To briefly summarize the corner-crossing issue, in the fall of 2021, four nonresident hunters from Missouri wanted to access public land in Wyoming that heretofore had been off-limits to the general public due to the fact that two tracts of private land met at a corner, theoretically blocking the public from crossing the private land holdings without permission. To do so without trespassing, they built an A-frame ladder (above right) across the fenced intersection where the four parcels met — two private property, two public — so that when they climbed up and down the ladder, they would never set foot on the private land.

They were subsequently accused of trespassing on Iron Bar Ranch land near Elk Mountain; a Carbon County jury later found them innocent of the charges. However, Iron Bar Holdings, LLC, filed a civil lawsuit claiming the four had violated the ranch’s air space — thereby diminishing his property value — claiming damages of between $3.1million and $7.75 million. The 22,042-acre ranch was appraised at $31.31 million in 2017.

In a huge victory for both the defendants and the general public, on May 26, 2023, the District Court of Wyoming found their actions were, in fact, legal, and that crossing through the airspace where they did not touch or otherwise damage private property did not constitute trespassing. As this is written in spring 2024, the corner-crossing lawsuit is on appeal at the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Colorado after moving from state court in Wyoming, to federal court in Wyoming, and now to federal court in Colorado. So it’s far from over.

These disputed “corners” were created generations ago, when most of the land in the western U.S. was mapped and platted based on square, 640-acre sections arranged in neat rows and columns, a system known as the Public Land Survey System. In this system, four tracts of land meet at a single corner point with four 90-degree angles. As land was doled out to homesteaders and the newly formed states, a complex patchwork of ownership formed. And while over generations properties were combined or split, some tracts were transformed into every imaginable shape. However, the underlying square 640-acre section can still be found all over the West.

The square sections shown above measure 1 square mile; 640 acres. Those in a yellow shade are BLM property; the non-shaded sections are private property. When the private is posted “no trespassing,” the result is land-locked BLM land, which is indicated by the red lines.

onX Maps (www.onxmaps.com) has researched the corner-crossing issue extensively, and found there are 8.3 million acres of corner-locked public lands, with 27,120 land-locking corners, currently in existence in the western states. (Click here for an in-depth story about this issue on the onX Maps website.) Of these acres, onXmaps calculated that the Federal government’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees management of 70 percent of the affected acreage, with state governments owning 26 percent. Also, heretofore there have been no laws on the books that make corner-crossing expressly illegal.

My Experience With the Issue

Corner-crossing is near and dear to my heart. For generations, it has not been at all unusual for private landowners throughout the West to use their land ownership as a way to block general public access to literally millions of acres of public lands for any purpose whatsoever, including hunting and fishing. In so doing they have, by default, kept for themselves the resources found on those public lands, often profiting from this exclusive access by conducting pricey outfitted hunts on public ground.

It’s an issue I first discovered nearly 50 yards ago, when I started traveling the West as a low-budget, ham-and-egg deer and elk hunter. To navigate around it, before there was an internet, I spent untold hours in state offices and public libraries, studying maps and researching property boundaries, looking for unadvertised access points around private ranches to “landlocked” state and national forest lands. Though the idea of hopping over corners never entered my mind, I found a few unadvertised access points, and can remember more than one instance being confronted by a rancher as I accessed public ground. I had the maps and documentation, so that was that. But they were not happy about it.

Nobody is disputing the rights of a landowner to control access to their own property. Private property rights are one of the cornerstones of our society. And if a rancher doesn’t want to allow public access to his land to hunt and fish, so be it. But when he wants to prevent reasonable access to adjacent public lands by saying a person is trespassing by invading his airspace, isn’t that a little much? Does that mean an airplane flying over that same land is also trespassing? Where does it end? In the case of the Iron Bar Ranch, by claiming that corner-crossing is illegal, the ranch owner essentially has access to some 6,000 acres of public land — that we all own — for his own exclusive use.

You would think that state game departments, whose primary source of revenue is the sale of hunting licenses and big game tags — and out West, in most states the majority of that revenue comes from nonresidents — would do everything in their power to make it easier for tag holders to find and access a place to hunt on public land. That’s not necessarily the case here, though.

For example, shortly after the corner-crossing case verdict was announced in Wyoming, Montana issued a statement that said, “Corner-crossing remains unlawful in Montana, and Montanans should continue to obtain permission from the adjoining landowners before crossing corners from one piece of public land to another. Wardens will continue to report corner-crossing cases to local county attorneys to exercise their prosecutorial discretion.” 

If the courts rule that corner-crossing is in fact legal, that will open up more than 8 million acres of public land that John Q. Public has not been able to recreate on at no cost for generations.

That’s a very big deal.