Judge rules Wyoming corner crossers did not trespass
hcn.org
hcn.org
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
Edit: the number came from a real estate agent acting as an expert witness, who said he would drop the value by 25% or 30%; it's not a mathematical/geometrical argument.
> “Do they realize how much money my boss has … and property?” Grende said.
https://wyofile.com/corner-crossing-video-do-they-realize-ho...
No, its not. Its also not inconsistent with it being on the front page. Even if one assumes that the reason that it is on the front page is class sympathy with the party who prevailed on most of the issues, and not any other reason…”disproportionate” is not “exclusive”.
I’ve never accused HN of being a unitary hive mind (in fact, if you go through my posting history, you’ll see that’s an idea that I frequently mock.)
That doesn’t mean, though, that it is a representative – demographically or ideologically – slice of the population, either, and the ways it isn’t ideologically reflect, largely, the ways it isn’t demographically.
Pray tell, what is your source for the boogeyman you are attacking since it’s not what is popular?
You know of any revolutions that solve inequality? All the ones in known history simply change who the winners and losers are and maintain inequality.
Inequality absolutely exists and "revolutions" that claim to fix it in fact... don't. Socialism/Communism/etc all fail spectacularly to solve the "issue" of inequality.
And incidentally, are you familiar with the atrocities committed during the revolution? The “vertical deportations” of the Vendée region might add some much-needed nuance to what I can only surmise to be your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution.
People excitedly waiting for revolution often have no idea what a revolution actually is. If they did, they’d be aware that the most fervent revolutionaries are among the first to be executed when the establishment is overthrown. They’d also have some awareness of how the old power structures are often replaced with equivalent ones.
A revolution is a failure mode, not an end to be pursued. Read more history.
To be fair, the last revolution in France was 150 years ago, things change quite a bit in 150 years.
> your whitewashed, simplistic interpretation of the French Revolution
You seem to be equally biased, if on the other side. Events as large as a revolution are complex enough that it is hard to fit them into a manichean assessment.
And I would say that reading someone talk about some positive outcomes of an event and immediately feel compelled to call their views simplistic and whitewashed shows some bias.
The American Revolution barely averted a military dictatorship, because Washington turned down the offer from his officers. How many times has that happened in history? Only once that I know of, which makes Washington the greatest American President.
I place Kennedy at #2, for avoiding nuclear war with the Soviets.
right, well obviously the revolutions solves the inequality for the previous losers.
> In the video, Bakken and Miller tell Grende, who had called to report the four hunters were trespassing by “corner crossing,” they would not cite the men for either trespassing to hunt or criminal trespass
They also lost in court. It was a ranch manager trying to intimidate people with wealth, and it didn’t work.
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
"Do you know how much money I have?"
"Yeah, but we still don't like you, and saying that makes us like you less."
It's a really weird mix of respect for wealth/property (when you're a good neighbor) and disrespect for wealth/property (when you're an asshole).
E.g. see what happens when a millionaire pisses off the fishing community by ignoring laws and harming river habitat
> Officers said they would submit reports to the county attorney who, documents say, subsequently ordered a deputy to charge the men, which happened on Oct. 4.
Somebody should stop taking those shrooms.
By citing this figure, the plaintiffs are essentially admitting that they are claiming de facto ownership over the public's land.
EDIT: I finally found maps in the opinion:
https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
It's a blurry map, but seems to show this ranch (in yellow)
> The area around Elk Mountain is surrounded by a checkerboard pattern of public (yellow) and private (white), as well as state (blue) lands.
So the yellow is actually the public land, and it's unclear how much of the white is actually the ranch in question and how much is just other private land.
[0] https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.3/north-public-lands-why-four-...
The company building the railroad was paid not only in cash, but also land (which was suddenly very valuable next to a transcontinental railway).
But to avoid giving them all the prime spots, the checkerboard system was put in and they were given 50%, so the other 50% could be purchased by anyone.
It would cause a huge uproar if the fed sold the land, but this allows them to defacto ‘capture’ it as long as no one asserts the right laws.
By stopped the public from accessing the intervening public land, it defacto gives them ‘ownership’ (as in they can do what they want with it) on the federal public land, but without having to pay for it, pay taxes on it, etc.
These rural areas are typically pretty poor, and the private land owners usually have no issues influencing county and state level politics. The county this is happening in (Carbon County) has a hair under 15k people in it, and a median income of $62k. Wyoming overall has a population of $ 570k and most of them live in 1-2 cities.
Dropping $1m in Washington DC will barely make a dent lobbying wise. Spreading the same over the Wyoming and Carbon County gov’t would be… quite powerful.
Alternately, a tall fence?
It would be pretty hilarious if the land owner here gets charged in connection with blocking access to public land with the chains.
Took me way to long to figure out this wasn’t a subtle HN-dig at golang.
