BLM went along, citing the act, and even sought to remove herds from the public land squares interspersed throughout the checkerboard. This would have been an almost unprecedented move. While roundups eliminating horses from the “herd areas” are somewhat routine, the designated herds have remarkable staying power. 

“BLM has only zeroed out a herd two times in history,” says Bill Eubanks, an attorney who has represented horse advocacy plaintiffs in the Red Desert dispute for over a decade. The Colorado and Nevada herds that were eliminated faced dire straits from a landscape that lacked enough resources for their survival. Animals were “emaciated,” Eubanks says, and federal law explicitly permits removing herds “in order to preserve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance” in areas. “The agency ultimately documented that they could not keep a genetically viable, self-sustaining wild horse herd,” Eubanks says, “because it was just impossible.”  

The rationale for getting rid of the Red Desert herds was starkly different. It hinged on the RSGA asserting its rights to have stray wild horses removed from private lands as soon as possible, and the assumption that herd elimination was the only reasonable way to do that in the checkerboard.  

The association sued BLM again three years later, and out of it came another settlement agreement. This one called for eliminating two herds and shrinking two others. Wild horse advocacy groups, represented by Eubanks, got involved with their own lawsuit, arguing violations of the Wild Horse Act, National Environmental Policy Act and other federal laws. After a federal district court defeat, the horse advocates prevailed when the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2016 that the federal agency broke the law by treating the entire checkerboard as if it were private property.  

Appellate Judge Monroe McKay and the court acknowledged the “practical realities of the checkerboard” and the need for BLM to find a “workable solution,” but still faulted the agency for ignoring a key provision of the act. “It seems to me that the only way the BLM can ultimately lawfully achieve its [ecological balance] duty to maintain wild herds and prevent destruction of viability caused by over grazing on public lands is to go back to step one and make appropriate judgments by redetermining the HMAs without the non-permissive use of private lands,” McKay wrote.  

While the BLM went back to the drawing board, the herds kept steadily growing. In the winter of 2022–2023, the federal agency commissioned an infrared aerial survey that found roughly 4,700 horses in the Red Desert herds. Roundups followed and a similar assessment at the end of 2024 found just shy of 3,700 animals.  

Around the West, the pace of roundups has long been inadequate to keep up with population growth, in some areas resulting in ecological harm rather than ecological balance. As of spring 2025, the number of free-roaming horses and burros nationwide was approaching 75,000—nearly triple the BLM’s targeted numbers. Nevada, which hosts nearly half of them, has been the poster child of feral horse overpopulation run amok, and its state biologists have reported that the equines eat more forage than all the native ungulate species, like elk and mule deer, combined.  

Impacts to wildlife have also been documented in Wyoming. A University of Wyoming-led research team examined how free-roaming horses influence sage grouse and found evidence that overpopulated Red Desert herds are hurting the imperiled birds’ survival rates by breaking up sagebrush, increasing bare ground and denuding watering holes. Wildlife managers on the Wind River Indian Reservation—which isn’t subject to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act—reported dramatic, almost overnight changes after rounding up nearly 8,000 horses in 2022 and 2023. “It was at an ecological crisis point,” US Fish and Wildlife Service Supervisory Biologist Pat Hnilicka said at the time. “If something wasn’t done, there was no turning back.”  

In the Red Desert, near where her family ranches, Chapman has seen feral horses eat themselves out of a home during periods of drought and succumb to severe winters. It was especially hard to watch, she says, during the winter of 2022–2023. “We found families of horses dead within feet of each other,” Chapman says. “It was just really sad.” 

Wild horse enthusiasts, however, contend that equines are being unfairly scapegoated when it comes to impacts on the land. Casper College instructor Chad Hanson, who’s an avid horse photographer and writer, says that their impacts on grasslands are “red herrings”—arguments intended to distract from more significant concerns. “The BLM’s rangeland assessments make it clear: Livestock represent the most significant threat to the health and vitality of our public lands,” says Hanson, who joined the checkerboard horse lawsuit as a plaintiff.  

But there is a distinction between how horse and livestock impacts to rangeland are handled, according to Jim Magagna, a longtime lobbyist for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. “It’s the only major species of animals out there that isn’t managed,” he says of Red Desert horses. “We manage our livestock—we harvest our calves and lambs every fall. We manage our wildlife through hunting seasons.” Because wild horses, legally, are neither livestock nor wildlife, the BLM’s toolkit for managing them is much more constrained.  

Attempting to remedy the court’s concerns after the 2016 loss, federal authorities prepared an environmental impact statement and updated its resource management plans for the Rock Springs and Rawlins areas.  “We’ve been trying to come up with a solution,” says Brad Purdy, a senior advisor for the BLM’s Wyoming office. The federal agency’s analysis assessed different scenarios, in part demonstrating “adequate forage, water, cover and space” to support horses if the trimmed-down herds were confined to solid-block public land outside the checkerboard. Still, there were concerns the herds would easily drift back onto private land.  

Ideas for solutions included fencing the checkerboard and keeping horses on public ground, but that would require extensive fencing that would bisect big game migration routes and could even harm sage grouse prone to striking them. It was called “not technically feasible” and the gargantuan task was dismissed. 

The assessment also considered and dismissed a land swap to consolidate private and public property. “For a land exchange, you’ve got to have a willing partner—and I don’t think we had a willing partner,” says Purdy, the BLM-Wyoming senior advisor. “I’m not saying that in a negative way. It’s completely up to private landowners whether they want to engage in a land exchange with the Bureau of Land Management.”  

The option the agency ultimately landed on was to get rid of the Great Divide Basin and Salt Wells Creek herds, which dwell in areas that are respectively 48 percent and 72 percent checkerboard. The northwestern portion of the Adobe Town Herd, an area that’s 42 percent checkerboard, would also be lopped off and managed for zero horses. In total, the contested plans called for ridding roughly 2.1 million acres—an area about the size of Yellowstone National Park—of more than 3,000 free-roaming horses. “When you weighed it all out, this was the most informed and the best decision, I think, the BLM could have made,” Purdy says.  

Initially, the courts were on board, upholding the agency’s plans. Rankin’s August 2024 opinion—the ruling that bummed out Smith and the other roundup observers—recognized the BLM’s bind of having to remove the private land horses and having no practical means of keeping others on checkerboarded public land. Repped by Eubanks, horse advocacy groups and individuals again appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.  

By spring 2025, BLM was already setting in motion its renewed plans, but history repeated itself, and again the 10th Circuit put a stop to the roundups. Like nearly a decade prior, the court faulted BLM for not demonstrating how removing all horses from public land in the checkerboard is necessary to achieve a “thriving natural ecological balance”—language from the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act. “They said it’s the guiding principle of the act, as Congress wrote it, and you can’t just ignore that,” Eubanks says.  

Federal officials turned heads by announcing they were proceeding with the elimination roundups despite the appeals court ruling, sparking another lawsuit, then another—and eventually an assurance that nothing would happen before summer 2026. 

So several thousand Red Desert horses remain on the landscape, and land managers, stockgrowers and horse advocates are at a stalemate. “This whole controversy, it’s been a standoff for 15 years,” Chapman says. “I’ve been here since day one, right in the middle of it.” The 10th Circuit’s summer 2025 opinion instructed BLM to go back to federal district court to resolve concerns about “ecological balance,” but BLM’s earlier plans stated there was no ecological justification for removing the Red Desert herds. There was no scarcity of forage, water, cover and space, according to its own analysis.  

Pro-horse plaintiffs say the stakes are high. Herds around the West could be at risk if BLM prevails in removing whole herds because of the checkerboard’s private land, Eubanks says. Every herd management area in the country contains private inholdings or non-federal land. “Where do you draw the line?” the attorney says. “There’s not really any coherent reason why it could not apply elsewhere. Does BLM see this [argument] as specific to these herds, or is this really something that they’re testing out? We don’t know.”  

Meanwhile, ranchers’ patience has been exhausted after decades of legal disputes and the BLM failing to achieve targeted numbers. Magagna, at the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, sees few prospects for coexisting with free-roaming horses in the long-term. “At this point, the only way that the landowners could be satisfied outside of a total removal would be if they were reduced down to [agreed-upon] numbers, with a firm guarantee that the horses would be held at those numbers,” he says.  

Others say the potential solution was prematurely dismissed by the BLM. “I think the right solution is for the federal government to have land swaps with the checkerboard landowners and consolidate the private lands and the public lands,” says Erik Molvar, a biologist who directs the Western Watershed Project, an environmental group that focuses on negative impacts of livestock grazing. “Once you consolidate the private lands, then under the Wild Horse and Burro Act, the wild horses that stray can be removed back onto the public lands—and the private landowners can have wild-horse-free private lands.”  

As long as a decade ago, Eubanks was encouraging BLM to consider a land swap as a mutually palatable solution so that the Rock Springs Grazing Association would be unencumbered by horses, which would then dwell only on solid-block public lands. “Not one time has BLM even explored the idea—they just refuse to even consider whether it’s a viable option,” Eubanks says. “What’s especially peculiar is BLM does land exchanges of substantial size. They’re the agency that specializes in these federal/non-federal land swaps for precisely this type of purpose.”  

For now, the steady stream of litigation is keeping the Red Desert horse dispute in flux. As this story was going to press, the federal agency and Rock Springs Grazing Association had not shown their hand, declining interviews about legal next steps to satisfy the court’s concerns about “ecological balance.”  

“They could interpret the 10th Circuit opinion differently than I do,” says Eubanks. “We have very little intel on how they’re going to approach these issues. It may be that the outcome of their evaluation sparks more litigation. I’m sure that would be a surprise to no one.” 

This story was created in partnership with WyoFile, an independent nonprofit news organization that covers Wyoming. 

Mike Koshmrl is a Lander-based journalist who reports on wildlife and natural resource issues for WyoFile. 

Header image: Research in Wyoming has indicated that wild horses may threaten sage grouse survival rates by breaking up sagebrush, increasing bare ground, and denuding watering holes. Wild horse enthusiasts counter that horses are being unfairly scapegoated for environmental degradation, laying the blame on livestock instead. (Allegra Keenoo and Jacqueline Alderman/Bureau of Land Management)

Mix of public and private lands causes fire management challenges 

By Kristen Pope 

A bolt of lightning crashes down and hits some brush, which begins to smolder. The wind transforms wisps of smoke into visible flames and the small fire quickly becomes a mass of orange flames—headed straight for neighboring homes. If this small ignition occurred on one of the six million acres of public land in the western US that are completely surrounded by private land, it would be more likely to become a bigger, more problematic fire, according to researchers. 

Fire management is more challenging in areas where public and private lands meet, whether they are completely “stranded” or another part of the wildland-urban interface. The mix of land ownership types and uses can lead to very different objectives and approaches. One community in Oregon is taking on these challenges through a cooperative public-private effort that works with landowners to prepare for wildfires and reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in the first place. 

The mix of public and private lands that shapes parts of the wildland-urban interface results from a number of factors, including policies from the time of westward expansion. During the 19th century, government grants were made along the new transcontinental railroad corridors to encourage people to build nearby, with every other parcel becoming private, and remaining parcels reserved by the government. Today, many of these reserved parcels are still public land, surrounded by private land and forming what’s known as the “checkerboard” pattern found in some parts of the West.  

University of Wyoming associate professor Bryan Leonard and colleagues explored how these and other lands surrounded by private lands, which they refer to as stranded lands, impact fire considerations in a 2021 article in Environmental Research Letters. The researchers studied fires that ignited on western public lands between 1992 and 2015 and found that ignitions on stranded public land were 14-23 percent more likely to grow to over an acre than other fires. They also analyzed the impact using 5-acre and 160-acre thresholds, and found similar results— that ignitions on stranded public lands are more likely to get bigger than those on more accessible public lands. 

They also found that fires on stranded public lands were more likely to escape the crucial “initial attack” phase of firefighting, which involves rapid containment efforts that occur within the first one to eight hours after an ignition and is a key indicator of how large fires are likely to ultimately become. “If it stays small, the damages are going to be pretty limited, but as soon as it escapes that initial containment then it’s much more likely to become problematic,” Leonard says. Overall, they found that fires on stranded public lands become 18 percent larger than those that began on public land that is accessible.  

In certain states, including Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming, the fires that began on stranded lands made up 10 percent of acres burned, in spite of only making up 3-6 percent of ignitions. Leonard and his colleagues also found that, on average, stranded fires were two to three times as large as non-stranded fires in these states

Not every state had the same results, though. In a few other states, including Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah, the 1 percent of fires that started on stranded public lands only accounted to 0.27-1.5 percent of the area burned in those states. 

“I expect this has to do with differences in the extent and nature of stranded lands across these different states,” Leonard says. “Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming have some of the most extensive checkerboarding of private and public land thanks to the legacy of the railroad land grants. While not all checkerboarded lands are stranded, the two are often highly correlated, and it is not hard to imagine that conducting fire management activities is more difficult in a highly checkerboarded landscape than in one with a relatively isolated stranded parcel.” 

Vegetation type, in addition to land ownership, may have contributed to this difference between states. “Most of the stranded lands in these three states are grasslands, which are associated with the faster initial spread of fires,” Leonard says. 

The reasons why fires that start on parcels of stranded public lands are more likely to become large could be related to difficulty of accessing those lands for management, detection, and response. Even before a fire sparks, fuels management can reduce the threat of wildfire, including mechanical thinning, prescribed fire, and invasive weed management. “While many public lands are in need of additional fuels treatment, this problem is systematically worse on stranded land due to access issues,” Leonard says. In the study, stranded lands were 5 percent less likely to be the focus of management projects. 

“The same access issues can also complicate and slow the ‘initial attack’ once fires start, by creating confusion and logistical hurdles associated with determining land ownership and obtaining access, says Leonard. Even when private landowners are eager for assistance with fires and fire management on these lands, there can be barriers to access like locked gates that take up time. Leonard says, “These issues might be compounded in settings where the landowners have a less than amicable relationship with public land managers due to past access disputes.” 

While stranded public lands can lead to significant fire management hurdles, these only represent one type of situation where public and private lands coming together complicates fire management. The wildland-urban interface (known as the “WUI”) is a transitional area where human development abuts undeveloped wildland vegetation, and is often found where public and private lands meet. The WUI has grown rapidly in recent decades, increasing by 33 percent from 1990 to 2010. A 2018 study found that houses in these areas are increasing by 41 percent, and that the WUI is the fastest-growing land use type in the Lower 48. That growth is attributable to multiple factors. 

