Checkerboard Pro-Active Solutions?

[Dougfirtree]

Philosophically, everything is a construct of humans. Laws only work if people follow them and/or agree to them, everything is entirely arbitrary. There is no actual reason we can't do anything, and or not do it right now.

Throughout human history people have flipped the table over numerous times.

When the table is flipped everyone has a pretty crappy time, we are best served when we find common ground.

To that point, when you or I get packed at a trailhead... sure, but when 3MM people?



Personally, complicated, but yes. I personally have ownership of a property with a public easement through it, there is a public road on one side and a path through the top 1/3 of the property that allows people to access the inlet of the lake for fishing or just to walk their dog. Tons of people use it everyday. Sure it's a little annoying and sometimes people take liberties and walk out our deck to take photos, but .

If your willing to include the experiences of family members (grand parents/parents/aunts/uncles) in forming your world view? My family had to have a rider? (correct word) attached to a senate bill (US not state) to do a land swap and get the boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park changed.

There's truth here. Private land can be a sore subject everywhere, but I think the west takes this to a whole new level. The private ownership of land is essentially a religion in much of the west. But we're watching the populations of these states grow and things are going to change in all sorts of ways because of that. Some of the political forces that have dominated state legislatures across the west are going to be significantly weakened in the future.

 

[Deleted member 18333]

Wyo is working on pro-active solutions. This bill just passed in Wyo and is waiting on the Governors signature. Doesn't entirely fix the problem but you eat an elephant one bite at a time. Expected to raise $1.4M per year to be used for easements and access. A step in the right direction.

https://wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/HB0122

In regards to the Oxy land in Southern Wyo that was sold a couple years ago. The company that bought it has already started carving up chunks and is selling them off to other buyers.

 

[VikingsGuy]

@Ben Lamb @VikingsGuy
Check this out

Should CO Full Limited for Elk ?

@BuzzH once watched me shoot the oldest, most haggard-looking doe antelope once as well, when I clearly had a better option. But...she was a trophy.

www.hunttalk.com

Very little new under the sun.

 

[Dakotakid]

I do not think prescriptive easements will be used to gain public access.
See MTsb345

 

[Deleted member 28227]

I do not think prescriptive easements will be used to gain public access.
See MTsb345

Ah, sorry we are missing each other. I do not think people should try to just trespass their way into a easement.

I'm saying in the context of mapping access, per the comments with nameless, that there are likely pieces of public that are already accessible via a prescriptive easement that you wouldn't be able to identify in a spatial analysis project. Those are local knowledge and impossible to deal with programmatically.

 

[Dakotakid]

It would seem that if MT curtails prescriptive easements by requiring the easement to be written, then that info/data may become available. At least to overlay on a map.
But that is going to be a ton of work to get done as required by the bill.

 

[Bullbrl]

Not true, not true at all. It's really county by county, ask the local warden, I did. My county they will prosecute unless you can find the survery marker for the corner and step over that. GPS/ONx etc, are not perfect and you could be off by feet or yards, hence trespassing. So technically you're probably right, corner crossing isn't illegal, but you have to be sure you are actually at the corner.

I've been researching this quite a bit lately and one thing has come to my attention that I'm wondering about.

In your quote above, "unless you can find the survey marker for the corner and step over that".

If the marker isn't there than how can either party say exactly where the "boundaries" are? I mean, lets say it went to court because you were accused of trespassing. How could the landowner say you were trespassing if there is no marker? I'll bet a large amount of money that if a surveyor came out to the property and surveyed the property lines, the "corner" wouldn't be exactly where it should be. With that in mind, how could trespassing be enforced, and it could even be said the private landowner could be held liable for misrepresenting his/her property lines. Without a survey marker, are we supposed to just take the landowners word that it's fenced correct to begin with? After all, we're talking about a very minute area in question here.

The reason I bring this up is because a surveyor friend of mine who works for a timber company says many, many times those corners on private/public aren't exactly correct. He said, a lot of times they are off by quite a bit.

I hope all that makes sense.

 

[Dakotakid]

I've been researching this quite a bit lately and one thing has come to my attention that I'm wondering about.

In your quote above, "unless you can find the survey marker for the corner and step over that".

If the marker isn't there than how can either party say exactly where the "boundaries" are? I mean, lets say it went to court because you were accused of trespassing. How could the landowner say you were trespassing if there is no marker? I'll bet a large amount of money that if a surveyor came out to the property and surveyed the property lines, the "corner" wouldn't be exactly where it should be. With that in mind, how could trespassing be enforced, and it could even be said the private landowner could be held liable for misrepresenting his/her property lines. Without a survey marker, are we supposed to just take the landowners word that it's fenced correct to begin with? After all, we're talking about a very minute area in question here.

The reason I bring this up is because a surveyor friend of mine who works for a timber company says many, many times those corners on private/public aren't exactly correct. He said, a lot of times they are off by quite a bit.

I hope all that makes sense.

There is a Montana law that says something along the lines that the landowner is presumed to know the boundaries of the property. To my knowledge it has not been litigated yet but the presumption may trump the gps.

 

[Bullbrl]

There is a Montana law that says something along the lines that the landowner is presumed to know the boundaries of the property. To my knowledge it has not been litigated yet but the presumption may trump the gps.

Then I presume the marker is directly under where I crossed the corner

 

[Nameless Range]

At a conference I was at over the last few days, the VP of OnX came as a guest speaker. He gave a great talk and showed a lot of the cool things they are doing. The last portion of his talk centered around their efforts with TRCP and federal agencies to unlock locked lands.

After his talk, I approached him, and he allowed me to bend his ear. This is the case I made:

OnX should incorporate this data set of parcels that are theoretically inaccessible into their mobile application.

For one, they would be crowdsourcing local and expert knowledge that would refine their data set. