Seems right to me, and a lot cheaper than the courts time.

careful they havent made it legal, they just found THOSE men didnt trespass.

Wyoming still needs to define it better, as of now its an individual thing, and you are still open for litigation if you corner cross.

every state is different. Some are ambiguous like WY, and others its explicitly prohibited or explicitly allowed.

people also have to remember fences are lines of convenience and not necessarily property boundary.

All public land needs public access period dot.

That makes sense. I believe a majority on the THF, including myself, understand it's not ok to set foot on private land without permission from the owner or authorized agent.

It would be interesting to repeat exactly what those men did. Would the landowner press charges? Would the Sherriff come out and arrest you?

sheriff may or may not write ticket and same judge, under same evidence, would probably dismiss it. Technically its not the sheriff jobs to decipher statute so my bet is for a ticket.

I’d becareful though, I bet LO is going to watch those boundaries like a hawk. And Onx isnt that accurate. With that said most of those gridded parcels arent huge, section or less. Good luck with any game retrieval. Might as well be hunting next to an indian reservation, one inch over and your going to get a ticket

knowing that land owner isnt going to give you permission to retrieve questions ethics of hunting that public land IMO. Even if Wy law allows for retrieval its going to be a huge PIA

No the sheriff will not cite or arrest you in Wyoming. The jury found them not guilty of trespass and the judge ruled not guilty on civil trespass.

BOBO we do not have a sheriff that will write for corner crossing now.
Legislation going into affect in July states that a person must touch the private land to be guilty of criminal trespass if they are hunting or gathering shed antlers.
This is a ruling that opens up corner crossing in Wyoming until laws are passed to the contrary. Precedent has been set with the ruling for Wyoming only.
There is no law in Wyoming prohibiting corner crossing, yet. I feel we may see something this year though based on the latest ruling by the court though.

The LO had to force the sheriff to go out and write up the men in question, the GW would not write them up.

As you know, there no winning when you force a LO’s hand

This is a big area where AccessYes program can be expanded, Hopefully cooler heads prevail and hot heads dont ruin that program too.

Bobo you bring up an interesting point about fences. But in reality could be be a matter of where your foot is planted in relation to the actual legal survey boundary regardless of a fence or marker?

I can see complexity if people want to take it to that level.

I will go back and ready the 4 pages of posts but the result is what I kind of thought where they would go.

The Unlawful Closures Act was going to be the respondents best bet to prevail. I haven't read the act, just the cliff notes. If I'm not mistaken the suit was in a Wyoming district court. That limits the implications. I am both glad and sad at the decision. I'm glad because the owners claim of damages was ill conceived. Either they trespassed, in which case there was no damages other than cease and desist (because their claim that market value was eroded) or they didn't, in which the owner didn't have the market value claim he thought it did. I'm usually sad when property rights are eroded. This has unintended consequences. We take property rights for granted in this country as a whole. We don't ( as a society) tend to a strong understanding of the destructive force erosion of those rights have on our economy and society.

Having said that, I hope some reasonable resolution to this issue occurs. The state (feds) needs to pay for the access either through right of way, outright purchase or purchase through eminent domain (if this meets the criteria). At the same time, the owners need to have some control over who is crossing their land, either by limiting the access to foot traffic or daily numbers. And the state needs to indemnify the owner for liability and reimburse for damages. Those can be paid for by public access fees. We pay fees to take toll roads, we pay fees to get into state and federal parks, we pay fees to hunt and fish. If we want access across private property we should pay fees for that as well. But the state could negotiate that access and set the fees through the public process.

Just random meanderings of an old mind.

I cant wait to see all the people with a successful harvest that would not have otherwise if not for crossing a corner.

The solution would be for the Feds to declare eminent domain for a 10' x 10' square in the corner to allow for public access between the properties. That would equate to 25 square feet in each quadrant. In most cases the land owners own the property catty-corner to the public land. So pay them for the 50 square feet condemned at the market rate and be done with it. I don't see it's any different than buying right of way along an existing highway.

I wouldn't want the Federal Government declaring eminent domain (substitute seizing private property) in a case like this. Somebody worked their a-- off and earned enough coin to buy a piece of property with certain attributes, one of which could be limited public intrusion for increased privacy. The government comes along and says, we're taking some of your land so an unlimited # of people can walk right by your place, changing your value, land scape, view, increased trespass probability, decreasing privacy........That's how I see it differently than your example of highway right of way.

You may not want it but it happens everyday, ask me how I know...I have eminent domain on my place w a transmission line

And in these type cases it may be the best option

Keeping public property, "private" doesn't even make sense and the most recent court cases agree with my stance

utilities are a little different then land locked Public land. What happens when they ED the only water source of a ranch? Or put in a prescriptive easement that cost YOU thousands of dollars to maintain.