“[The WUI is] a beautiful place to live. Most people who care about the environment would like to live closer to nature, maybe see wildlife from their kitchen window,” says Volker Radeloff, a professor in forest and landscape ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison and one of the authors of the study. “The other major factor is that downtown areas are expensive to live in and there’s a housing crisis, and so some people are also pushed out of urban areas and they have to move out into the wildlife-urban interface because that’s the only place they can afford to live. When we look at the WUI, it spans the gamut. There is Malibu WUI, but also trailer parks, and every socioeconomic group is found in the WUI.” 

USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station

The continuing growth of the WUI is problematic for both fire risk and fire management. “If a fire occurs it places more people at risk. They have to be evacuated, firefighters have to focus on protecting structures, and so forth,” Radeloff says. “The other side of that coin is that most fires are started by people, so the people living in those landscapes, the power lines, barbecue grills toppling over, arson, the whole suite of different reasons for ignitions—they are all concentrated.” 

This is particularly true in the kind of WUI called the intermix because it involves homes dotted among the vegetation. In contrast, the other type of WUI, interface WUI, involves high-density housing near a large tract of wild area. Interface WUI areas may have less vegetation to burn and more hard barriers, like roads and pavement, that can act a fire breaks, but when fires impact these areas, they can race through neighborhoods quickly, igniting house to house. 

The WUI also poses challenges to fire preparedness. When landowners have different management objectives—and budgets—it can be challenging to find good solutions. One private landowner may prefer a thick forest close to their home for privacy and wildlife observation, whereas a nearby homeowner may prioritize creating defensible space for fire protection. A public parcel of land might be managed for ecosystem services, while a timber tract may focus on maximizing the price of timber products. 

“If you have ten private landowners, they have twelve different opinions about how to manage the land, and there are different objectives,” Radeloff says. “One will prioritize aesthetics over fire safety, over biodiversity values, over income from timber harvesting, and so forth. In the wildland-urban interface where houses are, the land is privately owned so it becomes very hard to coordinate and do something like a prescribed burn unless all landowners are in agreement.” 

Finding solutions to fire management when dealing with a variety of public and private landowners can be a challenge, but a partnership near Klamath Falls, Oregon, is working to reduce fire danger and promote forest health where public and private lands intermingle. The Chiloquin Community Forest and Fire Project (CCFFP) uses cross-boundary management to improve forest health while working on fire resistance and response. 

The project focuses on a 38,800-acre area that is 60 percent forested and at high fire risk. The Chiloquin area includes large tracts of national forest, with fingers of private land interspersed, largely running alongside waterways. It is a complex WUI area with a mix of land ownership types and both industrial and nonindustrial uses. 

“There are a lot of subdivisions that may be completely surrounded by Forest Service [land] or surrounded on three sides by Forest Service, so there is a lot of interface between the private and the public land in Chiloquin area,” says Leigh Ann Vradenburg, project manager for Klamath Watershed Partnership, which is the watershed council overseeing the project. In her role, she works with federal and state agencies, nonprofits, and private landowners on ecosystem restoration projects in the Upper Klamath Basin. 

CCFFP maps and inventories the region to identify priority treatment areas and obtains grants to reduce fire risk, including money for private landowners to manage fuels on their own land. Outreach is a key component of this effort, including meetings, workshops, mailings, phone calls, and on-the-ground visits. Vradenburg and partners also collaborate with larger forest health and wildfire resiliency projects to do large-scale planning efforts. She says CCFFP has more than 32 landowners participating, and the project has already treated more than 4,400 acres of private land. 

One of the barriers they face is landowners’ reluctance to treat their land if neighboring parcels are not doing fuel treatments. People in rural communities also like their privacy, she says, which includes visual barriers, such as trees separating them from roads and public lands where people might be recreating. However, she works to build trust and overcome these barriers.  

“We’re non-regulatory, we’re non-threatening,” Vradenburg says. “We come in from the position of advocating for the landowner and helping them to understand what the forest could and should look like but then also understanding what their needs are. Do they run cattle out there or have objectives for timber harvest? We’re working to support them in their forest management and land management goals.” 

CCFFP is part of the Chiloquin Wildfire Initiative, which is a partnership with Chiloquin Fire and Rescue that focuses on creating defensible space around homes and helping landowners treat small properties, including providing brush trailers to help people haul off materials. Additionally, they are increasing outreach and education efforts, with plans to go to local schools and events to educate people about wildfire. 

Cooperative public-private efforts like this initiative rely on the willingness of government entities and private landowners to work together to meet fire management challenges. “I think we were fortunate to have a good community to work with,” Vradenburg says. “Sometimes it takes all the players in the right places and Chiloquin has been an example of that and the success of that is shown by the acres treated and the landowners involved and so it’s something we’re really proud of.” 

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com. 

Header image: 2013 Alder Fire in Yellowstone National Park (Mike Lewelling/National Park Service) 

Corner-crossing case ignites firestorm with messy history

By Christine Peterson

Long before a group of hunters from Missouri hoisted a ladder over a fence in southwest Wyoming—setting off a series of headline-grabbing court cases and breathless predictions—the US government had a plan. It wanted a railroad built. And it wanted it built fast.

But, like anything built with speed in mind, there were unintended consequences. Those consequences spent 180 years slowly heating up before a gray area of western law boiled over into a legal battle that has captivated the nation and is reshaping the debate about how to access millions of acres of public land across the West. At the heart of it lies a philosophical argument about private ownership, public land, and what it means to live and recreate in the West.

A long simmer

Look at a color-coded, land-ownership map of the western United States and, in the chaos, a few patterns appear. Large blocks of green denote national forests like the Beaverhead-Deerlodge in Montana, Bridger-Teton in Wyoming, and Salmon-Challis in Idaho. Swaths of orange Bureau of Land Management land spread across large portions of Nevada and Utah. State land pops up in a haphazard way, often surrounding reservoirs or in pockets enclosed by private land.

And then there’s the checkerboard. Instead of yawning stretches of one color, there are bands of tidy, one-mile squares alternating between orange and white. This wavy chess board, composed of millions of acres of not-quite-public, not-quite-private land, spans a section of the Union Pacific Railroad across the bottom of Wyoming. The trend continues across other portions of the West like northern Nevada, southern Idaho, and scattered portions of Montana. It’s a leftover from the federal government’s drive to connect the East and West coasts and facilitate the transportation of people, goods, and timber.

At the time, that meant transcontinental rail lines. Building a railroad costs money, though, and railroad companies wanted help. So the growing federal government looked at a map of the new country, full of 640-acre squares of land brokered through treaties or stolen from Native American tribes, and offered the railroads a deal. The government would give companies every other square of land for 10 or more miles on either side of the proposed railroad tracks.

Companies could do what they wanted with those private squares: sell them, develop them, or keep them. The government would use the squares it kept to entice settlement through the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres to any adult citizen willing to live on and “improve” the land. As settlers moved in waves with the tracks, creating farms, ranches, towns, and eventually cities, the nascent US would have what it wanted: railroads crisscrossing the continent and a settled West.

For decades, that’s exactly what happened. Between 1850 and 1871, Congress gave railroad companies more than 100 million acres of every-other-square on either side of proposed railway lines. These squares were sold, perhaps to homesteaders who had settled nearby public parcels. Cities cropped up. Land consolidated.

States with fertile land, plenty of rainfall, and more mild winters developed quickly and the checkerboard disappeared, erased from modern maps and gone from memory, says John Leshy, former solicitor of the US Department of Interior and author of Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands. But not everyone wanted to live everywhere the railroad stretched. Some areas, like portions of parched Nevada or sagebrush-covered southwestern Wyoming, were either never settled or were abandoned. So that checkerboard remained. Early on, it caused surprisingly few problems.

Take the Rock Springs Grazing Association. Created more than a century ago, it loosely oversees 2 million acres of checkerboard in Wyoming where ranchers graze cows and sheep in the winter. “In the summer, Rock Springs Grazing doesn’t have livestock out there, so recreation use in the summer wasn’t affecting them,” says Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The public was welcome to traverse and use the landscape, both public and private parcels, just as the association’s producers held shares allowing them to graze their livestock across the checkerboard. The decision was a practical one, Magagna says. “Because it’s such a large acreage and being checkerboard every other section, the reality of managing or monitoring public use would be quite a challenge.”

But that kind of utopian ownership, where ranchers could graze and the public could hunt and recreate over public and private land, didn’t translate everywhere. Some landowners began to treat corner-locked public parcels as de facto private land. Still, they largely gave access to hunters and anglers, Magagna says, loosely abiding by the Unlawful Enclosures Act of 1885, which said that landowners can’t block the public from accessing public land.

A few cases broke that early, relative ease. The first occurred in 1917 when a man trailed his sheep through his neighbor’s property to reach public grazing land. Another, called Leo Sheep Co. v. United States, followed 60 years later when the government wanted to build a road through the checkerboard. The courts ruled in favor of the man who wanted to run his sheep through his neighbor’s land, citing “custom of the open range.” But in Leo Sheep, it ruled in favor of the landowner, saying that the government doesn’t have a right build a road over private land to access public land.

Outside of those two niche cases, not much was challenged. Time went on, hunters and anglers knocked on landowners’ doors, shook hands, and were mostly given access. Easements were bought and sold, and state access programs purchased walk-in rights.

But in more recent years, as ranches changed hands, that door-knocking, permission-giving ethos waned. Wealthy, out-of-state landowners became more interested in private hunting grounds and less in running cows and letting an occasional hunter wander through. “These big owners, rich guys, they come in and buy a piece of property with eyes wide open. They know there’s checkerboard and access to what they want to control,” says Buzz Hettick, co-chair of the Wyoming chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and longtime hunter and public lands advocate. “And rather than live with what they have, they immediately try and get what they want.”

As more private landowners refused access to the public checkerboard land, more hunters, anglers, and other recreationists grumbled. And when those handshakes didn’t work, deciding if someone trespassed fell to the local sheriffs and county attorneys.

The grumble grew louder as reports from GPS company onX showed that 9.52 million acres of land in the West is landlocked, with 2.4 million acres of corner-locked land in Wyoming alone. Public land advocates said private landowners shouldn’t be able to block the public from public land, while landowners countered that the public has no right to cross private land.

For years the debate simmered. And then four men from Missouri heaved a ladder over a fence.

A major test

At this point, almost anyone interested in public land in the West has heard the 2021 story: Four men wanted to hunt on thousands of acres of public land on the west side of Elk Mountain in checkerboard sections of southeast Wyoming, but they had to cross a corner to get there. They knew no formal rules existed outlawing corner crossing, and they also knew “the alternating sections were reserved by the federal government for public use,” says Ryan Semerad, an attorney representing the four Missouri hunters.

So they figured they would step from one public parcel to another, with the ladder straddling the middle. If their feet didn’t touch private land, then surely, they thought, they weren’t trespassing. Once on public land, they shot deer and elk, field dressed the animals and carried them back out over the same, makeshift ladder they used to enter the land. Except the ranch manager for the wealthy, out-of-state landowner found them, told them they were trespassing, and called the sheriff. The sheriff issued citations, and the Missouri hunters ended up in court.

Then the hunting community exploded. A GoFundMe account set up to pay for the hunters’ legal fees raised almost $118,000 from more than 2,000 donations. Comments from donors filled the page, many saying some version of what one person, who gave $15, stated simply: “Private landowners should not control access to publicly owned land.”

For hunters, anglers, and others wishing to access corner-locked land, the case was about more than defending four hunters, it was about settling an issue that had been gnawing at recreationists for years as they stared at maps of land they wanted to get to but felt they shouldn’t. This was just the case to finally bring a gray area of western access law to a head.

“You have a wealthy landowner who doesn’t live here and purchased the lands as his playground, and some hunters who were motivated and supported by national groups to test the law,” says Magagna. “It was a perfect place for a fight to come up.”

The hunters won their case in the local courtroom, with a jury finding they did not commit criminal trespass by passing through only the airspace of the Elk Mountain Ranch. Hunters said it was settled, at least in Wyoming. But even before the verdict arrived, the ranch’s owner, a North Carolina pharmaceutical executive, also sued the hunters in civil court, alleging that trespassing through his airspace stole value from his land. It was a taking, he claimed, which the courts had ruled illegal in the Leo Sheep case. He then later said the hunters caused millions of dollars in damages.

Months later, a federal judge said that argument didn’t quite hold up. The hunters didn’t step on private property or cause property damage. As the hunting community claimed another victory, the landowner filed an appeal to the 10^th Circuit Court.

David and Goliath

David Willms, associate vice president for the National Wildlife Federation’s public lands program and University of Wyoming adjunct professor, believes most of the controversy stems from a change in attitude about what these lands mean. When the US government wanted to settle the West, they focused on giving land to individuals to be used for cutting timber, mining gold and silver, growing crops, or raising cows and sheep. The government wasn’t originally in the business of owning land. Until it was. And decades later, the public began to see public land not as something to be disposed of but something to be retained for the public good.

The checkerboard, or corner-locked land, is the collateral damage of that shift in attitude. As the tourism and outdoor recreation economies increase, public land has become one of the West’s greatest assets. In Wyoming alone, tourism generates $4.8 billion each year and provides 33,000 jobs, according to the University of Wyoming’s Jay Kemmerer WORTH Institute. It’s the second largest economic driver after energy. But few values in the West are as sacrosanct as private land ownership, which means the issue of who can access those millions of acres of corner-locked private land quickly pits two core Wyoming values against each other.

For Semerad, the case is like David and Goliath, a battle between wealthy and regular Americans. “The range was free to travel and free to stargaze and pick flowers. In America, it was ‘go roam, go see, go venture’ and that was the ethos of the American West. Only, in the last 75 years you had monied landowners that started to act like it really wasn’t that way,” he says.

Before the 10^th Circuit Court made its ruling, Semerad said a decision in the hunters’ favor would provide an important correction. Not only would it tell sheriffs and county attorneys throughout the West that people can access public land over corners, but it would also affirm that “America was never predicated on someone being able to buy up the landmass and block everyone out.”

But Magagna said it wasn’t so simple. None of the prior cases, such as Leo Sheep, cleanly addressed whether or not the public could cross corners to access to public land. And if landowners are suddenly forced to allow people to corner cross, he said, they may be less willing to allow full access to their private properties to hunt and fish via those old-time handshakes and newer easements and access programs.

Now those in the West may find out. In March, the 10^th Circuit Court ruled unanimously in favor of the hunters. While many hunters rejoiced that they would now have access to millions of acres of land, others expressed caution, wondering about a possible US Supreme Court ruling and concerned that the gray area enveloping what it means to live and recreate in the West still remains.

