One thing our betters really hate is when we try to take back something they stole fair and square.
The Land, Cattle, Railroad, and Robber Barons ask you to politely stop back from their property border. You might lower their property value!
They’re gonna have to hire the Ghostbusters drive the poor people cooties off their property, and then have the Men in Black erase their painful memory of the traumatic incident. Neither of them work cheap.
Seems a point to countersue that their exclusive access is denying others the right to access land that should be accessible to the public, and so they should have to pay for the value of the land that they restrict from others.
This is of course, my opinion on the ethical side of things, I don’t know if it would play on the legal side of things.
Can you imagine owning a 50 square mile ranch (32,000 acres) and then fighting to keep the public off the roughly 12 more square miles of public land your ranch encompasses? I feel so badly for him!
I don’t understand the ladder argument–I don’t know much about aviation rights, but it seems that if you could fly over at 100’ AGL then a ladder (or rope swing or whatever) should be fine. Also, you DEFINITELY don’t own the sub-surface rights except in limited circumstances, so maybe tunnels are in order. It’s all bullshit. I once rode through a billionaire’s property on what I knew 100% was a legal easement (a buddy owned it), and the caretaker started laying into me, talking about calling the sheriff, etc. I told him I was on a legal easement owned by so-and-so and his response changed to “Well, how would you like it if I rode through your front yard?” Well, if I bought a property knowing there were several public and private easements, I guess I’d suck it up.
I expect the response would be along the lines of “We are imposing no more restriction than what is allowed to every landowner: the right to limit access to our property. The public is entirely free to make use of any and all other legal methods of access, over which we assert no control whatsoever.”
I’m thinking this might best be resolved by a new law that says access to public land is valid only when the public in general can make reasonable use of the right of access. Thus, a landowner who chooses to block easy access would lose his own right of access.
That’s actually an interesting situation–the billionaire also has an easement over my buddy’s property to access their $4000/night glamping compound and installed a motorized security gate on my friend’s property. The sheriff told my friend it was a civil matter, and take them to court. Yeah, right. SS,DD.
I think they would love that solution. What’s really going to stop that land owner from then entering the now-closed public land? Who is going to patrol and enforce?
IMHO. There should be a reasonable person argument in here somewhere.
Prescriptive rights, are, of course a whole different ballgame. But this isn’t about that. I don’t think…
Do prescriptive rights come into play when crossing private property (even a foot of it) when accessing public land?
The people trying to grab public land for themselves, should be laughed out of court. Provided someone is not driving or hiking all over there property to get to it.
I’ve gotten this, lost x-country skiers on my property. What I do is drive them back to their car. Good karma. Shit, we have ZERO police protection. And even the Sheriffs office is closed from 11pm to 7am. I guess their moto is “Best of Luck” see you in the morning. Maybe.
I know that I’ve hiked across private property unwittingly (I’ve also corner-crossed quite a few times not knowing it was a gray area). What these new apps allow, OnX in particular, is to better plan my trips and avoid private property. I, and others, do plenty of cross-country trips that don’t follow trails and there aren’t always fences marking boundaries as the photos in the article show.
I hope a way to ensure public access to public property, that doesn’t require expensive helicopter trips is found (of course, they tried to stop even air travel into their “private” public land).
Video monitoring is reasonably easy and cheap nowadays.
The estimate starts at around 8 million acres of land-locked public land in the west. If we assume these are all sections (they aren’t, but we’ll use that assumption for this exercise), that is about 12,500 sections. Each section has 4 miles of property boundary. That adds up to 50,000 miles of boundaries to monitor. I know some might agree for public access so we can reduce that total, but it’s a shitload of miles of boundaries to monitor. I just don’t see this being viable.
Someone check my math. I could be off.
Technical issues aside, what do you do if you do catch them? Even trying to levy a fine is probably going to end up with another Bundy style standoff.
I totally agree! This whole issue is yet another example of how the rich control our government because this total injustice shouldn’t even exist.
100% agree. This would be Ammon’s new rallying cry and the county sheriffs would back him and the feds would NOPE right out of there.
Yep. We need to figure out a way to provide legal access for the public to these pieces of public land. Corner crossing seems to be the best way with the public paying for the gates if fences exist (no fences exist in the NYT article example). It would require just a few square feet of land from each of the two private parcels at these corners to build the access gate. Or, the land owners could just stop being assholes and let people cross at the corners without the passing of laws and forcing of hands. I’m guessing that is asking too much of these folks.
I think corner crossing should absolutely be allowed. Put up sections of fence with signs designating the private land on each side and a clear path between the fences across the corner. That would allow everyone to see and understand where the boundaries are and accommodate the crossing in a controlled manner. Maybe even let the property owners petition the government to put up the fence sections and signs if they want to be that petty about it.
If people trespass on private land even with that accommodation, then charge them with trespassing but even then just walking across land should never result in millions or even thousands of dollars in fines.
Question, does any of this corner crossing use vehicles, or is it all assumed to be on foot?
Once I (inadvertently!) cut across somebody’s land, and a shotgun-toting motorcyclist soon arrived to see what we were up to.
All the examples of corner crossing I’ve read about and experienced in my own life have been on foot. However, the WSJ article mentions these owners are upset about airplanes landing on these public sections so it isn’t even restricted to just going across these corners.