I don't know how much I enjoy the language per se, but I went to a talk on Go once and ended up married to the organizer.
I generally don't like any programming language after I have tens of thousands of lines of it written
It might be useful to consider why checkerboards are good shape in legal systems, but bad shape in go. Also why the legal system rejected checkerboards after some thought, at least provisionally.
(historical rant: You might as well resign if your opponent is not also 30k. Who comes up with these analogies? People who have barely heard of the game, like 10ks or sth?)
Finally: yeah, Go is a bad analogy for this.
The analogy breaks down because 'being allive' would require access to the edge, rather than having two liberties. Playing with such a different definition of life and death does seem like an interesting 'variation' of go.
You have mashed some words together and they do not make sense if you know what you are talking about.
A diagonal connection is a very thick connection. The major complaint about this connection is that it is not efficient; hearing someone say that the stones are not really connected is, once again, just hearing that you are 30-20k. I am being generous about 20k.
A prior case has a situation where the govt seized land to build a road to allow public access. The ruling was that the govt could not do such a thing without fair compensation.
Looked like a clever idea at the time, likely.
The ridiculous lengths these hunters had to go to in order to avoid straying onto private land is antithetical to freedom (you still need hunting licenses in Norway; and permission to hunt on private land so there are still potential issues, but worrying about a few meters and the accuracy of GPS to avoid even crossing a tiny little portion of private land is not one of them).
Also, isn't this somewhere in the mountains where there are no railroads?
Office types gridded up manifest destiny using squares within squares and created a pre GPS coordinate system for coding up space (within central north america).
See (as starting points).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/do-us-topos-and-national-map-have-...
While I'm not from that part of the world I spent a few years writing interop transformations betwixt all manner of "coord systems" across the globe that predate WGS84 et al.
The PLSS grid explains the locations of many midwest US roads and townships, and "checkerboard ownership" (families | businesses buying land to surround other land and then deny access to land not paid for) was one form of early system gaming.
The foundational aspect to the question posed is that land was gridded in abstract from afar before any aportions were made, a secondary aspect was that in some regions large tracts of those squares were initially granted to various railroads on an "every second large chunk" basis, another aspect was that in the days of open cattle grazing early land cattle barons realised they didn't have to own land to graze on it and they could control access to unowned land by only paying for surrounding land or for "chokepoint" land in rough terrain.
A 'final' aspect to the story is the creation of the US National Parks movement which started a wave of "freezing" as yet unsold land as permanently held as not for private use.
A key point is that the Land Grant Act of 1850 granted checkerbordered land to railroad companies within at most 50 miles of planned rail routes .. however that practice wasn't limited to rail grants - Tribal lands were also checkerboarded by the Dawes Act and public land was released on a checkerboard basis.
You can see the checkerboard ownership even in early cattle country that had no history of railroad grants - the large squares were the unit of sale and typically the early sales were for homesteads in the midst of unclaimed land with the next sale not being "right next door" but for another homestead block in the midst of unclaimed land.
It's the appeal of owning your house, shed, assets, yards, etc. while not having to pay to own the land your cattle are moved through for seasonal pastures.
Eventally all land would presumably have been purchased .. but the National Parks started freeing things up.
There's more on this (but not the complete picture) in:
That’s interesting, there are places where public/private checkerboards emerged naturally? The wiki link only tells the land-grant and reservation part of the story.
I had a better grasp and notes on this in the late 1990s, if you read the wikipedia page closely I seem to recall they make brief passing reference to both Homestead and Dawes Acts (~ 31st congress (?) era IIRC).
The railroad grants were the largest best known example by a long shot I believe, however not the first or only example and all based on an ealier gridding abstraction and a practice of encouraging development to spread out.
There's an intertwining of rich private interests and public policy .. people with entire full PLSS squares were able to influence land release patterns and the idea of vast endless "untouched" lands where you weren't forced to have neighbours had appeal.
> History and politics have complicated the pattern of land ownership in the West. To promote western expansion in the nineteenth century, the federal government encouraged the construction of rail lines through the West by granting every other 640-acre parcel along rail corridors to a railroad company. The hope was that the lands remaining with the government would increase in value as the companies built rail lines, which the government would later sell at high prices. The plan was successful further east, but the government struggled to sell the lands in the arid West. The result of this failed venture is the checkerboard pattern of public and private land that now plagues much of the West.
[0] https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
That's... how you got places.
If you actually damaged something -- broke a fence, stole a horse, dug a ditch, whatever -- then, yeah, you'd get in trouble if you got caught.
I heard from a friend that moved out to a rural area that especially the newcomers moving in from cities are super-sensitive about "their property". His neighbor -- from NYC -- threatened a lawsuit because my buddy's truck broke off some branches that extended out into the common road.