Christine Peterson is a freelance journalist covering the environment, wildlife, and outdoor recreation for local, regional, and national publications from her home in Laramie, Wyoming.

Header image: Checkerboard caused by forest management, as seen from the International Space Station. (NASA)

Finding future solutions for recreational access to corner-locked land

By Heather Hansman

The hunters, technically, never touched the ground. In 2021, four men were looking to hunt on a section of Bureau of Land Management land that was surrounded by a privately-owned ranch in southeast Wyoming. So they used an A-frame ladder to climb from one parcel of public land over a fence to another parcel of public land without stepping on private land. But the landowner called it trespassing and sued them for $7 million in damages for traveling through his airspace. The case, which eventually made its way to federal appeals court, sparked up a long-simmering battle about public land access.

Across the western US, 8.3 million acres of public land are corner-locked. This means they are bordered on all sides by private land and the public can only access them by corner crossing, like the hunters did. Historically, most corner crossers have been hunters, anglers, and other recreators looking for uncrowded wild places. With an almost 50 percent increase in recreational use of many public lands over the last 15 years, more people are looking for those quiet places than ever.

Corner crossing is not technically illegal. There’s no specific law on the books that prohibits it or makes it legal, although states have tried to codify it the past. So, it’s murky, because it can be viewed as trespassing and because it’s not always clear where the corners are, or how to access them. The hope for clarity, after so many years, is what made the Wyoming case so significant.

In March, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the hunters were in the right to cross, as long as they didn’t touch private land. The ruling applies only within the 10^th Circuit Court’s jurisdiction of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.

Despite what many characterize as a strong ruling in support of public access, questions remain about the use of corner-locked federal land, including how the ruling will be enforced, where it applies, and how recreationists can ensure that they’re avoiding private land. As the dust settles, it’s worth looking to existing models for safe, legal access to understand what the future might look like, and how both members of the public and landowners can navigate the ongoing uncertainty.

Currently, one of the most effective ways to access corner-locked land is through easements, which are deeded rights of way that allow the public to cross specific pieces of private land in pursuit of recreation. Easements can look like a lot of different things, from historic rights-of-way, to conservation easements that allow for walk-in public access, to roads that traverse checkerboarded private sections, making the public land easy to access.

While effective, they are not without barriers. Lisa Nichols, senior advocacy manager for OnX, the mapping company that has spearheaded research about corner-locked lands, says that one hurdle is knowing where historic easements lie. “There are a lot of easements out there that are only on paper or in file cabinets,” she says.

That’s starting to change, thanks in part to the 2022 Modernizing Access to Our Public Land Act, which mandated that the US Department of the Interior, Forest Service, and Army Corps of Engineers digitize and standardize all their maps so they can be available to the public by 2026. As those records are revealed, public access is improving. When OnX worked with BLM to digitize easement records in Montana and the Dakotas, they uncovered access to 29,600 acres of public land that had previously been considered locked.

For purchasing new easements, the biggest hurdle is valuation. Government entities can only pay at the federal appraisal rate, which Nichols says is often well below what landowners are willing to accept in exchange for granting perpetual access. “You have to find the right landowner who is interested in opening that up for not much return,” she says. It’s also possible that the recent spotlight on corner-locked lands will prompt investment from the private sector, which isn’t limited to the appraisal rate.

Another future hurdle—which is a barrier to almost any kind of public access across private land—is the enforcement of boundaries and figuring out who is responsible for upholding it. Public agencies or nonprofits rarely have the capacity to monitor the boundaries of an easement, but landowners don’t want the burden to fall entirely on them. Nichols says that in their research on locked corners, landowners complained about bad actors crisscrossing their property, blocking their roads, or otherwise disrespecting their rules when they had some level of access. “We heard stories of horses getting shot because [someone] thought it was an elk,” she says. “The majority of hunters are good, it just takes one bad apple.” Landowners are already expressing similar concerns about corner crossers potentially disrupting their operations.

To avoid the messy boundaries and technicalities around easements, government entities or non-profit groups like land trusts can also acquire private land for public use, through land swaps or direct purchases. “Those have historically been the best way to convey land into conservation,” says Joel Webster, Interim Chief Conservation Officer for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. He says they will continue to be an important tool, even if corner crossing becomes more widespread. “It allows for public access,” sure, but it also “makes properties more contiguous, it’s always beneficial for wildlife, because it can get rid of fencing. It’s good for conservation.”

These land acquisitions can be successful all around, like in 2019 when the Bureau of Land Management bought 11,148 acres of checkerboarded private ranch land near the John Day River in Oregon that opened access to previously locked or hard-to-access land and rivers. But finding appropriate land to swap or buy, and making sure the value makes sense for everyone, can be tricky. In a 2017, Aspen-area land swap between the BLM and Leslie Wexner, the billionaire CEO of brands like Victoria Secret, nearby residents objected, saying that the exchanges benefited the private landowners more than the public.

Like easements, finances are a key piece of effective land swaps, and pricing land becomes complicated when some of that land is in the public domain, or a public agency is purchasing the land. When appropriate landscapes and valuation are established, there is funding through the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to make it happen. Webster says that 3 percent of the fund is set aside for increasing public access, and it has been a powerful tool for finding and buying appropriate pieces of land.

But the funding isn’t infinite, and not all locked lands are good candidates, so land swaps aren’t a silver bullet. “We’re not going to buy our way out of the checkerboard challenge. It’s not economically or politically physically feasible,” Webster says. That’s why public access advocates are celebrating the potentially much broader impacts of the corner crossing ruling.

Land and money doesn’t always have to change hands to build up access to corner-locked lands. There are also management programs that incentivize landowners, in various ways, to grant recreationists access. Often called walk-in programs, 27 states administer these kinds of voluntary public access programs.

In Montana, the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks established the Unlocking Public Lands program in 2013 to explicitly target corner locked parcels of public land. The program gives landowners a tax credit for allowing public access. “The landowner has to be open to the public for [at least] six months and one day, and they have to allow all recreation,” says Access Program Manager Jason Kool. It is slightly restrictive, he says, “but it’s helping keep access options and producers on the landscape. We find that they want to allow public access and to be compensated for it.”

According to Kool, the programs work best when the landowner wants to provide access, when the rules are clear, and when the agency carries the burden of regulation, so that enforcement doesn’t fall to the landowner. It’s time and labor intensive, but it’s effective. “We have seasonal technicians we bring on to help manage properties, so the hunter management burden is taken out of the landowners hands,” he says.

Unfortunately, they have struggled to enroll landowners. Kool says their biggest challenge is finding a balance between flexibility for landowners and consistency for the public, who want clear information about where they can recreate. To address those issues, they are increasingly relying on digital tools that are more accurate and make it easier for the public to find information. In the future, they hope to geofence public access areas on publicly-available digital maps, so users can clearly know when they’re in the right place.

Users knowing the exact location of themselves and boundaries is critical to the success of not only easements and walk-in programs, but also corner crossing itself. It’s another challenge that user groups are working to overcome.

Some corners are marked physically with stakes, rocks, or blazed trees, but not all are, and survey markers can be hard to find. Some survey markers are also better than others; onX advises people not to cross unless they find a “survey-grade” marker, usually called a pin or a monument. The physical survey marker is key because GPS technology isn’t quite accurate enough to get you precisely to the corner. Nichols says the variance is usually plus-or-minus 16 feet.

Beyond that, many areas aren’t surveyed, digitally or physically, says Devin O’Dea, western policy and conservation manager for Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a nonprofit that promotes recreational access. In response, there’s a rise of grassroots opportunities for nonprofits and volunteers, like the citizen science group The National Map Corps, to mark correct survey points. “There’s an opportunity for the recreation community to help agencies with identifying the corners and assist with mitigating potential conflicts,” he says.

Along with higher resolution data, that kind of accuracy could open up opportunities for landowners to allow access and the new ruling gives both recreationists and landowners more clarity, too. “I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of reality that landowners who are open to having people cross at a corner could provide a physical gateway at the corner with signage up saying, ‘you’re welcome to cross, make sure you do it here,’” Nichols says.

All these pieces, from perpetual easements to walk-in programs, will be tools for access to corner locked lands in the future. And both recreationists and public land advocates need all the tools they can get.

Heather Hansman is a freelance journalist based in Southwest Colorado. She’s the author of Downriver and Powder Days. You can find out more at heatherhansman.com.

Header image: Elk Mountain, Wyoming. (Doc Searls)

Revisiting the original nature conservation model

Perspective from Robert B. Keiter

Yellowstone National Park—established in 1872 and widely regarded as the world’s first national park—represents the initial dominant model for nature conservation both here and abroad. Early US national park designations generally followed the “Yellowstone model,” which entailed setting aside broad swathes of publicly owned lands in the American West to protect native wildlife, scenic features, and wilderness-like settings. The new parks prohibited any permanent human presence, including the original Native American occupants. Other countries soon followed the same model, creating their own national parks and wildlife reserves that often also excluded human communities. It represented an enclave approach to nature conservation that has, over the years, proved problematic for failing to fully attend to the needs of natural and human communities.

Not long after Yellowstone was established, it became apparent that the high elevation park was not large enough to meet its wildlife conservation goals. In 1882, General Phil Sheridan coined the phrase “Greater Yellowstone” as part of an effort to address the absence of critical winter habitat within the park’s boundaries and highlight the need for landscape-scale thinking. Although park expansion efforts went nowhere, the establishment of forest reserves—now known as national forests—adjacent to Yellowstone during the ensuing decades helped with the habitat problem. Less than a century later, ecological science validated Sheridan’s concerns, giving rise to the “Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem” concept, which has further extended nature conservation efforts beyond the park’s boundaries.

Outside the United States, the “Yellowstone model” provided the impetus for early national park designations, but also proved problematic in many locations. Centuries-old human communities frequently occupied and used landscapes suitable for national park status. Local residents regularly depended on park resources for their sustenance and were unwilling to ignore wildlife depredation and damage incidents that threatened their livelihood. As in the US, it was also apparent that ecosystem-level conservation was required to protect native wildlife while inside and outside the parks, and to secure local cooperation with these efforts. Enter the community-based conservation idea, designed to promote coexistence by enlisting residents in the conservation effort through local participation in park management decisions, community economic benefits derived from the preservation efforts, and compensatory programs addressing wildlife incidents.

Over time, this evolving Yellowstone conservation model, which featured an enlarged focus on the entire ecosystem and the need to integrate community concerns into wildlife conservation efforts, has been institutionalized in the developed and developing world. One example is the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve program, which employs concentric zoning that emanates outward from a protected core national park and permits a heavier human presence and more intensive uses the greater the distance from the park. Another example comes from Nepal with its joint Makalu-Barun National Park and Conservation Area designation that reduces the level of protection in the surrounding conservation area. In Poland, buffer zones help protect wildlife straying outside its national parks.

A similar and related evolution is evident in US national park conservation policies. As time has passed, Congress has expanded the original national park idea by devising new designations—national monuments, national recreation areas, national preserves, national seashores, and the like—all of which deviate from the strict Yellowstone model of nature conservation. More recently, the ecosystem management idea has taken hold in the Greater Yellowstone region and elsewhere, informally yet effectively extending nature conservation efforts beyond park boundaries. Often drawing upon international models, local communities are now regularly brought into conservation efforts in recognition of the undeniable linkages between residents and nearby national parks. Significant efforts are also afoot to incorporate original Indigenous occupants and their traditional ecological knowledge into national park conservation efforts. And these trends will likely continue. Simply put, the original “Yellowstone model” has evolved as the US has adapted its nature conservation strategies to meet today’s challenges, sometimes employing conservation strategies that have originated elsewhere.

Robert B. Keiter is the Wallace Stegner Professor of Law, University Distinguished Professor, and founding Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment at the University of Utah. His books include the forthcoming Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone: Controversy and Change in an Iconic Ecosystem, To Conserve Unimpaired: The Evolution of the National Park Idea, and other works.

The Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee celebrates six decades of cooperative conservation

By Kristen Pope

Chip Jenkins, Superintendent of Grand Teton National Park, knows he has to pay attention to what happens beyond his park’s borders. He points to the Snake River, which he says is “arguably the lifeblood” of the park. “The headwaters are up in the Bridger-Teton National Forest. It flows through Yellowstone, flows through the John D. Rockefeller Parkway, through Grand Teton, and on through the community. So it’s affected by what goes on outside the boundaries of Grand Teton National Park.”

It’s not just water, but also people, plants, and wildlife that cross boundaries, which is why Jenkins and other regional land managers participate in the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC). The committee is not a formal decision-making body, but instead aims to foster voluntary collaboration and cooperation among agencies. Celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year, the GYCC shows that the simple act of coming together, even without extensive power and resources, improves conservation of large, complex landscapes.

The committee’s purview—the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—is approximately the size of Maine, with Yellowstone located right in its heart. Described as “one of the largest nearly intact temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth,” it is home to vast herds of wild bison and elk, grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles, and even lynx and wolverines.

It also spans three states—Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming—and includes national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, and other federal, state, and private lands. Because each land manager has their own unique policies, regulations, and priorities, issues that affect a broad area can get complicated. The GYCC, which began in 1964 as a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Forest Service and National Park Service, has evolved over the decades to address this challenge.

“In the beginning, it was just the national parks and forests agreeing to communicate and collaborate at that time on routine matters,” says Tami Blackford, GYCC executive coordinator. Over the years, the group took on larger, more collaborative projects. In the 70s, members worked together to develop consistent management direction for grizzly bears. In the 80s, the group worked to aggregate their management plans and in 1990 they released a draft Vision for the Future, which culminated in the 1991 Framework for Coordination.

As the GYCC focused on wider projects, it only made sense to bring more land management agencies to the table. In 1999, the committee brought in the US Fish and Wildlife Service and in 2000, it created an executive coordinator position. In 2012, the Bureau of Land Management joined, followed in 2020 by the state wildlife directors of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. While cities, counties, private landowners, and tribes are not official committee members, the GYCC welcomes their engagement.

Together, committee members build relationships, exchange information, collaborate around cross-cutting issues, and support each other’s work through annual grant opportunities. “There are really rich opportunities to share and coordinate and not duplicate effort,” Blackford says. The GYCC’s three strategic priorities are maintaining resilient landscapes, responding to increased visitor use, and strengthening coalitions, partnerships, and communications.

Jenkins, who currently chairs the committee, says the committee “provides a framework and form where we come together on a regular and routine basis. First and foremost, it provides the catalyst for us building relationships where we get to know each other as people. We get to know each other in terms of the work that we do, the challenges that we face, and what we’re trying to do.”

