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 10th 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)