The Private land owners didn’t cause the issue, Federal Government did. There is also the issue that several land owners who would swap land in a heart beat to get land locked parcels out of their domain but Alot of people have mind set that the only compromise, is opening Private property to prescriptive easements. Again this thread is filled with the hell with private property rights, doesnt effect them so who cares.

why not just give them option to land swap? Why does LO’s have to loose land? Not a utility, you dont depend on that land for water, electricity etc so why should they loose it?

CO has purposed something similar but I dont think it passes

jnd great points and BOBO I do agree with you also on the private property rights.

No need for easements just make crossing at marked corners legal, you have to step over the corner.

Land swaps can and do happen but the public has a way of putting a stop to some of them . Yes the gov't created this issue with giving all that land to the RRs.
Wyoming has a laws going into affect in July that states if you go onto private land for hunting or antler gathering the GW can now cite for trespassing, you must actually touch the private land though to get cited.

Folks have been corner crossing in Wyoming for years without much issue until this guy wanted to stop the elk hunters that hunted on those parcels the year before too.

Game retrieval means you just cut it up into packable parts, just like folks do every year and carry it out over the corner.

The problem will never be undone because it is old and entrenched in real estate parcels. Land swaps are one way to alleviate the perceived problem of lack of public land access, but they will not solve all the problems and there is often litigation holding them up. Personally, I like that we have some very difficult to access public lands that offer refuge and reward for those that would access them. Some land swaps that offer greater "public access" may be done at the expense of hardworking hunters that had the gumption to get in there and learn the place. Now I am not talking about corners or land locked pieces, but I hunt some small difficult to access public parcels successfully that I am sure the BLM would deem disposable if they could swap for some land to put mountain bike trails or something. I also appreciate private landowners that are effective wildlife and habitat managers and the ability to funnel wildlife dollars into projects more easily on those private lands than on federal or even state land....

To legally corner cross according to these trial results and not get into trouble, there must be a monument at the corner. GIS parcels and phone GPS are not precise enough.

We have a similar issue here in Texas where a landowner has blocked public access to a navigable waterway by building a fence across a state right of way on a FM road. Right now, if anyone wants to put a boat in the water, they must lift it up and over his fence. The FM Road dead ends just past where it joins the waterway and dead ends into his land. Now he's trying to buy the Farm to Market Road from the State to try to block the public from even driving down to the waterway. A group of people are trying to stop all this but as usual it hard to fight someone in court who as money to blow. There's a Facebook page dedicated to trying to stop all this. The crazy part is if you know the history the state or county allocated money to put the Farm to Market Road in for the sole purpose of granting the public access to this waterway. The Facebook page is Save the Cut Off. This is an old portion of the Trinity River the Corp diverted the main channel away from if I remember correctly. Its land locked and water doesn't flow through now but as the definition clearly states once a waterway is deemed navigable no matter what you do to it afterward it retains its status as a navigable waterway.

Kry, also hard to imagine private land adjacent to public land being private if forced to allow “trespassers”.

Sir, I'm a landowner, so I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance that doesn't care or is nonchalant about landowner's rights. I have personally been trespassed and poached.

And I don't think anyone here is advocating trespassing either. We're talking corner-crossing, and in this specific case, the accused did nothing wrong. The court determined he did not trespass. I still do not believe that a private landowner can independently block access to public land. There are options the government and private landowners can take.

Personally, I would be all too happy to lose a few feet at a corner and build an easement. Well-fenced, it may actually keep law-abiding public land hunters off 99.999% of my land. Providing ladders as discussed earlier ain't a bad option either. Trespassers are gonna trespass, regardless.

I guess I'd rather be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

Many of these sections are not fenced off separately, there are thousands of acres.
The corners are marked for the most part and as kry pointed out a LO can not fenced off public land due to the UIA.

LOs are not required to allow game retrieval and that is an issue every year across the state. Some LOs actually will let an animal rot rather than give access for retrieval so ethics go both ways in that instance.

Access Yes program has already been affected in that area of the state. Some LO pulled their land after the jury trial and folks lost some good hunting access.
The program only works if LOs are willing to enroll, can't force them.

LEOs will not be writing tickets for a charge that has already been adjudicated, GWs will be able to write for trespass starting in July but you must actually touch the private land for this new law to affect you. Remember the LEO would not cite them at first the LO had to raise a stink to get that to happen.

This is good news for public land hunting access.

I see no problem with someone coming onto my property to follow up a wounded deer.

The problem comes when I haven’t heard a shot.

99% of the people I know are honest. But, if you watch a guy following a blood trail, even when it’s skimpy, you know it. Just as you know when he wouldn’t be following up.

A lot of years ago, a hunter said he thought it was his Uncles land. I had bought it 7 or 8 years prior from what may have been his Uncle.

Lately, I’ve had no problems. Of course, I don’t live there so I may have problems that im not aware of.

Bottom line is that I want no part of an armed person who is breaking the law.