More than 300 people participate in the GYCC’s nine subcommittees, which tackle the transboundary challenges of fire management, hydrology, invasive species, whitebark pine, native fish, wildlife, climate change adaptation, and clean air. Coordinated research and planning efforts have led to joint products like the 2021 Greater Yellowstone Climate Assessment and the 2024 Whitebark Pine Interagency Agreement.

The GYCC also funds around $250,000 of projects in priority areas each year. The 2024 round of selected projects focused on the ecological health of birds, creating smoke ready communities, stream restoration, and more. One project addressed long-term monitoring of whitebark pine—an important fall food for grizzly bears—in northern parts of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, while another project funded an outreach and prevention campaign about invasive species in the region.

“The Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee’s fingerprints are on a lot of really cool projects in that part of the world,” says Brian Nesvik, the just-retired director of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “While a lot of that ground is protected, there are still some real conservation needs. So the [GYCC] doing the work they’ve done over all these years is a really good thing for the ecosystem.”

Arthur Middleton, associate professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley thinks the committee has especially shined on certain issues, like work with grizzly bears and migrating ungulates. “The GYCC really is a place for these emerging issues to more rapidly become understood and kind of integrated into the planning across all those units,” he says.

In other cases, limited funding and personnel hours, as well as the spectrum of things the committee cannot control—like climate change and what happens on private lands—means the non-decision-making body’s power has been limited. “I think like anything that’s existed for 60 years, the GYCC has had its ups and its downs in terms of meeting its mission and intended goals, Middleton says, though he points to the positive impacts of the organization saying, “I strongly feel that conservation has been improved by the GYCC.”

Jenkins acknowledges there have been bumps in the road, but believes the teamwork is paying off, pointing to the recovery of grizzly bears, wolves, and bald eagles, among others. “The reason that we have had these conservation successes is because people at the local community, at the state, and at the federal level have chosen to pursue and to work towards improving the condition of the ecosystem,” Jenkins says. “Yes, it’s been contentious, yes there have been fights, yes there’s been political compromise, yes there’s been litigation, but arguably the ecosystem is in better health and better shape today than it was 60 years ago. And it’s because people set out to be intentional and thoughtful about the decisions that they want to make and recognize that they need to do that in a collaborative way.”

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.

~

Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee Photo: 

A new tool to suppress an invasive fish shows promise

By Isabella Sadler

In October 2019 and 2020, helicopters hovered above the pristine waters of Yellowstone Lake, surrounded by an autumn landscape of yellowing aspen trees. The helicopters carried a weight equivalent to 14 small cars—17,000 kilograms of circular, brown pellets—which they released near a small, rocky island in the lake’s West Thumb. The pellets rained down, sinking to the lake’s bottom, where managers hoped they would suppress the thousands of invasive lake trout born in Yellowstone Lake annually. Years in the making, this novel technique targets a life stage that past efforts have been unsuccessful at controlling, and shows promise as an effective, low-cost way to eradicate invasive fish.

Yellowstone Lake is home to the largest population of genetically pure Yellowstone cutthroat trout, a spotted, golden-colored trout native to the western US. This culturally and ecologically significant fish attracts anglers from across the country and serves as a valuable food source for many land mammals and birds in the area. But lake trout—an invasive, predatory trout species first discovered in Yellowstone Lake in 1994—threaten cutthroat trout and the animals that rely on them.

Lake trout eat cutthroat, which led to a severe decline in the cutthroat population after the lake trout population expanded. Lake trout also do not occupy the same ecological role as cutthroat, which has implications for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a whole. Cutthroat are medium-bodied trout that reproduce in streams connected to Yellowstone Lake, making them available as food sources for many land animals that pass by streams. Lake trout, however, are much larger and do not access the streams, making it nearly impossible for land predators to catch them. Because of this, fewer cutthroat means less food for brown bears, black bears, eagles, osprey, and more.

To combat this problem, the National Park Service fisheries program began removing lake trout in 1995 with gillnets, which are large nets that entangle fish as they attempt to swim through. While lake trout numbers in Yellowstone Lake have decreased since 2012, the invasive trout persist in large numbers and pose a substantial threat to the cutthroat. In addition, gillnetting is very expensive, and young fish, typically two years old and below, are small enough to slip through the gillnets.

Thus, park service biologists sought methods to kill young lake trout before and just after they’ve hatched. To do this, they targeted where lake trout lay their eggs, attempting to make these spawning grounds inhospitable to the developing fish. After years of research, they developed pellets that mimic the way a decomposing lake trout carcass removes oxygen from the water. Releasing these organic, “carcass-analog” pellets in the water around the spawning grounds reduces oxygen concentrations to lethal levels, smothering lake trout eggs. This only harms the lake trout young because cutthroat spawn in streams far away from Yellowstone Lake.

It’s also cost-effective. More than $2 million is spent gillnetting lake trout in Yellowstone Lake each year, while it’s estimated that applying pellet treatments to all known spawning sites would cost just $250,000 annually. Gillnetting would still be needed to target adult lake trout, but fewer fish hatching each year would slow their reproduction and reduce overall costs.

Park biologists piloted this new method in 2019 and 2020, dropping the pellets on Carrington Island spawning reef. In the two years following pellet treatments, biologists didn’t catch a single lake trout hatchling in traps surrounding Carrington Island, implying that nearly 100% of lake trout eggs died at this location. While these results are very promising for controlling young fish, Carrington Island is just one of 14 known spawning sites in Yellowstone Lake. Researchers do not yet know how suppressing hatchlings at one site will impact the lake-wide invasive trout population and would need to treat more spawning locations to determine the pellets’ overall efficiency and impact on the lake trout.

Biologists must also consider potential negative side effects of this treatment. Two studies are currently evaluating the effect of pellet treatments on Yellowstone Lake. One project collects tissue samples of algae, zooplankton, macroinvertebrates, and fish to measure the extent to which pellets are incorporated into the food web. The other project evaluates the impacts of pellet treatments on water quality and nutrient dynamics. Because pellets contain nitrogen and phosphorus—nutrients that can stimulate the growth of algae—there is a chance that the pellets reduce water quality and affect other organisms in the lake. While they don’t expect unintended effects, biologists want to be certain before expanding the treatment to more spawning sites.

Overall, Yellowstone National Park is moving forward with cautious optimism. The cutthroat trout population has greatly recovered due to these efforts, but lake trout control will need to continue into the foreseeable future. Carrington Island will be treated again in autumn 2024 and 2025, and the pellets’ initial success has inspired further development and research. Not only is this new method a milestone in the park’s 30-year battle against lake trout, but the work in Yellowstone Lake is paving the way for management in other large, deep lakes where controlling invasive species has been extremely difficult.

Isabella Sadler is a PhD student in the Program in Ecology at the University of Wyoming. Her research interests involve how invasive species and disturbance alter freshwater ecosystems.

Header Image: The angular rock surrounding Carrington Island in the West Thumb is prime lake trout spawning habitat in Yellowstone Lake (Koel et al., CC BY 4.0).

Indigenous trail crews empower the next generation of environmental stewards

By Cecilia Curiel

For the last several years, Shonto Greyeyes of the Diné (Navajo) Nation has made his living in some of the Southwest’s most sought-after landscapes—from the Red Rock District in Sedona, Arizona, to Utah’s Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Greyeyes got his start doing river restoration for Coconino Rural Environmental Corps, based out of Flagstaff, Arizona. Following his time at Coconino, he moved north to work in Montana before returning to the Southwest to lead high school conservation crews in Williams, Arizona, intern at the Red Rock Ranger District, and lead adult crews in Grand Staircase for the Arizona Conservation Corps. He now serves as a program coordinator for the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps.

I spoke to Greyeyes while he tabled at the Nizhoni Days Pow Wow in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With the sound of voices, drums, and laughter in the background, he described the impact that Ancestral Lands and programs like it can have for Indigenous peoples. The Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps aims to engage Indigenous youth and young adults in conservation and land management through hands-on service projects. Like other conservation corps programs, Ancestral Lands crews work with government agencies and private organizations on trail building and maintenance, ecological restoration, historical preservation, fire prevention, and more. However, they do this work with the added goal of restoring Indigenous peoples’ historical connection to the land. Or as Greyeyes put it, such programs can “lead our nations back to ecological and cultural wellbeing.”

Ancestral Lands is now the model for a much larger initiative. In the summer of 2022, the US Department of the Interior launched the Indian Youth Service Corps (IYSC), meant to provide employment and training for young Indigenous peoples, as well as to “increase Tribal engagement in environmental stewardship activities.” Through her role leading the department, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo Nation has ensured that Indigenous stewardship is part of efforts to address topics such as climate change and environmental justice. The Interior Department’s role, Haaland said in her acceptance speech to the position, is “not simply about conservation—[it’s] woven in with justice, good jobs, and closing the racial wealth gap.”

Both Greyeyes and Secretary Haaland see corps programs as not only a means of employment and community service, but also an opportunity to reengage Indigenous people in stewarding the landscapes they inhabited for thousands of years before systematic removal by the US government. The IYSC can contribute to community resilience by promoting ecological and social restoration, shared knowledge, and skill development. Achieving these goals—if history has taught us anything—will largely depend on how well programs integrate Indigenous knowledge and values.

~

Programs like the IYSC and Ancestral Lands have a long historical precedent going back to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) under President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The CCC was intended to provide employment and economic relief for young men in response to the Great Depression. Many viewed the distress experienced by displaced workers who could no longer provide for themselves or their families not only as a financial burden, but a social and psychological one. The CCC was Roosevelt’s answer to mending these problems. In fact, historian John Paige notes that the program was steeped in ideas for social and cultural development, with influence from 19th-century philosopher William James who wrote that such programs would make men, “tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation.” While this sentiment clearly leaves out the active role of women, it shows that conservation corps programs were more than tools for employment, but active in social construction and community building.

While the Civilian Conservation Corps was widely developed for white men in a still-segregated 1930s America, it did recognize the hardships that the Great Depression placed on Indigenous and Black Americans, creating divisions for both. The CCC Indian Division did not suddenly dispel the difficulties that Indigenous people have and continue to endure, but the program was largely lauded as a success within Native communities, especially when compared with other policies of the time.

For example, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, implemented just one year after the CCC, intended to restore Indigenous cultural knowledge, strengthen tribal governments, and promote native traditions as a counter to earlier government policies of Native American assimilation. However, it relied on US government authority to enact many of its stated goals, and the program failed to promote tribal autonomy and cultural resilience.

The CCC Indian Division, on the other hand, had the simple goal of providing employment and training to Indigenous peoples while making improvements to both tribal land and government land that other divisions of the CCC worked. The training prepared Native American participants to eventually hold over 750 of the approximately 1,200 managerial positions in the CCC Indian Division. This was a key difference from the Indian Reorganization Act, which was largely run by white governmental officials. The acknowledgement that Indigenous peoples were best suited to make decisions in Indigenous affairs was a critical element of the CCC Indian Division’s success.

~

That self-determination is something that Ancestral Lands and the IYSC strive to replicate. “If we have people from our communities that look like us performing these tasks and showing up authentically through failure and success, the whole process,” Greyeyes says, “when we see our people doing it, you know, it becomes a possibility.” But truly empowering marginalized communities, Greyeyes emphasizes, also requires creating the opportunities and mechanisms for them to succeed. “If I could train myself out of a job,” Greyeyes continues, “that would be ideal.”

Training crew members to move up in the organization isn’t the only goal of programs like Ancestral Lands and the IYSC. They want crew members to take their training into the community. Shamira Caddo of the White Mountain Apache Nation describes starting her work in conservation. “At the time, there were no jobs on the reservation,” she says. So when she got a call from the Arizona Conservation Corps White Mountain Apache office she jumped at the chance, even though she wasn’t quite sure what she had signed up for. All she knew was that she needed to be at “Pinetop, with camping gear and clothes for, like, eight days.” Her first days at Arizona Conservation Corps were “a crash course” operating chainsaws to clean up after wildfire and clear trails. This was her first job off the reservation, and she eventually became a crew leader. Caddo says one of the most influential parts of her experience was, “being exposed to different departments within the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] or Park Service, or, state, local and federal agencies. It was like, wow, you know, they actually have these jobs. And I can actually do them.” She now works at a farm in Minnesota that brings Indigenous practices into the community through garden projects, and she credits her chainsaw training in part. “That’s one of the reasons why this organization hired me, “she told me. “They needed sawyers on the farm.”

The corps offer more than just skill-building. Many of the corps members I spoke with explained that conservation programs meant their first chance to leave the reservation and engage with their ancestral lands. Maasai Leon, of the Chiricahua Apache Nation, has been working in conservation for several years, including recruiting Indigenous members for the Arizona Conservation Corps. He explained that many of the crew members he worked with had never left their reservation. “And those that had,” he says, “have never really seen a lot of the national parks and monuments and areas that we work in.” Programs like IYSC and Ancestral Lands reconnect Indigenous peoples to land they were violently displaced from by the creation of our national forests and parks. These programs offer a renewed opportunity to help Indigenous youth understand “the connections that we have to place and how it’s been disrupted through the creation of parks and forests,” Greyeyes tells me. “In a larger wellness community aspect, [it’s about] creating opportunities for young Indigenous people to develop their own story and develop their own narratives as a part of their identities when working in parks.”

Working these lands, Leon explains, is important for Indigenous youth to engage their past. For example, one crew worked on a historical preservation project on Fort Bowie, where many Indigenous peoples were held prisoner during the Indian Wars. “It would be wise to put Native people on that trail to know the history,” Leon says, explaining that understanding the complexities of historical sites, the legacy of settlement, and the nuance of tribal relations is important for Indigenous peoples.

This gets at another mission of programs like Ancestral Lands and IYSC: to foster community resilience by creating and sustaining cultural lines of heritage through interaction and passing knowledge from one generation to the next. This is why, Leon says, when the crews are together, he tells stories, especially those involving other tribes represented on the crew. “I always encourage people to learn more about their culture,” he says. “And if there was any way that we could provide more information for them, or put them in touch with an elder, we would.” Opportunities like these are important in keeping alive the knowledge and traditions that Indigenous peoples share through story.