Folks that have been living out there awhile are cautious with outsiders, but overall a lot more neighborly, just because you have to be.
“The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".
[…]
The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently fundamental that it was not formalised in law until modern times.”
Also, cows themselves are not annoying. What is annoying is their owners herding them over public roads and lands, having them shit everywhere without cleaning up. And that is pervasive in rural Bavaria, far more than in the reset of Germany.
Just think a minute about where you're moving to.
(Is this an appropriate model for certain "reputation economy" actions that exist in many human societies, like duels over perceived slights to one party's physical prowess?)
Also, this doesn’t require a single owner to own those black squares. It could also be four individual owners, each building a (virtual or physical) wall on the border of their land.
Because of that, I expect that any civilized country has laws that give land owners and their visitors the right to reach their land, so that they can benefit from owning it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_way)
Nothing more credible than a local real estate agent being paid to serve as an expert witness by the prosecution team of a guy that owns a 22,045-acre ranch! He probably had a sniper dot on his forehead during the testimony.
Reading into it more than I should, it seems to me like what the plaintiff actually believed is that if people thought they could corner cross, it would reduce the value of the property, because it would mean that more people would be emboldened to do it. One group of ladder-bearing hunterrs wouldn't do it themselves, and without the right to cross his property being set in precedent, many groups probably avoided doing it for fear of being sued. The legal gray area dissuaded them. No more! This is one of those times when opening the box killed the cat.
Even the court seems faultless here. It's not re-zoning their land, it's clarifying a law that already existed. The owner had an incorrect pre-ruling valuation.
This case is especially crazy cause the landowners sued the hunters: if they hadn't sued there wouldn't have been any damages, maybe they should sue themselves!
For example, if there was never a trespass on this property, but someone, somewhere else brought a similar case before the court and got the same ruling from a judge, I would expect the impact on the valuation of the property would be impacted in the same way.
It also seems a bit troublesome that the perceived valuation is driven by the owner's efforts to misrepresent the property. I could argue they should be charged with theft of $7.75 million, and are effectively suing people for reclaiming the stolen goods.
https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
> What they had done was place an A-frame ladder across an intersection of property boundaries, the location where four parcels of land meet at a point. They climbed up one side of the ladder from public land, and down the other side of the ladder, stepping kitty-corner onto a different parcel of public land. But in doing so, their bodies also crossed through the airspace of the other two parcels meeting at that point, which were private. Their trial, set for mid-April, will decide if they trespassed when they passed through that private airspace.
This sounds so constructed, as if they wanted to provoke the precedent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_us...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery... , also known as "Skyhook" and pretty well demonstrated in "The Dark Knight".
https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title43/cha...
| Public
---+---
Public |
(kudos to whoever linked it up thread - couldn't find that comment again, but had it open in a tab).
The precedent is that corner crossing is illegal and fences to enforce that are ok.
Next, the PDF is a great share. I am feasting on it now! Page 7 reads:
Other than these chained-together signs, there were no posts, fending, or building within one-quarter of a more of the corner.
Another good part (pg7 again):
[T]here is no evidence the Defendants caused any damage to the Plaintiff's property.
But it is illegal to block access to federal public lands. So you’d need to have some way through. Doesn’t have to be on the corner, it could be an easement or whatever somewhere else, but access can’t be blocked.
They intentionally did it to block people though, and try to defacto claim the public land as theirs - which is illegal.
And they aren’t allowed to put up fences to deny access to public land, that’s the entire point of the Inclosures act.
Still doesn’t make what the hunters did illegal, or what the rancher did legal. But it’s why it got to this point.
I mean this is the same as countless supreme court decisions. Was gay marriage legal prior to Obergefell? No, obviously not. The ruling was based on a law that has been in existence since the civil war, but until the judges interpreted that law it did not matter.
Federal law overrides state law. It’s Article VI, Paragraph 2 of the constitution, if you want to double check.
Where federal law says it is illegal to block access to public lands, it is illegal to block access to public lands. Even more so when we’re talking federally owned public land.
There is no law (or judicial interpretation) that Wyoming can pass that is constitutional to change that.
Here is a cite, which you haven’t provided any supporting you case, clearly stating as such, regarding the Inclosures act and someone playing similar games - around 1893. That instance was in Colorado, but was sustained by the Supreme Court and applied nationally.
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/167/518]
If you have an actual cite to an actual applicable case, please do post it. The earlier link literally agrees with me, as the judge cited the Inclosures Act when dismissing the claims that corner crossing was illegal.
Otherwise, stop spamming this propaganda.
>“Last year, a couple of dads from Missoula and their sons showed up and asked me if they could hunt here. I told them to give me 15 minutes and I’d take them out with me. We got some really nice mule deer bucks for their sons, and they helped me work cattle the next day. We got some antelope for the dads the day after. So we had fun. One of them even bought beef from me this year.”
https://www.onxmaps.com/onx-access-initiatives/corner-crossi...
