This land is no longer your land

[Humptulips]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/this-land-is-no-longer-your-land/ar-AAu3Cko?li=BBnb7Kz

[huntingfool7]

Thanks Bruce.

[zwickeyman]

Sad but true. Happening all over this state also. One of my favorite places in Idaho is landlocked by private/big ranches

[JDHasty]

I hope the backlash against this is enormous.

[pianoman9701]

Kind of tough being the little guy. My $50 political contribution means nothing but emails clogging up my inbox asking for more. When someone can donate $200K to a candidate, they get what they want out of our government.

[JDHasty]

There is a guy in Montana who had everyone buffaloed into thinking a public road through his ranch was private.  I looked at the County Assessor's map, contacted the State, got the confirmation that it was public right of way and had an email from the County Sheriff in my wallet.

When he was still being a jerk about me using the road to access public land I told him:  keep it up and I will copy this info and post it in front of every convenience store on the county. 

He has a two-bit outfitting schtick that without him having almost exclusive use of this land wouldn't be worth two-bits. 

[hunter399]

These are the reasons why I won't buy a discover pass in Washington state,cause when I look at maps and see all the state land that is land lock by private property without access,when you pay for access pass you should be able to access all state land.

[baldopepper]

I know others and myself have been saying it for quite some time, but this loss of access is the biggest threat we have as hunters.  Seems every year we see more examples of closed areas or areas that require such a high fee to hunt the average hunter is locked out. I can see the opening for an outfitter who simply helicopters you over closed land into public land for a fee. I think we average hunters don't really realize how many hunters out there find paying $5000.00 or more for a hunt to be no problem. Getting to be more and more like Europe where big game hunting is pretty much a rich mans sport.

[Netminder01]

Such an important topic!! I sure hope not a single foot of protected land is reduced for any reason much less commercial use. 

I'd argue a larger threat to hunting than reducing land for commercial use is emerging technology. Those that have access to emerging tech right now generally aren't in love with hunting & firearms. Technology (imo) will be weaponized to stomp out hunting land access as a strategic means to reduce hunting.

Properly used, it would increase the force behind a common anti-gun argument for firearms (in their view) - hunting. Fewer hunters having access will reduce hunter success thereby reducing new hunters coming into the sport, lower DFW revenues via licenses, etc, etc...

[NoBark]

I would love to see a national law that the Federal Government would be required to provide public access to ANY public land that was at least 1000 acres or more.    Start there and then work down to the 640 acre checkerboard pieces across the west. 

[JimmyHoffa]

I seem to remember it sure wasn't my land during gov shutdowns from 0 either.

[Atroxus]

That is an interesting and disheartening read. On the flip side though I wonder how many of the people complaining about this, if in the position of these landowners would be happy with being told "You need to let the public cross your land so that they can can get to a piece of public land." Or how many people on here would just take advantage of having exclusive access to a parcel of "public" land?

[KFhunter]

That is an interesting and disheartening read. On the flip side though I wonder how many of the people complaining about this, if in the position of these landowners would be happy with being told "You need to let the public cross your land so that they can can get to a piece of public land." Or how many people on here would just take advantage of having exclusive access to a parcel of "public" land?

 

and some of these trails they're talking about may be old, very old, but aren't used and grown over, washed out or slid over.  The gent in the article is an activist make no mistake.  He wishes to trod on private property where some historical map has a squiggly line but no one has used it in years. 

People suck, they leave trash, shoot trees, crap on the land, widen trails, use their ATV's on foot paths and make a nuisance of themselves so I don't blame a landowner for trying to keep out the vermin.  If people didn't suck so bad maybe more trails would stay open? but the other angle is landowners profiting off preventing access to public lands, and that sucks too. 

There's no answer I can see, I can't square my belief in strong property rights and my belief that public land should be accessible - and it gets even muddier when people trash others' land and landowners get greedy (prevent access) in getting trespass fees for a public resource like big bull elk.

Then to top it off the .gov bullying landowners to gain access while they're closing gates left and right where we used to have access without any contention from landowners.

what a mess, I default to keeping strong private property rights. 

[elkboy]

To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, "If it ain't a mess, it'll do until one gets here."

As the West gets more populated, the more these two strongly held Western values will conflict: property rights on one hand, and access to public land on the other. 

And, just looking at the map, a lot of this has its roots in the alternating-section method of land disposition- the "checkerboard" patchwork of public and private land.  And also the fact that fertile valley bottoms hold the farms and ranches (and access roads), while the mountains above may have wound up staying in federal hands.  Yup, a mess...

[Stein]

There are several groups like RMEF as well as some of the state departments that are doing good work both preserving as well as gaining access to new pieces that were landlocked before.  I'm all for making trades, deals and purchases, but I also respect private landowners.  If they don't want to give the public access through a deal of some sort, then nobody should trespass.  Landlocked public land is a bummer, it is essentially private, but that was the deal when the guy bought all the pieces around it and I have no right to trespass to get to something I can use.

The checkerboard layout is hardly a new phenomenon, it has been around in some form for much longer than anyone reading this post.

I think one of Randy Newberg's episodes had him hiring a helicopter.  I think it ended up being pretty reasonable, something like $300 for a short trip.  I believe he did have a run in with the adjacent landowner that was pretty used to having the public land to himself.