Leon offered another example of a crew member working with Anasazi artifacts, explaining that for his people, the Diné, coming into contact with such ancient cultural pieces meant he needed to perform a cleansing ceremony known as smudging. Leon continued, “When it comes to ceremonies, we’re very understanding, you know…if someone needs to go to a ceremony, we will work with the individual to try to get them to wherever they need to go.” Caddo shared a similar experience of a young Navajo crew member who refrained from sleep during a lunar eclipse as part of a tradition passed down from his grandmother. Caddo says she had to think on her feet, but because time off for ceremonies is structured into the Ancestral Lands program, it was easier to make adjustments for the crew member. Making space for ceremony within conservation programs represents a different way of being with the land, of recognizing Indigenous peoples’ stories and ceremony in conservation.

Caddo, Greyeyes, and Leon’s experiences help us understand how Indigenous conservation crews can empower young Indigenous peoples to carry knowledge into the wider community. In calling for a national Indian Youth Service Corps, Secretary Haaland said, “Increasing [Indigenous youth’s] access to nature early and often will help lift up the next generation of stewards for this Earth.” Connecting Indigenous youth with the land is a significant step in combatting some of the environmental and social injustices that Native peoples have experienced, and one step toward the broader goals of passing Indigenous knowledge to future generations and embedding it into our policies and land management strategies.

Cecilia Curiel is a graduate student at the University of Wyoming studying English and Environment and Natural Resources. She hails from Eugene, Oregon, the traditional homelands of the Kalapuya people and the people of the Grand Ronde Reservation and Siletz Reservation. She loves to be in the outdoors, a passion she first developed working in conservation corps in the North and Southwest.

Header image: Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps crews empower young Indigenous peoples to carry knowledge into the wider community. (photo courtesy Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps)

Booming elk numbers create a rare opportunity for hunting and tourism

By Janey Fugate

While scouting for mule deer on a chilly October evening in southeast Wyoming, the last thing I expected to see was several hundred elk. But there they were, at last light, filtering over the crest of a bare ridge and winding down the valley floor towards a river. Awestruck, I watched from a crouch. Cold eventually forced me to my feet and I started moving back along the hillside towards my car. As I walked, blaze orange vests alerted me to the presence of three other hunters lying behind a rock, rifles at the ready. I knew that they were waiting for the elk to step across an invisible line onto public land.

This image of three hunters watching a band of wary elk moving across a darkening landscape has stayed with me. Elk numbers are up across Wyoming, creating more hunt opportunities and possibly more funding for state wildlife agencies. At the same time, this ties to a host of management challenges related to changing property ownership, balancing in-state versus out of state tag allocations and finding enough access to private and public land for more hunters on the landscape. While these challenges aren’t unique to Wyoming, they are particularly acute here as the state moves to adapt to a growing outdoor recreation industry.

Against this backdrop, the state is leveraging its need to control elk numbers with a desire to boost the outdoor recreation economy through increasing nonresident tag allocations, with implications for game managers, landowners, and hunters.

~

In the age of environmental crises, it’s unusual to hear of a wild animal that’s thriving. But in Wyoming, elk are at historic highs. In the 1980s, the state had an estimated 65,000 elk. Since then, elk populations have nearly doubled to reach over 120,000. Barring a few herds in the northwest, elk today exceed the desired numbers determined by game managers.

“It’s the heyday of elk. It really is,” says Lee Knox, a wildlife biologist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Knox attributes elk population growth to a range of factors, including elk’s adaptability to different habitats and food sources relative to other hoofed mammals, their long-lived nature, and ability to learn to avoid hunters by hanging out on private lands.

Another major, though indirect, contributor to elk abundance could be a lessening of hunting pressure driven by changing landownership and changing landowner values. What were once large working ranches that supported hunting are now often divided into smaller ranchettes and developments, where elk are viewed less as a nuisance or a hunting resource and more as an attractive feature of the property. On the flip side, some landowners have consolidated large ranches that are less open to hunters than in the past, effectively locking up herds of elk from hunting pressure. This is particularly relevant in eastern Wyoming, where the amount of private property drastically limits hunter access compared to the western part of the state, causing hunters to crowd into patchy public lands.

While having too many elk is certainly a better problem to solve than its opposite, overpopulated elk can take a toll on the landscape. Elk can damage fences and get into haystacks or crops, compete with mule deer for habitat, and can be tough on willow and aspen stands, which are already declining as the climate gets drier.

Yet, elk are one of the most coveted kinds of quarry by both nonresident and resident hunters. As such, elk offer a particularly salient window into how big game hunting, a $250 million industry in Wyoming, fits into the tension around how to grow the state’s recreation economy while best managing habitat, access, and hunter satisfaction.

The Wyoming Wildlife Taskforce—a group of stakeholders from around the state that formed to tackle issues related to wildlife management and the sporting industry—may have found a way to bring elk to more sustainable levels. Their proposal could reap the economic benefits of attracting more out-of-state elk hunters, who pay significantly more than Wyoming residents to hunt. They proposed several legislative changes to elk hunt management in the state.

The first change was to remove a longstanding 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags. The state legislature approved this change, which will go into effect in 2024. The demand for these tags has steadily exceeded their availability. According to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, in 2022 there were 30,000 applications from out-of-state hunters for the 7,250 allotted elk tags.

In addition to removing the cap, the taskforce recommended splitting the nonresident tags into two categories: special (40 percent) and regular licenses (60 percent). The price of nonresident special licenses, which are designated for coveted hunt areas that offer higher rates of success on larger, mature animals, will increase to just under $2,000. For the regular tags, the nonresident price will remain at its current level of $692.

Boosting the number of licenses allotted for nonresident hunters like the taskforce proposed can be controversial when it’s perceived as taking away opportunities for in-state folks. This can be especially sensitive in Wyoming because the state already has higher nonresident tag allocations than neighboring states. Compared to Montana, which limits nonresidents to 10 percent of the available tags, Wyoming allocates 16-20 percent of elk, deer, and pronghorn tags to nonresidents. Jess Johnson, policy coordinator for the Wyoming Wildlife Federation, a sportsmen’s advocacy organization, says that maintaining a culture that prioritizes in-state hunters is a critical concern for residents.

“A fundamental part of being from these states is the ability to draw these tags,” she says. “Hunting, fishing, and trapping is a constitutional right in the state of Wyoming. Folks are very protective over it, understandably.”

According to the taskforce, these changes will not affect resident elk prices or the quantity of tags available to resident hunters, but they will affect Game and Fish’s budget—for the better.

Currently, 80 percent of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s budget is funded from hunting license fees. And 80 percent of that 80 percent comes from out-of-state tags. For example, an elk tag that currently costs nonresidents $692 is only $57 for residents. Doubling the price of a portion of these nonresident tags for elk, as well as deer and pronghorn, like the taskforce proposed has the potential to boost Game and Fish’s $90 million budget by 6 percent, adding an estimated $5.7 million in revenue each year.

“To me, that’s a win-win when you can approach the market value of a product and help your state agency,” says Sy Gilliland, president of the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association and a member of the taskforce.

According to an economic survey conducted by the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association, the number of nonresident hunters applying increased by 10 percent from 2015 to 2020, reflecting a broader trend in big game hunting. With shows like Meateater popularizing hunting and a growing desire to eat ethically harvested meat, the demand for western hunting isn’t showing signs of slowing down. And Wyoming is well positioned to capitalize on it.

“We have a world-class wildlife resource, and the world knows it,” says Gilliland. “Elk hunting right now is the best it’s ever been in modern history. [People] want to come here and experience it, so raising the cost of licenses can slow down or recoup the real value of that license.”

Gilliland has been guiding hunters all over Wyoming since 1977. Owning the state’s largest outfitting business, he’s led black bear hunts, moose hunts, and everything in between. As an outfitter, Gilliland also occupies a unique space in the cross section of hunters’ values. Outfitters need nonresident hunters to support their businesses, while still desiring the solitude, abundant wildlife, and public lands access that residents cherish.

He hopes that the change in the nonresident tag quota will indirectly benefit his industry, and Wyoming. His logic is that nonresidents willing to pay for the higher price of an elk tag may be more willing to hire a guide.

“The best bang for your buck is to put that license in the hand of a nonresident using outfitters,” says Gilliland. “He leaves the most dollars on the landscape.”

And repeat customers are the easiest the retain. Jim Moore, a Virginia native, has been coming with his son to hunt elk in the Wyoming backcountry for the last 10 years. Moore says that for him, harvesting a bull elk is just a part of the deeper experience of being immersed in nature. While telling me about his hunts, he described sharing a kill with a red fox that helped itself to Moore’s elk carcass, finding wolf tracks in the snow, and nervously keeping watch on a nearby grizzly bear while his guide field dressed their elk. With his outfitters, he’s hunted both private and public land.

“It’s a real opportunity for people that they can use commonly owned land,” says Moore. “It’s millions and millions of acres of opportunity for people.”

~

And while it’s true that the opportunities to hunt public land are vast and worth celebrating, Wyoming’s overabundant elk are just as often found on private lands. This is where access comes in, a hunting buzzword. Increasing access to both private and public land is a big piece of the puzzle. Both Knox and Gilliland believe that nonresidents may be more willing to hunt private lands—and pay the steep fees landowners often charge for access—than residents are. For instance, in eastern Wyoming, Knox says local hunters are more likely to travel elsewhere in the state for hunt opportunities rather than try to get access to private lands.

“Most [residents] will go west if you allow it because there is more public land,” says Knox.

Gaining permission to hunt on private land presents a barrier for hunters that don’t have existing relationships with the landowner. When I watched the three hunters hiding on the ridge, they had no alternative other than to wait at a distance and pray the elk would cross onto public land. Similarly, in Area 7, a hunt unit near Laramie Peak, there were roughly 1,000 elk tags sold to hunters, but the hunter success rate was only 30 percent. In this area, there’s not a shortage of public land, but a lack of access to the private land where the elk hang out.

Private lands can even inadvertently prevent public lands from being accessible, an issue recently brought to the forefront of national news with the now infamous “corner crossing” case. In 2021, a landowner sued four out-of-state hunters for crossing a corner of his ranch to access public land on Elk Mountain they drew elk tags for. This more than $7 million lawsuit, still ongoing, pits the rights of public users against the rights of private landowners, adding to the friction felt around the West.

“The relationship between landowners and hunters is breaking down,” Johnson says. “There’ve been bad actors on both sides, frankly.”

This dynamic is painfully real to Ross Cook, a hunting mentor of mine whose family has owned a ranch outside Lander for the last 35 years. A few years ago, he caught two hunters going to retrieve a mule deer buck they shot illegally on his property. This is a more extreme case of the kinds of harmful behavior that deter landowners from opening their properties to hunters, but it illustrates a rising lack of trust.

“I have zero interest in letting people come and hunt that I haven’t shot with and worked with,” says Cook. “Vetting someone is really hard and most ranchers don’t have time for that.”

There are many reasons why landowners may not want hunters on their property, despite how much money people will pay for access. These range from not wanting the hassle of managing strangers and concerns over ensuring safety to not agreeing with shooting animals on principle. But for Cook, it comes down to finding hunters that share his ethics.

“I would love for people I know who have elk tags to come up to my land and go to town… but finding individuals you can trust is really hard.”

Landowners may have another reason not to allow elk hunters on their land. Cook says that landowners often claim money in elk-related property damages from Game and Fish instead of allowing hunters on their land, which incentivizes a cycle of limited access and over-abundant elk. Programs like Game and Fish’s “Access Yes,” where landowners can make their property open to hunting, address this dilemma but haven’t seen much success.

So bridging a desire to capitalize on nonresident hunters’ dollars with the potential to knock back elk populations is complicated on a lot of levels. The next step may be to match a rise in nonresident hunters with properties willing to let them hunt elk.

“How do we get more hunting pressure on reservoirs of private property?” asks Gilliland. “The best bet for that is to put more licenses in the hands of nonresidents who have the ability to hunt that land and have the ability to pay landowners.”

~

Hand in hand with removing the 7,250 cap on nonresident elk tags is a taskforce proposal to create new nonresident elk hunting units to change how managers can distribute hunters across the landscape. These changes signal how Wyoming is grappling with a growing demand for western hunting and a desire to both protect its wildlife and maintain its identity in a changing West.

And though distrust between landowners and hunters is a thorny issue, some of these challenges may hopefully open the door to creative solutions that give hunters access to private property where elk congregate. For example, in other parts of the state and the region, online startups are connecting recreationists to private landowners with hunt opportunities, similar to Airbnb for hunting.

The economic benefits of attracting and capitalizing on nonresident hunters and the revenue they might bring to the state are significant, as is the potential to bring elk to more sustainable levels.

But for Gilliland, there is another, less tangible benefit to welcoming more nonresident hunters to Wyoming.

“We change lives, I have seen it so many times. [Hunters] are so grateful to the state of Wyoming for this opportunity,” he says. “I’ve guided congressman, they are hunting their public lands… when they come out here and they see their wilderness for the first time, they are advocates and they go home and help form policy.”

Janey Fugate is a storyteller and a master’s student with the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming under Matthew Kauffman. Her research focuses on how Yellowstone bison, after being reintroduced to the park, established the migration patterns they exhibit today.

Header image: Elk stand silhouetted against a sunset in Wyoming. (Shutterstock)

How place and technology meanings shape conflict around outdoor recreation development

By Wes Eaton and Curt Davidson 

In the fall of my first semester as a visiting professor at the University of Wyoming, a stranger knocked on the half-open door to my new office and said, “There’s a town in Wyoming where people are saying that an outdoor recreation development proposal is tearing their community apart. Want to look into it with me?”

The stranger was Curt Davidson, a new professor of outdoor recreation and tourism. I had never heard of the thing stirring up the controversy, a via ferrata, which Davidson described as a protected climbing route—rungs, ladders, and cables installed on cliffs to assist climbing. It was the community conflict that intrigued me; people around Lander, Wyoming, were increasingly divided on the prospect of building a via ferrata in the nearby Sinks Canyon State Park. I am a social scientist specializing in conflict and collaboration around controversial environmental issues. I wondered if lessons from conflicts around water management and energy transitions, which I’d studied in the past, might apply in the world of recreation development. I told Davidson I was in.

As we began meeting and interviewing the people of Lander, we soon found that via ferrata meant much more than iron rungs and ladders, and rarely even that. We wondered if what seemed to be an intractable controversy about specific issues might instead be viewed through the lens of how Sinks Canyon State Park and via ferrata mean different things to different people. We hoped this lens could help foster understanding in the situation at hand, as well as provide a means for decision-makers and developers to sidestep future conflict.

We began our research by reading up on Lander, a former mining town southeast of Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation, now known as a recreation destination and gateway to the Wind River Mountains. Between the Winds and Lander, the middle fork of the Popo Agie River runs through Sinks Canyon, where visitors access campgrounds, hiking and biking trails, and sport climbing from a state highway. Sinks Canyon State Park covers 600 acres near the mouth of the canyon, while the rest is managed mostly by the US Forest Service.