> Eshelman asserts that when the men corner-crossed — stepping from one piece of public land to another at a four-corner intersection with his ranch — they damaged him by up to $7.75 million.
> That’s based on a 25% devaluation of the Elk Mountain Ranch, appraised at $31.1 million in 2017.
> Rinehart would discount the ranch by 30% if corner crossing was declared legal, he said in an affidavit. His figure would raise alleged damages to a total of $9.39 million.
So the argument essentially is "this law gives me de facto ownership of 25% more property than I actually own, and these guys trying to cross it somehow sets a precedent to set that land free". IANAL, but on the face of it that makes zero sense because two dudes breaking the law doesn't undo the law.
However, if they're not actually trying to win, this is a pretty solid argument to make if you're trying to persuade a judge to legalize corner crossing.
https://www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/wyoming/article_a519...
Is it illegal to take a case to court with the intention to lose yet set precident?
Further, if a litigant fails to raise an issue while arguing a case, and the court therefore doesn't consider it, then the precedent doesn't necessarily control a future case where a litigant does raise that issue.
I put ranchers in quotes because these people roll in from Texas or California (or they're mega corps like Farmland Reserve LLC or the Gates Foundation), purchase a ranch or farmland, lay almost everyone off, shut down basically all active ranching (I believe this might be part of Gates's anti-global warming schtick), and then do nothing with the land beyond sell private elk hunts. And of course they don't want me shooting animals on the neighbouring public land, so they hotly contest those with signs, fences, gates, private security, etc.
The fine for blocking a public road in Montana is laughably small. Something like $50/day, which isn't even pennies for these people.
The fine for blocking a public road in Montana is laughably small. Something like $50/day, which isn't even pennies for these people.
Fines for failing to remove the encroachment would rise from $10 per day to $100-$500 per day.
Then following the link from the article, you can see the actual bill in Montana Legislature: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/HB0486.htm
Finally: "Current Bill Progress: Became Law" here: http://laws.leg.mt.gov/legprd/LAW0203W$BSRV.ActionQuery?P_SE...
I'm very impressed so much information is available online from the legislature!
More details about what exactly defines "blocking": https://www.plwa.org/closing-a-rural-road
“My dad used to hunt some private property in Montana,” said Mr. Hettick, a forester with the U.S. Forest Service. “And one year they told us, ‘Sorry, you can’t anymore — we leased it to an outfitter.’ I was crushed. And I was like, you know what? This is never going to happen to me again.”
I am pretty strongly for access to public land, but even I could appreciate the concerns re: bad apples being encouraged by this particular case. That is, if you already have an issue with people illegally accessing your land, then opening the door for more people to attempt to access public land by passing through some mathematically precise point in space does in fact invite people who aren't so careful to cross near the corner. I've seen enough braided trails and "no motorized vehicle" signs busted and mashed into tire tracks to believe that concern. And the reality is that all it takes to do irreparable harm is 1 bad actor, because they can do so much damage.
All of that said, I think it's vitally important that western states do something to make it impossible to sue a trespasser for whatever loss of value you perceive when the public land you thought you locked up remains public.
I can see suing a trespasser for the cost of reclaiming a social trail that they happened to get caught on. But I cannot see suing a trespasser for 25% of the value of a $31M real estate transaction, because it turned out that a bogus legal theory about "owning" land that's not actually in the deed is, in fact, bogus. If the landowner can make a compelling case that the previous owner, or the facilitating real estate agents, convinced the new owner of that bogus theory, then sure, sue them for the lost "value". But not the guys who went out of their way to avoid causing any real (in the legal sense) damage.
I'd recommend you read OnX's report. They provide two examples of how the land owner is being harmed, although only one of them ("Bad Apples") seems valid.
Ultimately, the concept of American exceptionalism (that is, the belief apparently held by every American that they, personally, justify an exception to the rules, but not anyone else) needs to die. That national myth is the greatest obstacle to a viable American implementation of e.g. the UK's freedom to roam. Until then, the land owner has (and should have) the right to protect their property.
Years ago (ca 2009), I was training for the Laramie Enduro (now known as the Laramie Range Epic) mountain bike race up around Happy Jack, about 90 miles east of the ranch that kicked off this whole thread, when I encountered a no-motorized-trail sign, snapped off at its base, pressed into the mud in tire tracks left by car- or truck-sized tires.
I've been skiing up in wilderness areas in the Snowy Range (that is, the range that Elk Mountain is the northern terminus of), and had to deal with junked up snow from snowmobiles. Now, damage to snow is sort of ephemeral, but damage to the underlying trail because there's insufficient snow coverage?
In either of these cases, what recourse does the land owner/manager have? Do our courts really just "whelp, sucks to be you"? I really get how a few bad actors can really mess up an area. Because of that, I really do believe that if the law came down very publicly like the hammer of god on a few of those bad actors, the ones with the rotten luck to get caught, then people in general would be better stewards of the land.
I think limiting damages to real damages (like trail mediation), and excluding legal fees, means that the would-be plaintiff, bringing a civil suit, should have to weigh whether or not the cost of a suit is worth winning the actual cost of removing a trail. If its 12 feet of trail near the corner, its not worth it.
I recall an incident in Colorado, in 2000, where a radio station told its listeners about an unofficial gathering of off-roaders. Several hundred people showed up in trucks and jeeps and things, drove off road on federal land to get to private land, then tore up 7 acres of wetlands before leaving. A cursory googling of the KBPI mudfest incident didn't reveal the outcome, but at most a dozen people (out of ~200 vehicles) actually saw charges filed. If I was personally facing the remediation of 7 acres of wetlands, I'd be selling out every jackass who came with me and didn't get caught. That's the power of throwing the full cost on the unlucky one who got caught.
These aren't poor innocent bystanders whose land is being ruined. It's wealthy people trying to steal access to our public property. Fuck them.
That said, the goal is to access additional public land. I struggle to see how the supreme court will fall on the side of private landowners and might even punitively add that vehicular access to private land might be allowed in the future. Right now it's only "on foot". This ruling has an enormous body of evidence and research behind it, this isn't a small issue for a large number of people; they just don't overlap much with the HN community very much.
Unless it's a hunting preserve (they do exist, plenty of buckhunting going on in Alabama) hunters are local and intensely aware of the power relationships. One really wishes to know: who is the guy with deep pockets that Eshelman upset and what are they beefing over, and how did he get the wholesome quartet of hunters to go along with him. The whole suit is about as organic as the Chatterley trial.
What are you talking about? Access to public lands has been an ongoing fight for decades with people from the entire political spectrum having opinions about the matter. Whether that be rock climbers trying to access routes, or people who fish trying to access streams, to people like this who are trying to access public hunting land. Assuming that everyone trying to access public lands is some poor pleb is in bad taste. Companies like Patagonia have long supported more liberal access to public lands with millions in donations, as well as organizations like the NRA with their advocacy and financial support.
I'm talking about the Gawker lawsuit bankrolled by Peter Thiel, and Thiel is on the record saying that you need a 7-figure sum to access the court system. He has to know.
b) FTFA:
> Wyoming Backcountry Hunters and Anglers launched a fundraising campaign in 2021 to ensure the hunters, Smith, Bradly Cape, Phillip Yeomans and John Slowensky, could have their day in court.
I don't think this case is very constructed at all, as many similar disputes have played out in my region, but generally they don't make it to court... they end up either as hunters getting run off and not returning, or the BLM district supervisor sending nasty letters to get gates unlocked, or an argument mediated by the sheriff where everyone leaves unhappy. What's unusual about this case is that it has a very clear and well-documented set of facts that makes it an almost ideal test case for the issue of corner crossing, and both public land advocates (which range from the owner of OnX who is involved in this case to many other political lobbying organizations) and landowners looking to retain the ability to restrict access to their adjacent public land stand to benefit. The well-documented set of facts here are not that surprising as this is a well-known issue in hunting circles and there are quite a few people who document their means of land access very carefully in order to defend themselves in a situation such as this.
I suppose they wanted to make a case to demonstrate the dubiousness of that norm, and successfully have made one. Kudos to them.
https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-342-getting...
around 1:10:00 the hunters talk about how they found this place.
I think you don't appreciate the hunter demographic and how much people will travel to enjoy the hobby. They're often not local, but frequently build relationships with the locals and landowners like you describe, and go back to the same places year after year.
First, there is important historic context: "checkerboard" land ownership, in which alternating PLSS squares are owned by private owners and the federal government, is very common in the west. It is a result of a subsidy/incentive scheme awarded to railroads, in which the railroad was given ownership of 50% of the land within a certain range (up to 40 miles) of the new railroad. This land ownership incentivized the railroad to develop both the route and services along with it, and because the federal government retained ownership of the other 50% it was assumed that the government would benefit from the resulting increase in property values. The way it has actually turned out is less than ideal; in many cases the federal government's squares are public land to this day while the railroad parcels have been sold to ranchers and other land-intensive operations. This results in a situation where vast acreages of public land are only accessible by corner-crossing at the intersections of this checkerboard.
Second, fences are put up mostly to keep cattle in, not people out. Where gate aren't installed, you could step over or through them, but with typical barbed wire construction that risks damaging the fence and pissing off a rancher. So on trails there are sometimes permanently fitted triangular ladders, and some people carry a ladder with them for this purpose.
The dispute over access to public lands that are near, behind, or otherwise restricted by private land is a long-simmering one in the west that is reaching a head. In many cases public roads pass through privately held ranches. It has long been common in some areas for ranchers to put up "no trespassing" signs on these roads, which must be ignored after confirming the road is public. There have been various incidents of landowners locking gates on public roads, but this isn't so common since it's pretty clearly illegal and usually you can get the sheriff to do something about it. The problem seems to have been getting acute though, and instances of people being run off of public roads and public land adjacent to private holdings seem to be increasing. At the same time, land owners are getting more strategic about acquiring land that fully encircles public parcels so that they can get exclusive access to them.
The root of this problem, as best I can tell, is the rise of the private game reserve. Many ranches have essentially been converted away from ranching operations (or at least they have been reduced to a secondary purpose) and now operate mainly as game reserves where people pay a good sum of money to hunt. This means that adjacent public lands are competition, both reducing the game inventory and providing alternative hunting destinations. So the owners of these game reserves have a great motivation to make public land around them inaccessible, and it's been difficult to organize against them since the BLM is not particularly interested in the problem.
There are definitely ways in which this is a selected case to test the issue, but the issue is not at all restricted to this case. Hunting organizations are looking for clear precedent that private land owners cannot restrict access to public land, land owners are looking for clear precedent that they can. Since this case has a very "clean" set of facts it's pretty attractive to both sides, as it'll be hard for a court to resolve without taking a stance on the broader issue of the legality of corner crossing.
In some areas there are fairly successful "open gate" programs that encourage ranchers to coordinate with state game authorities on providing access to public land that is in or behind their holdings. When the ranchers are mainly in the cattle business or farming, everyone can get along pretty well. There are disputes and there are ranchers that aggressively try to keep people out, but it's not so common. The big problem arises when the ranchers are primarily in the business of selling access to their land for hunting, in which case anyone hunting nearby who hasn't paid them becomes a problem in their eyes.
On the surface it may seem this law infringes on private property rights(guaranteed by our constitution), but the spirit of it is to prevent infringement on enjoyment of one's property rights by being blocked by another landowner and there is no "precedents" in our legal system so each case is supposed to be decided on its merit and the judge's interpretation of the law alone.
If an A-frame ladder can be used to cross an intersection of property boundaries, can the owners build a 30 meter high fence at the intersection to render the A-frame ladder obsolete?
And if it were built, what kind of legal challenge could be used against it?
In summary: It is illegal in spirit to block access to federal public lands.
If I had a lawyer friend and some free time I'd have probably tried a ladder too.
I am curious with the technology available at the time, how much either method would have increased the surveying time, accuracy, and other generally important parameters?
Perhaps hexagons cut in half (causing 6-corner intersections) or the isosceles trapezoid pattern below would work.
https://robertlovespi.net/2020/06/03/tessellation-of-isoscel...
Partly it'd be cool to have it look like Settlers of Catan.
I think this is only having the areas not be "cut off" in the mathematical sense, though.
And in particular checkout the section titled: Survey design and execution.
Now keep in mind errors happened a lot over large distances with difficult terrain and lines got skewed. But defining a chunk of land as the "Southwest quarter of the Northeast quarter", and then breaking it down from there by physical corners set in the ground is pretty sensical even when things get skewed. With hexagons, you COULD do the same thing, but I don't think the errors would come out so well. You'd have to be more careful to tie to more points/lines in order to not accidentally create conflicting definitions.
It sounds like a nightmare honestly.
You can do what you want as long as you do block passage between adjacent, or event reasonable nearby, public land.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/califor...
Might make sense where land is amazingly spacious (like wyoming in this case), but I wonder how that would work in other locales, say row houses, or manhattan or california lots which are measured in square feet...
And there's no need to shrink all the plots if there's a reasonable way already present.
Wouldn't chamfering the corners by 6' have the same effect?
I guess I don't much care, being neither a rural Wyoming property owner nor someone who wants access to all that public land in the checkerboard. But the net effect of this setup is that "big private ranches" are effectively illegal in Wyoming, and that strikes me as no less irrational than "you can't get to public land if it's surrounded".
No they aren't. All the private ranch owner has to do is purchase the land from its current owner. IE the government.
A private ranch can't steal that land from the government though, through some complicate surround maneuver, like from the board game "Go", of course.
If you say "It is illegal for me, ajross, to purchase stale2002's house".
And then I respond by saying "No, it is not illegal for you to do that. All you have to do is get me to agree to sell you the house"
And then your response to this is by saying "But you aren't selling your house!"
This final response by you, does not prove the first statement you made to be true.
It continues to be legal for you to purchase my house, if I agree to it. Just like it continues to be legal for a rancher to purchase land from the government, if they agree to it.
Just because you are not very good at convincing the government/state legislator to sell you that land, does not make it illegal for you to purchase the land from them, if they choose to sell it to you.
You can't have a big ranch. That's silly. You also can't use "corners" to prevent access to land you don't own, because that too would be silly. Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were. Someone should fix this, because the regulatory regime is bananas. This court case isn't doing anything to help, it's just negating the silly.
You absolutely are allowed to do this! All you have to do is purchase the land from the people who own it.
> which is that large ranches in Wyoming are de facto illegal.
They aren't! Someone refusing to sell you something, is not the same as it being illegal.
Just like it isn't "defacto illegal" for you to purchase my house.
> your response does nothing to refute my point
it absolutely does, because it is not defacto illegal for you to buy my house, even if I refuse to sell it to you.
It is disingenuous to say that it is defacto illegal for you to buy my house, because I refuse to sell it to you.
> Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were
It is not silly for someone to refuse to sell you something.
The analogy would be like if you said "its silly for me to steal your home". And "it is also silly that it is defacto illegal for me to purchase your home".
It is not silly that you cannot buy my home, if I refuse to sell it to you. It is not defacto illegal for you to buy my home, because I refuse to sell it to you.
Your point is a "de jure" argument, you're telling me what the law says (and for the record: I don't disagree). I'm making a "de facto" point: regardless of what the law says, owning large unbroken tracts of land in this area is a practical impossibility. And since the entity refusing to sell the land is the government itself (the body that makes and enforces those laws), I don't think it's at all a stretch to categorize this as de facto illegal: any action that resulted in big ranches not being impossible as a matter of practice would be by definition an act of lawmaking.
Stated slightly differently: if the government needs to change a law in order to make something possible, then that thing was "illegal" previously.
Fine the owner for having blocked access to the public land with chains. Uno reverse card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad...
This often means you might be able to walk through farmers paddocks, to access a track, but little guarantee that you could do this in the future.
There have been some instances of abuse of the Scottish system, but its pretty few and far between.
Scotland and England have separate legal systems, hence the confusion - there is no UK wide standard answer on right to roam.
> https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19459239.right-roam-work...
https://visitsweden.com/what-to-do/nature-outdoors/nature/su...
Trouble in this case is the public owns the BLM land, right? So they would be the ones entitled to an easement and they have not sought one. Perhaps they should.
The thing is, law is complex, overlapping, and often unintuitive. Especially property law. Although a non lawyer might think a claim is stupid or ridiculous, the law itself might not see it that way.
This is one of those times. I believe we have the right outcome here and it’s a great day, but usually when non lawyers think a case is legally obvious, they are wrong.
The case may be morally obvious—as here—but law and morality are different things. And just because the law ought to be obvious—again, as here—doesn’t mean it is obvious.
> Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl granted the hunters’ request to dismiss most of Eshelman’s lawsuit
* Before hunters were corner cutting, the land was more desirable and I could have sold it for $X
* With hunters now corner cutting, the land is less desirable, due to the hunting activity, and can only be sold for $Y
* $X - $Y = $7 million
[0] http://www.crmc.ri.gov/publicaccess/PublicAccess_Brochure.pd...
Of course, this claim of damages collapses in a puff of logic when you point out that he never should have had exclusive access in the first place. Maybe he can sue the judge next?
AKA an appeal
If he's wrong, he never had exclusive rights to public land in the first place and it was not his to lose.
If he's right, he obviously did not suffer the loss of the value of that property.
If he had lost the case, he would have suffered a financial loss, but having lost cannot recover it from the "trespassers".
EDIT: Yup, I would have bet my life on it. The plaintiff is the kind of guy who donates millions to an organization to overturn the 2020 election, and then sued them for damages when they failed to overturn it [1]. And when a federal judge cast doubt on his lawsuit, he dismissed it and immediately re-sued in state court, shopping for a better judge. What a piece of work!
1: https://wyofile.com/corner-crossing-landowner-gave-millions-...
He also sent his ranch employees to harass the hunters while they were on public land. Clowns.
The whole idea that you could claim public land for private use by blocking access to it should be wildly illegal.
You could paramotor in and out for example.
The reason is the same reason that 'real estate' earned the key descriptor 'real'. People will literally go to war over two things: people, and land (*some would add religion, but I'd suggest that's generally been a convenient excuse under which lay the truly motivating people+land end goals).
A land owner doesn’t own the airspace above or the ground below. Only what they are reasonably enjoying and using. The airspace at this corner isn’t used by the rancher.
And now this specific right is codified in caselaw. It always existed just wasn’t spelled out for this specific purpose.
It's not like they didn't have the source material to base the story on, so why can't they pass that along to the reader in this day and age, to credit the source?
But no, apparently a retold story in someone else's words is better than being able to read the 50-page document that actually lays out the ruling..
To be fair, there are legitimate reasons too. Links can become invalid and they most likely don’t want to deal with the headache of fixing that/perceived UX issues of not fixing it. Even worse, linked content could be easily replaced with something… unsavory
Previous discussion:
6M Acres of Public Land in the US West Are Corner-Locked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34143365 - Dec 2022 (183 comments)
The Wyoming corner crossing case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33860346 - Dec 2022 (74 comments)
A navigation app that illuminates public land within privately held property - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33753467 - Nov 2022 (181 comments)
Then there is the other case of large agriculture or forest lands. Without a specific reason, you are not allowed as a land owner to close this off to the public. Forests are to be held accessible to the public (e.g. for nature recreation), even if you own them. Even for farm land with animals, it is usually accepted that people (hikers, mountainbike etc.) pass through these. In case of fences for animals, it is also generally accepted to climb over these (of course, you're responsible for damage either to the property or yourself*).
And a last anecdotal note: I have a friend who hikes with a group of 3-4 people every year based on (pretty) straight lines through Germany. They usually sleep on the ground (without tents) wherever they are when night comes. This is often on private land. Their experiences were almost all positive, land owners even come to bring them water, to talk etc. Some first watch curiously but are fine when the story is told.
* There's a strange ruling that you, as an owner, can be held liable for people hurting themselves on your ground, even when they're (e.g.) thieves trying to break into your property. I think this ruling is created to prevent land owners creating traps, where children can fall into holes etc.
So, in Germany, there's less land per square mile?
Nobody should be the sole owner of a beach, lake, river, or mountain.
[https://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=23&page=322]
Besides of course chasing beachgoers down the waterfront with his rake. [1, 2]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/01/vinod-kh...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/califor...
It is quite an entertaining listen - 1:03 is where he explains the background and 1:08 onwards is where the interview starts: https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-342-getting...
I’m not sure what rules there are if there’s a navigable waterway that goes into the public land through private land, there may be issues if you have to portage around obstacles on the river onto the private land. I would assume that if you can access the navigable waterway from public land, you are allowed to use it to reach the landlocked public land by traveling along the waterway through private land, but I’m not 100% sure.
I would say that if land was purchased that completely blocked off access to public land without such easements, somebody screwed up royally with regard to such easements. Not sure if that's what actually happened with the land in question?
edit: actually reading an article linked within the one linked here: "This is a murky legal area, due in part to the failure of Congress to ensure access to landlocked federal public lands". So yeah, someone screwed up royally and it was Congress.
[1] "Any damages Eshelman would claim for that alleged transgression would be limited to “nominal damages” and not the $7.75 million Eshelman had claimed in lost ranch value, the judge wrote."
Not even stepping on private property, just crossing through its airspace.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised. My wife does some work on the medical side of the Personal Injury industry and there's always some comedy about PI lawyers trying to juice the moral equivalent of a stubbed toe into a 7-figure case.
(I'm not justifying this claim, of course, just providing information in case anyone was wondering where the number came from.)
This is really some pretty contrived reasoning.
Apparently to encourage railways railway builders were given every other square mile of land on each side of the railway. But that should only create 2 "rows" of checkers, each accessible either from above or below. The only way to create a full checkerboard would be to build multiple railways, in parallel, only 2 miles apart. I cannot believe people did that, so what am I missing here?
I’m all for property rights but if you own a big chunk of land …. this seems less consequential than someone stepping off the sidewalk onto my lawn, or an out of control kid crashing their bike into my yard…
Anyone using the ladder in the photo seems VERY considerate.
Link to judge's decision https://www.wyd.uscourts.gov/sites/wyd/files/opinions/22-cv-...
I can't imagine that if this was a significant cost for the party filing the suit that they would have prosecuted it.
Given the wording of the law (even absent the recent subsequent laws) you can't claim privilege over public land like that.
If the ruling were any different it would have been terrible for the idea of public lands being for public use.
So here is a mirror: https://archive.ph/vVoLH
He'd been a lot richer if he constructed a private road and charged a toll. He'd have defacto control of who crosses and it'd be quite profitable too.
Instead he got caselaw against him and is left with nothing. Lesson about greed here!
By allowing corner crossing, people willing to go the long way around can get to the public land for free.
What sort of a sociopathic son of a bitch do you have to be to tie up so many resources on such a minor transgression? That dude eats babies for sure.
As a child you would scream if your toys were taken away. As adults we scream at the mere suggestion of something being taken away. It doesn't matter how rich you are. Some things never change.
This is why we get stuck in ridiculous local optima and just can't get out. Individuals, including those in government, might be able to see better long term solutions, but getting there often involves convincing people to lose something. Nobody seems to be willing or able to explain their long term strategy. Or perhaps nobody is willing to listen.
Start by being better than the people you hate. Campaign for strategies that involve short-term personal loss to get to better places.
You may not owe billionaire types better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
(Submitted title was "Udge rules Wyoming corner crossers did not trespass")