Public land access for those who can buy it

This (public) land is your land - or is it? That is the question in a dispute between a group of hunters and a wealthy landowner in Wyoming that might be heading to the Supreme Court soon. One normally understands public lands to be open to all. Yet some in the rural West, like the plaintiff in this case, Fred Eshelman, would like to keep access to the public lands to themselves.

In Wyoming and other parts of the West, federal lands intersect private ones in a checkerboard pattern that dates to the construction of the transcontinental railroads. In order to limit access to these public lands, landowners like Eshelman are trying to prevent corner crossing, in which people pass from one square section of public land to the next. Instead, they want to maintain sovereignty over the air and the tiny sliver of land at the very corner of their properties that abut the public lands, and prevent hunters and others from entering those ostensibly public areas.

Keeping public lands private seems to be a largely unpopular stance in Wyoming, which has the highest proportion of hunters of any U.S. state. While hunting’s origins as a livelihood and means of subsistence persist in rural parts of the U.S., in recent years, as discussed on this blog, its perception as a working-class activity has begun to evolve. The hunters in this case drove from Missouri for a weekend of recreational hunting and camping, but even so, the blockading of public hunting areas by a wealthy businessman has the feeling of a distinct class conflict.

The reason this story smacks of injustice is that the landowner doesn’t simply want to block access to his own land, but also wants to prevent anyone from accessing a large swath of public land that happens to be prime hunting ground. The lawsuit he filed against the hunters alleged $7.75 million in damages for trespassing in the air above the corner of his property, a claim that implies that his 22,000-acre ranch would lose a significant amount of value if the public were allowed to access the public lands adjacent to his property.

The desire (of an out-of-state pharmaceutical magnate) to prevent others from accessing the public lands strikes me as greedy and unfair. It also seems distinctly un-neighborly. While common decency prevents hunting on your neighbor’s front lawn, it is not uncommon where I grew up, in a fairly rural part of New Hampshire, for hunters to make their way onto private land, as public lands are much less prevalent on the East Coast than they are in the West. We still wear blaze orange when we go for walks or hikes in fall and early winter so we aren’t mistaken for potential targets. Typically, unless there are lots of No Hunting signs visible, hunters are free to hunt in whatever stretch of woods they wish. I have heard about big-game ranches in Texas with fences tall enough to keep deer from escaping, but I imagine that in most rural areas, absent those lofty fences, a similarly open custom to that in New Hampshire prevails.

That may no longer be the case in Wyoming. Lawyers on both sides of this case

agreed that Wyoming has changed from an idealized time when ranchers were open to hunters who respectfully asked to cross their land. Those days have faded, they said with an influx of money and people.

Another important aspect of the public land access debate is the impact of technology, which has made it significantly easier to identify potential areas to hunt. Local knowledge and relationships are no longer as crucial as they once were, because apps like onX have

allowed anyone with a smartphone and a subscription to identify both good hunting spots and the property lines that permit and limit entry to them.

This kind of technology has helped increase the number of hunters in places that were once the exclusive terrain of guides or in-the-know locals. If I were a hunter who lived in one of these places, I would probably be bothered by an influx of newcomers on local turf. But making it easier for people to avoid trespassing on private land doesn’t seem like such a bad thing for the owners of that land. And facilitating access to public land seems to be in keeping with the spirit of making lands public in the first place. It’s not surprising that, in a state where many of the locals are hunters, some Wyoming legislators have proposed a bill that would make corner crossing legal. It will be equally unsurprising if that bill faces significant opposition, considering the wealth and power of those seeking to prevent increased public land access.

The hunters’ attorney summed up the significance of this debate between two important - and notably rural - values:

It asks a fundamental question about our country and what we stand for. . . We do care about private property and the right to be left alone, but also we are a country of outdoors people and adventurers, hunters and travelers. . . . To me it’s this quintessentially American question of, Which one of our principles takes precedent?

But does your “right to be left alone” extend to the public lands next door?