Next, we scoured news articles to find out how the situation got to where it was. From what we could tell, officials from Sinks Canyon State Park had released a new master plan in October 2020, following a series of public meetings and a public comment period. The plan included a proposal to install a via ferrata on a north-facing cliff in the canyon, which a group of community members had pitched as a way of attracting visitors and boosting the local economy.

After the plan’s release, a retired Wyoming Game and Fish biologist and peregrine falcon expert raised concerns that the proposed via ferrata route crossed a known nesting site, kicking off what quickly emerged as an organized campaign. Lander residents rallied around the mantra “Keep Sinks Canyon Wild” and formed the vocal citizens group Sinks Canyon Wild, which distributed yard signs, knocked on doors, and organized community events. A group of about 40 opponents even surprised Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon on the Lander airport tarmac when he flew in to attend another event.

In the face of growing criticism, someone close to the debate suggested an alternative site on a south-facing cliff called the Sandy Buttress, but that didn’t end the controversy. In addition to concerns about the peregrines, critics accused Wyoming State Parks of ignoring public comments, making decisions behind closed doors, and valuing the state’s outdoor recreation economy over local concerns. As the campaign against the via ferrata grew, vocal support dwindled to a private matter. By the time we arrived, Wyoming State Parks was the sole public voice for via ferrata in Sinks Canyon.

Our first visit put us at the Middle Fork Restaurant on Lander’s Main Street in time for a late breakfast. Our rented university sedan gave us away as outsiders, but when we announced that we were researchers interested in conflict surrounding the via ferrata issue, the community opened to us, with thoughtfulness and engagement from all sides.

We began interviewing people that day. Over the course of three months, we spoke with 29 stakeholders, including recreators, wildlife enthusiasts, business owners, Wyoming State Parks employees, area residents, and local tribes. During our interviews, as well as informally at the Lander Bar, we were often told, “I don’t understand the via ferrata.” This could mean, I don’t understand why someone wants the via ferrata here, as well as I don’t understand why people are so upset over building it here. These weren’t statements of ignorance, but claims offered with humility. People in Lander and elsewhere, while clear about their own positions, were genuinely flabbergasted by those on the other side of the matter. Within this gap in understanding, we heard “via ferrata is tearing this community apart.”

As researchers, we were not trying to parse out who was right or might be at fault, or claiming to have special insight as to whether the via ferrata should or shouldn’t be installed. In fact, less than a year after we completed our interviews, Wyoming State Parks canceled the project, rendering what ought to be done a moot point. Instead, we aimed to better understand the fundamental drivers of different positions on the issue by focusing on the idea of “fit.”

A substantial body of social science research says that community support for new development is most likely when the technology involved is seen as “fitting” with a place. A perceived mismatch brews resistance. Because people draw on their personal experiences and community norms when forming ideas about the world around them, the same place and technology can mean very different things to different groups. As such, there is a wide range of ways people feel about or relate to a place (place meanings) that can match or mismatch a range of ways people view a technology (technology meanings). Social scientists disentangle and map these various possible combinations into “symbolic logics,” where a position of support or opposition is the logical conclusion of a particular pair of place and technology meanings.

Using these ideas, we proposed that critics in Lander saw the via ferrata as inappropriate for Sinks Canyon, whereas proponents saw via ferrata as a natural fit. This framework is useful for making sense of seemingly irreconcilable differences because it shows how any position is perfectly reasonable, given a certain view of Sinks Canyon and a specific way of thinking about via ferrata.

Take for example the people we interviewed who see Sinks Canyon as a wild and sacred place. They emphasized the diversity of wildlife along the park’s canyon walls and the dense riparian habitat along the Popo Agie River, pointing to the opportunities for wildlife enthusiasts. They highlighted that Wyoming Game and Fish has an agreement with State Parks to “preserve and manage important habitats for wildlife.” They also frequently referenced Indigenous groups and culture and were concerned that the proposed location “puts this via ferrata now right at the entrance of the canyon, right on a cliff that has petroglyphs and pictographs, right on an area that is culturally very significant.”

Now consider those who insist that the rungs and cables of a via ferrata would be an eyesore, saying, “We don’t need more junk going on up there, you know?” To them, the physical infrastructure—the rungs and cables—of the proposed technology doesn’t fit with the place’s wild aesthetic. They stressed this mismatch by labelling the via ferrata things like “playground,” “jungle gym,” and “plaything”—objects belonging in more developed recreation spaces.

Others opposed the via ferrata because of a different mismatch of place and technology meanings. They agree that Sinks Canyon is a wild and sacred place and objected to what they saw as the via ferrata’s commercial nature. The proposal at the time used a concessionaire to manage the route and included what officials hoped would be a nominal fee; opponents declared this out of sync with the public nature of a state park. Focus on the commercial dimension aligned with larger suspicions people held about the role of private interests and political motivations in the project, which ultimately came to symbolize valuing economic progress over wild places that ought to stay special. As one critic said, “We need a whole different lens to look at the planet, and my attention to the via ferrata is about that. It’s a little, trivial, kind of ridiculous thing, but it represents [an inability] to grasp the fragility of our planet and Wyoming’s unique place in how wild it is compared to the rest of our planet, and especially our country.”

Even proponents of the via ferrata agreed that it did not belong in wild spaces, with one saying, “I would not want the next via ferrata to be in the middle of the Wind River Range, on Gannett peak and the Gannett Peak Wilderness Area.” But to that interviewee and others, Sinks Canyon State Park is not wild. Instead, they called it a “gateway” and a “transition zone” between the wilderness of the Wind River Range and the development found below. Some called the state park a “planned” place, pointing to existing recreational infrastructure like parking lots, restrooms, campgrounds, and the highway running through it all. The pocketed, limestone cliffs themselves have made Sinks Canyon a hotspot for rock climbing, with more than 500 developed sport routes (although most of these are in the national forest, not the state park).

Another interviewee pushed back on the idea of the canyon as sacred, particularly the proposed via ferrata location at its mouth, saying “You’ll not find any sites where [Indigenous groups] did any camping or any ceremonies, no evidence of that activity.” Instead, it is a “pass-through,” used for travel, migration, foraging, and hunting—but not for sacred purposes.

To many sharing these pro-via ferrata views, Sinks Canyon State Park is seen as an appropriate place for new recreation development that avoids encroaching on what they see as truly sacred or wild places elsewhere. In general, via ferrata proponents focused not only on the technology as a form of recreation and education in keeping with the canyon’s current use, but also as a way of enhancing and equalizing that use.

The canyon’s cliffs currently offer mostly expert level climbing routes. In contrast, the via ferrata’s handles, cables, ladders, rungs, and safety clips could make climbing more accessible to more users. One advocate was excited that “we could open this up to underserved populations and have ways of allowing school groups and college groups and you name it. The opportunities are there for us to use this in an equitable way.” More generally, the via ferrata represented increased access to the health benefits of outdoor recreation by providing another means for people to spend time outside.

Another proponent highlighted the via ferrata as an interpretive tool that would complement the state park’s educational activity repertoire, saying “I see this more as an education tool to teach the climbing sport or climbing pastime lifestyle, but also teach about the beauty and the history of Sinks Canyon.” In this view, climbing the via ferrata would fit in alongside visiting the mysterious sink and rise of the Popo Agie River, experiencing the diverse local wildlife, and exploring hidden waterfalls and caves. It’s not a threatening, novel technology so much as “one more hook to catch kid’s interests,” as one interviewee said, or a way to increase visitors’ “stay time,” another said.

Other folks who saw Sinks Canyon State Park as a place of extensive use and development still attached a different meaning to it: the canyon is vulnerable to, rather than ideal for, additional development. To them, further alteration represented a line in the sand they didn’t want to cross, with one saying, “My greatest worry is basically that Sinks Canyon is death by a thousand cuts. You know, this [via ferrata] gets it a hell of a lot closer to the thousand. I mean [the park] is just a small area.”

Many interviewees shared stories of trampled paths, increased trash and pet waste, and overuse of the canyon by recreationists of all types. They worried that what was once the norm for them within the park—solitude, peace, wonderment—was disappearing, and that more users brought in by the via ferrata would only add to the problem. “If we don’t limit ourselves and ask ourselves to lighten up our footprint in the outdoors,” said one via ferrata opponent, “we’re going to trample it to death.”

Our research generated a figure illustrating some of these “symbolic logics” of fit that underlie support for, or opposition to, the via ferrata proposal. Admittedly, this framework does simplify things. Making meaning in everyday life is hardly so concise or linear. Nor are the given examples exhaustive of all the possible meanings and combinations of meanings people ascribed to place and technology.

There were, for example, people who saw Sinks Canyon as a recreational space but didn’t view the via ferrata as a legitimate form of recreation, saying it wasn’t “real” climbing. There were also those who saw via ferrata as worthwhile but blamed the shortcomings of the south-facing Sandy Buttress, warning it would be “a rinky-dink version of what a via ferrata should be.”

Despite the simplification, these logics remain a powerful tool for illuminating and charting out the values, motivations, and deep place attachments shaping peoples’ contrasting views on what is good for their community. This can get us a long way towards our research goal of building understanding among supporters and opponents, if people are willing to learn about, and take seriously, the meanings others hold that are different from their own. They can still disagree about whether Sinks Canyon is a wild place or a transition zone, but if they set aside their doubt for a minute and try on the other position, they may see the logic in it. We like to sum this up by saying, “If you’re furious, get curious.”

A close look at our symbolic logics reveals additional insights. First, it can be perilous to ignore or violate locally salient place meanings, no matter how beneficial a technology seems. In the case of via ferrata, even a technology that increases recreation’s accessibility (which is generally viewed favorably) was no match for concern for protecting a space that symbolized threatened wilderness. Second, different combinations of place and technology meanings can lead to the same position, which opens creative thinking for sidestepping potential outdoor recreation development disputes.

Communities and decision-makers wanting to manage contention around outdoor recreation development might take advantage of these insights when designing community engagement processes. A project leader might begin by finding out which meanings are tacit and prevalent for a place. This could give a sense of what types of development might fit well. Next, they could join, extend, or begin a new community dialogue to build understanding and potentially forge new, shared meanings along the way.

The best time to tap into and create shared meanings is before a big development announcement. That’s because people often hold multiple meanings for the same place—recreating in a place they hold sacred, for instance—but these meanings tend to congeal when someone feels “their” place is threatened. New technologies often constitute a big threat to place; the via ferrata proposal, for example, catalyzed the Sinks Canyon Wild citizens group dedicated to protecting Sinks Canyon when there wasn’t one before. Once a community builds a shared understanding, it can work to identify a reasonable “fit” between place and outdoor recreation development.

In this way, lessons learned from the Sinks Canyon via ferrata conflict, which appears to have ended, might assist other communities and decision-makers wanting to get ahead of conflict around outdoor recreation development. The authors, Wes and Curt, hope to support and continue learning from and with Wyoming leaders willing to build on this approach for current and future projects.

Wes Eaton is visiting assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work is on the science and practice of collaborative approaches for managing complex socio-environmental challenges.

Curt Davidson is an assistant professor with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. His work focuses on recreation with special attention given to recreation development, health and wellness, and experiential education.

~

Acknowledgments: We thank the stakeholder interviewees who shared their stories with us. We lightly edited some interviewee quotes to protect personal identities. Our research was funded by the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation, Tourism, and Hospitality (WORTH) Initiative, which is the sponsor of this issue of Western Confluence

Header image: Climbers enjoy a via ferrata in Spain. (Photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash.)

Rock climbers in a remote Wyoming canyon may help shape national public lands climbing management

By Nita Tallent

On an early summer day in 2018, a group of sport rock climbers—packs laden with ropes, quickdraws, harnesses, shoes, and chalk—clambered up a makeshift trail in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. They were eager to ascend the steep, awe-inspiring limestone walls strewn with pockets, cracks, ledges, jugs, and crimps that promised to deliver challenge and exhilaration.

“We noticed some excessive use of glue in routes at a really well-established area up in Mondo-Beyondo,” recalls Mike Ranta, cofounder of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society. “We had no judgement on that at the time.” However, their opinion began to shift when they saw how many new routes included holds manufactured through chipping, drilling, and gluing the rock. Such manufacturing is anathema to standards for climbing route developers to “leave the rock in as close to its natural state as possible.”

A booming popularity in the area alongside ambiguity over what constitutes ethical route development has made Tensleep Canyon the stage for an outdoor recreation conflict. Now, as the Bighorn National Forest resumes work on a climbing management plan for Tensleep Canyon to both address issues associated with overcrowding and define what amount of rock alteration is allowed when developing climbing routes, climbers and public land managers around the country are watching closely. The Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally.

~

Tensleep Creek cuts through an evergreen shrouded canyon down the southwest face of the Bighorn Mountains in northcentral Wyoming. Climbers have scaled the towering limestone and dolomite cliffs of Tensleep Canyon since the early 1980s when the “godfather” of Tensleep, Stan Price, hand drilled and installed ten bolts to set “Home Alone,” one of the first sport routes in the canyon. Hours from any major airport and lacking the glamor of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, residents and recreators believed the canyon was immune from being overrun. However, in the 30-plus years since rock climbers with ropes saddled over their shoulders first burrowed into these forests, word of the canyon as a treasure chest of routes waiting to be established spread.

Since the 1980s, climbers have developed more than 1,200 climbing routes in the Tensleep Canyon area. After local climber Aaron Huey and others compiled The Mondo Beyondo: Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming, the first published guidebook to the canyon in 2008, climbers and route developers flocked to the area. Today, climbers from around the world have discovered the canyon, making it the central jewel in the crown of any self-respecting sport rock climber. Still many local climbers would have preferred the jewels stay a secret.

The surge in popularity has brought problems. Heavy traffic and illegal parking along the Cloud Peak Skyway (Hwy 16) and Forest Road 18 create safety concerns. A weaving network of unapproved trails to crags is eroding soil. Dispersed camping sites close to waterways and the road are on the rise. Uncontrolled dogs run amuck. Masses of climbers inadvertently spread invasive plant species such as houndstongue and Canada thistle in addition to leaving behind human and pet waste and litter. At the base of climbing walls, staging areas have compacted soil and damaged shrubs and grasses. Boisterous crowds interfere with nesting raptors.

Recognizing that recreation was on the increase, in 2005 the Bighorn National Forest published a Forest Land and Natural Resource Management Plan announcing that within 10 years a climbing management plan would, “inventory existing rock-climbing routes including approach, associated trail locations, and human impact,” in Tensleep Canyon.

In 2011, the Access Fund, a national climbing advocacy organization, created a Tensleep Canyon stewardship group, now known as the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, to work with the Bighorn National Forest on the climbing management plan. The Access Fund’s goal was to collaboratively develop a plan “that both preserves the current climbing experience at Ten Sleep [sic], while conserving the resource for future generations.”

However, 2015 came and went and the promised plan had yet to be created. By the time Ranta and his buddies witnessed manufactured holds and chipped rock in Tensleep Canyon in 2018, it was not unusual to find climbers from around the world crowding at the base of the crags, anxiously waiting their turn. In that same year the Access Fund included Tensleep Canyon as one of “10 Climbing Areas in Crisis,” noting that “world-class climbing” invited crowds too great for the area to sustain.

~

As the popularity of rock climbing grew in Tensleep Canyon, so did the number of route developers looking to leave their mark on the limestone walls. This was not without controversy. For those not in the climbers’ sphere, establishing a new route is the magnum opus for many climbers, the pinnacle of their progression and status in the climber community. Setting or developing a sport rock climbing route involves drilling holes into the rock and inserting bolts along an ideal line that is safe and appropriately challenging. Ideally, route setters do this with minimal impact to natural geology, flora, and fauna of the rock face. They may “clean” the route, which generally involves brushing aside loose rock, vegetation, debris, lichens, and moss. They may also “comfortize” hand holds by smoothing and sanding sharp edges typical of the Bighorn Mountains to minimize torn and bloody “climbers’ hands.”

Generally, cleaning and comfortizing in dolomite and limestone are considered acceptable modifications by modern climbers, but the “manufacturing” Ranta and his buddies encountered in 2018 is not. The Access Fund defines manufacturing (a practice which they oppose) as “any conscious attempt to expand a hold, create a new hold (drilling pockets, expanding a pocket with a tool, creating a hold with glue), reinforcing loose holds with glue, or adding/placing an artificial hold on the wall in an attempt to curate a climbing movement or experience, or to create a route other than what is naturally available.” The conundrum is in the fine line between “cleaning and comfortizing,” which many climbers accept, and “manufacturing,” which many climbers oppose.

In an attempt to self-regulate in Tensleep Canyon, Ranta and other climbers approached world-renowned route developer and owner of a nearby climber campground Louie Anderson, who they suspected of manufacturing. The actual words exchanged during the June 30, 2018, meeting are forever lost with only contradictory recollections remaining. The gist was to agree upon what was and was not acceptable for comfortizing routes in Tensleep Canyon and put a stop to manufacturing. However, route manufacturing continued.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and the Access Fund denounced the manufacturing. In addition, three original Tensleep Canyon route developers—Charlie Kardaleff, Aaron Huey, and JB Haab—posted an open letter condemning the practice on the Tensleep Canyon Facebook page. Taking the debate to a national audience, Rock and Ice magazine published the letter in 2019. In addition, citizens reported the damage caused by the manufacturing to the Forest Service believing that it was the Forest Service’s role to stop the practice.

In July 2019, a few climbers, frustrated by the Forest Service’s failure to police the manufacturing, closed manufactured routes by removing bolts, clipping bolts flush with the rock surface, filling holds with glue, and affixing bright red padlocks to the lowest bolts. If the intent was to generate a reaction, that intent was met. The Forest Service, the Access Fund, and Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition quickly condemned the bolt cutting and padlocks, which escalated tensions and further divided forest users.

On July 19, 2019, much to the dismay of many in the local and national climbing community, Powder River District Ranger Traci Weaver issued an official regulation prohibiting any new route development until release of the Forest Service’s long-promised climbing management plan (which was slated to be completed by 2015, yet still in 2019 nowhere to be seen). Soon after Weaver’s announcement the Access Fund released a statement which denounced both route manufacturing and “vigilante bolt chopping” forecasting concern that due to these actions the “climbing community could lose the privilege of climbing in Ten Sleep [sic] altogether…”

Eighteen months later the Powder River District held a virtual meeting to request input from the public about climbing in Tensleep Canyon. The goal was to identify desired condition of the forest and clarify practices that would ensure respect for the natural and cultural resources owned by all Americans yet entrusted to the care of the US Forest Service. During this February 2021 meeting, District Ranger Weaver announced that the Bighorn National Forest had contracted Maura Longden, climbing management consultant with High Peaks, LLC, to lead development of the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan.

Members of the public submitted over 500 comments both during the public meeting and in response to a scoping notice, summarized on the Bighorn National Forest National Environmental Policy Act planning web page. The public expressed a gambit of concerns ranging from the fear that the Forest Service would prohibit all forms of rock climbing; to concerns about negative impacts to natural and cultural resources; to questions about the absence of non-climber, outdoor, recreator, Indigenous, and diverse perspectives in the discussions; to other issues. The overarching concern was whether and how the Forest Service would curtail route manufacturing while allowing route development to resume.

~

Despite the Forest Service’s best intentions, effort on the climbing management plan paused again following Weaver leaving her position in June 2021. In 2022, a new leadership team joined the Powder River District. District Ranger Thad Berrett, Lead Climbing Ranger Ryan Sorenson, and Recreation Program Manager Kelsey Bean began reaching out, learning about the needs of the many forest users, and signaling that efforts on the stalled plan would resume.

In 2023, the Powder River District staff continued to familiarize themselves with issues and the stakeholders, rights-holders, and national interest groups as they resumed work on the Tensleep Canyon climbing management plan. According to the Forest Service’s web page, the plan will respond to “increased development and impacts from rock climbing,” and will entail protections for soil, vegetation, geology, water, cultural resources, wildlife, and social resources. The Forest Service confirms it will codify the route development practices and ethics outlined in Best Practices for Development and Rebolting in the Bighorn Mountains and Bighorn Basin, a document the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition and Access Fund created with the Forest Service, while prohibiting manufactured holds and routes. It will also guide management for access trails and staging areas, human and pet waste, dog and human interactions with wildlife and livestock, commercial use, gear caches, dispersed camping, and visitor capacity. Climbing management plans are subject to the National Environmental Policy Act, which will allow for public participation. Ranger Berrett acknowledges that momentum on the plan has been slow and says not to expect implementation until 2024.

Meanwhile, US Forest Service leadership and climbing advocacy organizations such as the Access Fund are following the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Management Plan because it has the potential to set precedent for rock climbing management on public lands nationally. Despite the fact that 30 percent of climbing in the United States occurs in national forests, there is no national policy defining acceptable, standard practices meaning each of the more than 150 national forests must establish their own policies. The Access Fund is advocating for nation-wide guidance to bring “consistency and stability” among national forests. Eyes are on how the Bighorn National Forest codifies climbing in Tensleep Canyon because this climbing management plan may pave the way for other forest plans as well as national policy.

In addition, two bi-partisan bills put forward in Congress have the potential to shape management of fixed climbing anchors across designated Wilderness areas on public lands, according to the Access Fund. The Protecting America’s Rock Climbing Act (H.R. 1380) from Representatives Curtis (R-Utah), Neguse (D-Colorado), and Stansbury (D-New Mexico) and the America’s Outdoor Recreation Act (S. 873), introduced by Senators Barrasso (R-Wyoming) and Manchin (D-West Virginia) intend, in part, to “bring consistency to federal climbing management policy and protect some of America’s most iconic Wilderness climbing areas,” as summarized by the Access Fund. Both bills direct public land managers “to outline any requirements or conditions associated with the placement and maintenance of fixed anchors on federal land.” They also would require agencies to solicit public comment when drafting the requirements, giving climbers a voice in shaping climbing practices on public land.

~

As they await the final climbing management plan, an unofficial local climber group is promoting ethical climbing and route development. The Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, led by Mike Ranta and Adam (Ace) Ashurst, creates updated editions of Aaron Huey’s original climbing guide. In 2023, this informal collective completed the Tensleep Canyon Climbing Guidebook 11^th edition: The Invasion, which explicitly opposes the “intentional alteration of the rock by chipping, drilling pockets, or gluing for the purpose of enhancing holds (manufacturing).” The society’s strategy is to call out manufactured routes so local and visiting climbers can avoid or boycott them out of respect for the landscape, sending the message that manufactured routes are not to be revered or tolerated.

The Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition is also doing its part to engage climbers in stewardship of Tensleep Canyon. The coalition’s Christa Melde invites everyday climbers of all colors, genders, sexual orientations, and ethnicities to join the conversation around the climbing management plan. She believes the solution to sustainable climbing in Tensleep Canyon “just boils down to education.” To that end, Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition members reach climbers through one-on-one conversations about stewardship and Leave No Trace practices at crags and trailheads. They also advance engagement and education at the annual Tensleep Climbers’ Festival each July.

Everyone who Western Confluence spoke to for this article—the Bighorn Climbers’ Coalition, the Access Fund, a permitted rock-climbing guide, the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society, and independent, unaffiliated climbers—expressed a spirit of renewed enthusiasm and cooperation, unanimously pledging their support to the Forest Service staff in completing the climbing management plan. Now, land managers and climbers around the country are watching to see how the Bighorn National Forest not only tackles the challenges of parking, camping, trail use, and waste disposal in a remote yet world-famous climbing destination, but also how they draw the line between ethical route development and forbidden manufacturing.

Nita Tallent, PhD, is a plant ecologist, retired federal natural resource professional, and a master’s student in the Haub School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming. Her current research focuses on the motivations of private landowners to allow outdoor recreationists on their lands. Nita is also an avid outdoor recreator who dabbles in sport rock climbing.

Disclosure: Adam (Ace) Ashurst of the Tensleep Canyon Aerospace Society is the author’s step-son.

Header image: A rock climber ascends a sport route in Tensleep Canyon, Wyoming. (Photo by Nita Tallent.)

Can outdoor recreators minimize impact in the backcountry while connecting deeply with place?

By Sam Sharp

It’d been raining all day when we heard them: bullfrogs, croaking from the woods. We stopped, dropped our packs, and marched through the leaf litter to find them.

One student pointed out a big, green frog covered in mud.

“Can I hold him?” he asked.

Sure, I wanted to say. Just be gentle. But I hesitated. The frog had stopped croaking by now, frozen under the stare of ten 8th graders. In fact, all the frogs had stopped. We’d walked as carefully as we could, but our footsteps had still reduced their miniature pond to a silent puddle of mud.

“Let’s just look for now,” I finally said. “We don’t want to bother him.”

The student sighed. “Okay,” he said.

That night, after we set up our camp, I overheard him talking with a friend. This was the first frog he’d seen “in real life.”

That moment stuck with me. As an outdoor educator, I’d led these students into the backcountry—ten days in the Appalachian Mountains—to foster relationships with themselves, each other, and nature. At the same time, we tried to minimize our impact on this place. Most outdoor professionals would agree that holding wild animals, especially walking off trail to do so, violates that effort. It goes against Leave No Trace, or LNT—the ethical guidelines most outdoor recreators follow to reduce our impact on the backcountry.

And yet, something about LNT just didn’t feel right. There were times that, as with the frog, trying to minimize our impact resulted in minimizing engagement. But it wasn’t just missed opportunities. Sometimes it felt like we practiced Leave No Trace merely to create an illusion that we hadn’t been there. For some kids, this illusion of absence is a reality. Many of our students came from backgrounds that have been and still are excluded from outdoor spaces. It disturbed me to tell them to make our camps look like they were never there—to scatter rocks we used to tie down tarps, for example—when, just a week before, they had never been.

I left that job with a lot of questions. I could see how following Leave No Trace helped us clean up after ourselves and protect the wild quality of these mountains. But I worried that framing their whole relationship with nature around LNT might compromise students’ connection to them. At a time when access to wildlands is out-of-reach for many young people, could we adapt LNT to not just minimize our impact on nature, but also maximize meaningful experiences with it?

In the 1970s, Americans began flocking to national parks and forests in unprecedented numbers. Remote places suddenly faced a new source of pressure: aggressive, reckless recreation. Hillsides eroded as hikers walked off trail. People fed bears, then got attacked by them. Campgrounds became clogged with hot-dog wrappers, charcoal, and human poop. And unattended campfires often leapt into the forest.

People’s behavior began to shift, slowly, in the 1980s, when the National Park Service, Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management cooperatively established a program called “Leave No Trace” to inform responsible backcountry travel.

Leave No Trace has since become a non-profit organization, offering day programs, workshops, and multi-day “LNT Master Educator” certification courses. It has become the ethical underpinning of the most outdoor education groups and is the most widespread outdoor ethic in the United States. You can find its seven principles displayed at most trailheads, outdoor retailers, and National Park visitor centers. The principles are:

1. Respect wildlife
2. Travel and camp on durable surfaces
3. Dispose of waste properly
4. Plan ahead and prepare
5. Leave what you find
6. Minimize campfire impacts
7. Be considerate of other visitors

Leave No Trace is simple and actionable. Pack out your trash, it tells us. Stay on trail to reduce erosion. Let animals be. And cook on a propane stove, not a campfire, to limit burn scars and wildfires.

“All the principles are science driven,” says Derrik Taff, an associate professor of Outdoor Recreation at Penn State. He was on sabbatical at LNT’s headquarters in Boulder when we talked over the phone.

“I’ve seen them work firsthand, as a park ranger and outdoor facilitator,” he continued, “but they’ve been empirically shown as well.”

He described a study showing that LNT training led a group of kids to act with more consideration for nature.

I asked him how following LNT as an ethic, however helpful it might be in reducing our impact, might lead to a detached relationship with the outdoors. He saw that as a misteaching of the principles.

“It’s really just about being a good human… Like, let’s try to protect nature and be respectful of each other. Who could argue with that?”

I couldn’t argue with Taff on the point of whether or not LNT works. But I still felt like there was something off about it—something wrong with using it to drive our relationship with the environment. David Moskowitz, author and professional wildlife tracker, put this feeling into words.

“It [LNT] forwards the idea of wilderness,” he told me over the phone one day. “It erases the reality that North America wasn’t a wilderness, it was inhabited by people that we stole the land from.”

His criticism is not isolated. In a paper titled, “Beyond Leave No Trace,” researchers from Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara argue that “as a practical environmental ethic, Leave No Trace disguises much about human relationships with non-human nature.” It promotes an optimal relationship to nature based on human absence, another researcher argues, further alienating people from wild places.

“I had students who were so afraid to mess things up outside that it just became a stressful experience,” Moskowitz continued. “As if, you know, as if we were in a museum.”

He cleared his throat. “When it comes down to it, LNT is really about making it more aesthetically pleasing for affluent people to recreate.”

Moskowitz’ criticism of LNT resonated with me. It felt arbitrary to tell students not to flip rocks upside down when looking for crawdads, for example, when a flood might easily do the same thing. But again, Taff’s support for it made sense too. I’d chased off many racoons who’d come to scrounge on dinner scraps we hadn’t properly disposed of.

I wondered if there was a middle way—if I could find someone who has adapted LNT to inform a more holistic, complex outdoor ethic.

I immediately thought of KROKA Expeditions, which I’d heard about when I was working for Outward Bound. Based on an organic farm in New Hampshire, KROKA embraces a unique blend of organic agriculture and backcountry travel in its curriculum.  I reached out to Emily Sherwood, a co-director at KROKA, to learn more.

Sherwood made it clear that KROKA rigorously follows LNT. But it doesn’t seem to minimize intimate experiences with nature. On some courses, students build canoes from dead trees they fell, using hatchets they maintain. Sherwood also noted that they have a unique way of travelling in winter.

“Our winter travel is very intensive,” she started. “We use a large tent that can fit all of our group, and a wood stove that can heat the tent…And we’re really conscious about how we harvest those [tree limbs]… and how many we take from a single tree.”

KROKA students also cook almost exclusively with wood because it’s so abundant in the northeast. Campfires also foster more intimate experiences with a place and other people than gas, from carefully harvesting wood in the area as a group, to seeing the flames crackle while it cooks your dinner. Still, it’s still a surprising decision, given that propane stoves are widely considered to create less visual impact.

“It feels like Leave No Trace on a much more global scale,” she said. “We’re not using a petroleum product. And that feels like the right thing.”

We agreed that LNT looks different in different places. Here on the high plains of Wyoming, I rarely, if ever, make a fire (though I have in winter, when enough snow falls in the mountains to make a fire pit). But I’ve only been living in Wyoming for little more than a year. I wondered how I could continue framing LNT in my own budding relationship with this place.

Perhaps Moskowitz, a former KROKA instructor himself, said it best. “Let’s accept that negative impacts exist and that we need to clean up after ourselves. But we can reimagine Leave No Trace as something that is helpful in terms of keeping a clean campsite, but also realistic about our relationship with the natural world.”

This can still sound cerebral to me. But responsible recreation might not be as complicated as it seems.

On Day 5 of another expedition, we came upon Crater Lake in Pennsylvania’s Delaware Water Gap. It was 90 degrees out, clear and sunny. The students wanted to swim. I wanted to tell them no: this is a fragile, and highly trafficked, glacial lake. But I talked it over with my co-instructor, and we made a plan.

We scouted out a spot without much vegetation on the edge of the lake, and the next thing I knew all ten students were in the water, shoes off, howling like coyotes.

Later that afternoon, we air-dried, put on our hiking boots, and prepared to continue on our way. Our impact on the water seemed negligible—perhaps a bit of sunscreen in an already well traveled lake. But the water’s impact on us was momentous.

“I needed that,” one student said, closing his eyes. “And I didn’t even know that I did.”

Sam Sharp is a writer from Ohio. A former Outward Bound instructor, he is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing with a concurrent degree in Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming.

Header image: Students form a huddle and chant in Crater Lake. (Photo courtesy Philadelphia Outward Bound School.)

Cultivating pollinator support at state parks

By Amy Marie Storey

In 2019, a plain mowed field in Oklahoma’s Sequoyah State Park transformed into an acre of wildflowers. The verdant space served both visitors and pollinators. It became home to deer and raccoons, butterflies and bees. Park adventurers wandered the mown paths, enjoying the extra experience before heading home. The author of this metamorphosis was Angelina Stancampiano, a state park ranger who received a grant to revitalize the space as a pollinator garden. Following a recent move to Wyoming, Stancampiano hopes to recreate this success in five new state parks, combining community engagement and conservation to write a little hope into the big picture story of pollinators.

As it happens, the story is currently in a plot twist and it’s not a fun one; pollinators are in decline globally and although researchers have catalogued as much as possible about these declines, the causes are not yet defined. Conservation efforts of all sizes—from community courses on pollinator-friendly gardening to participation in community science initiatives—hold extra weight during this critical period. Recreation sites may seem an unlikely player in pollinator conservation, but this summer, Wyoming State Parks are taking up the challenge. With the agency’s focus on visitors and outdoor recreation, the trick was fitting pollinator conservation in with the parks’ people-oriented goals.

No comprehensive answers exist to guide long-term conservation of pollinators, including those in the western US. The once common western bumble bee (Bombus occidentalis), for example, once ranged down most of the US’s west coast, but today has disappeared from almost all its former range. A recent study showed Wyoming as one of the last strongholds for this species. Three other native Wyoming bumble bees are currently petitioned for listing under the Endangered Species Act alongside the western bumble bee. But a listing is just one, lengthy step of the conservation efforts. Data must be thoughtfully gathered and research conducted to uncover the causes of decline. Only then can conservation measures be designed to combat losses.

Meanwhile, patches of floral habitat like community and home gardens may be a lifeline to species in peril. According to Scott Schell, entomology specialist for the University of Wyoming Extension, supporting pollinators requires neither great skill nor great investment. “If you plant it, they will find it,” he says. He points out that people enjoy plants, too, and a garden can be a boon to human health. “I don’t see any downside in trying to help pollinating insects.”

Stancampiano is one of two Wyoming State Parks interpretive rangers, whose missive is to ensure that park resources and experiences reach the visitors coming from within and beyond the state. This means helping people build connections with the land through tours and activities. The opportunity to combine her role with pollinator conservation arose when Wyoming State Parks District Manager Kyle Bernis tasked Stancampiano and her counterpart, Linley Mayer, with applying for a Hearts of STIHL grant. Run by outdoor power equipment manufacturer STIHL, this grant funds sustainability- and conservation-related projects in parks.

“The three prongs were education, conservation, and restoration. And it just asked you to pick one,” Stancampiano says of the grant’s prompt. “But I decided to try and target all three.” She proposed Wings Over Wyoming, a long-term program that aimed to provide positive experiences to park visitors and support pollinators at the same time. Stancampiano outlined an ambitious plan to plant pollinator gardens and hold educational workshops that promised to impact parks, visitors, and wildlife statewide.

Last fall, STIHL awarded Wyoming State Parks $20,000 for the proposed project. Over the winter, the Wings Over Wyoming team crystallized plans, ordered seeds, and hosted the first workshop, which taught participants to build small bee habitats. State Park staff planted seeds during the first two weeks of June and the gardens peaked in July and August.

Wings Over Wyoming is engaging visitors through five themed sites. Bear River State Park highlights bats and rebuilds bat boxes around the park. Edness Kimball Wilkins State Park nods to the active Audubon Chapter in nearby Evansville by focusing on birds. Keyhole State Park restored a plowed area to a pollinator patch optimized for beetles. Medicine Lodge Archaeological Site, a designated monarch butterfly stopover site, is focusing on butterflies. Finally, Curt Gowdy State Park’s focal creatures are bees. Each site hosts pollinator gardens and workshops to make “seed-bombs” (packets of biodegradable medium that crumble to release native seeds) and build “bee bungalows,” alongside other pollinator-focused activities. The program reached thousands of visitors throughout the summer.

Stancampiano drew from the success of the Sequoyah State Park garden to strategically place pollinator gardens near campsites and other places where visitors linger. For example, “Once [visitors] get off the water for the day and have showered off and they’re making dinner, maybe the kids are going and reading all the pollinator signs and walking through that pollinator patch.”

Visitors to Wings Over Wyoming sites enjoy pollinator-friendly garden designs that also fit the landscape and its history. Bear River State Park’s garden beds are made with galvanized steel to pay homage to the automobiles of the historic Lincoln Highway nearby. Medicine Lodge State Park features raised beds in the shape of an elk, one of the park’s most iconic rock art images. Stancampiano sees Wings Over Wyoming as a way for visitors to connect to the land and its creatures. “We have public lands for us, but also for these plants and animals.”

Stancampiano is surrounded by collaborators who have provided practical support to help the program accomplish its lofty goals. The Wings Over Wyoming committee includes volunteers from across the state, colleagues from the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Office, park superintendents, and Stancampiano’s fellow interpretive ranger. This team-level planning may be the perfect counterbalance to Stancampiano’s high aspirations. “[I say], let’s do the extreme, and then the superintendents [say], ‘Woah, woah, woah. How much watering time is that going to need and how much time will it take staff to construct this building?’ . . . So by working together as a team, I think we have been able to hopefully hash out any issues before they arise,” she says.

Public education programs like Wings Over Wyoming can create long term results by inspiring communities to support pollinators and by cultivating the interest that already exists for insects and pollinators. When it comes to gauging interest, entomologist Schell may have the best seat in the house. “Almost everybody has some sort of striking memory of an insect event,” he says. As the go-to diagnostician for arthropods, Schell teaches public workshops, supports field trips for young learners, and answers as many questions as he can. “I don’t expect everybody to become an insect lover per say,” says Schell, “but just recognize their value.”

Even small actions like including a flowering plant in landscaping or contributing data to a pollinator study can have far-reaching effects. Will Janousek, a research scientist for the United States Geologic Survey and coauthor of a recent paper modeling occupancy of the western bumble bee, used information from a community science survey to show changes in the range of this bee and to predict continued range reduction in worst- and best-case action scenarios. “A portion of [the 14,500 surveys used in the study] comes from a variety of community science programs,” Janousek says. “People have the opportunity to submit data from their backyards.” Community-powered studies like this end up supporting petitions for federal protection, informing the decisions of land managers, and providing foundational research for future studies.

While it may be hard to measure exactly how Wings Over Wyoming gardens impact nearby pollinator populations, Stancampiano points out, “Anything that we’re doing is above and beyond what we have been doing [previously], so I see any of it, all of it, as a positive effect.” If Wings Over Wyoming succeeds, it will set an example for public education, equip Wyoming State Parks visitors to conserve pollinators, and add one more piece in the effort to restore these critical creatures. “For me,” Stancampiano says, “the best possible outcome we could have would be folks who came and visited one of our sites and went home and decided to change part of their manicured lawn into a pollinator patch.”

Amy Marie Storey is a master’s student with the Zoology and Physiology Department at the University of Wyoming. Her interest in ecology and entomology spills into her master’s work studying the parasites of wild bees in the West.

Header image: Blanket flowers bloom in a pollinator garden designed for butterflies at Medicine Lodge State Park in Wyoming. Photo by Emilene Ostlind.

Finding solutions for human waste in the backcountry

By Kristen Pope

Among stunning red arches, balancing rocks, canyons, pinyon-juniper, and cacti, a hiker in southern Utah sees something white in the distance. Is it a wildflower? Approaching the “blossom,” the hiker instead finds something far less picturesque—used toilet paper and human feces. No one wants to come across such a scene when they’re out enjoying public lands, but as visitors flock to the outdoors, this scenario plays out frequently. Human feces in the backcountry are unsightly, gross, and unsanitary—they can contaminate water, stick to pets and outdoor gear, and sicken people and animals. While this may have been a lesser issue in the past, now as millions of outdoor recreators visit the Moab area each year, land managers and user groups are pressed to find solutions.

“A lot of people feel as though they’re in the middle of nowhere,” says Jennifer Jones, assistant field manager for the Bureau of Land Management’s Moab Field Office. “They don’t understand that there are 3 million other folks that are going to be enjoying the same scenery and trails that they are, so tucking used toilet paper under a rock may seem like an innocent step, but unfortunately, with so many people doing that [and leaving] these little toilet paper blossoms all over the place, that becomes an issue for sure.”

In many parts of the country, burying fecal matter in a “cathole” is preferred, but in southern Utah’s arid environment, human waste and toilet paper doesn’t rapidly decompose. Grand County, Utah—home to Moab along with Arches and part of Canyonlands National Parks—has made leaving “solid human body waste” behind illegal. Instead, visitors must use a portable toilet, waste disposal bag, or other sanitary method to bring their poop out of the backcountry.

To overcome the “ick” factor and normalize this important sanitary measure, Grand County and partners held a “Poop Awareness Month” in October 2022. A social media campaign featured an inflatable poop emoji that, in short videos, explored the area, demonstrating responsible and irresponsible practices. Further, Grand County’s “Poop in Moab” website provides a handy guide for visitors, including requirements and best practices, while the statewide Gotta Go Utah campaign shares a similar message. BLM and other partners also produced a series of short films about responsible visitation in Moab’s fragile ecosystem. And the state’s OHV test includes questions about packing out human waste.

Agencies aren’t the only ones tackling this issue—the BASE jump and high line communities worked with the BLM to distribute over 2,000 specialized waste disposal bags and raise funds to build new vault toilets in high use areas for their sports.

Another important piece of the puzzle is communicating what people must do with the bags once they return to the trailhead. While some communities accept used human waste disposal bags with regular trash, in Moab, garbage trucks compact trash. “We had several incidents of our staff, because we have compactor trucks, getting sprayed with human waste when it compacted and these bags blew up,” says Jessica Thacker, program manager for Canyonlands Solid Waste Authority. These workers then needed a series of shots and medical check-ups, as well as new clothing.

Grand County, SE Utah Health Department, and others collaborated to install five special bins that can safely accept the used poop bags. QR codes on bags and at retail locations share the bin locations. During a pilot run from June through early October 2022, the disposal stations collected an estimated 1,200 pounds of human waste. “That’s 1,200 pounds that we didn’t risk going onto our staff or going into the local environment. It didn’t go into the waterways, so all the better for that,” Thacker says.

Problems with human waste are not limited to Utah. In Colorado’s Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, a permitting system is helping manage visitors and the unsanitary messes some leave behind. “By getting a permit, we’re engaging [visitors] with a lot more information ahead of time that can then set them up for success being in the backcountry, including how they are going to take care of their human waste,” says Katy Nelson, wilderness and trails program manager for the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District in the White River National Forest.

While using a bag is not required, each year the forest service and partners distribute around 5,000 free bags at three trailheads. In 2017, rangers recorded 334 incidents of unburied human waste in the wilderness area; in 2021 human waste incidents dropped to 153, and it’s likely the new permit system, messaging, and bag distribution played a role.

Human waste isn’t a new issue in the backcountry, but with increasing outdoor recreation, solutions are even more important. As communities across the West advance their outdoor recreation economies, they might look to places like Moab and the Maroon Bells for how to address this unpleasant reality. 

Kristen Pope is a freelance writer who lives in the Tetons. Find more of her work at kepope.com.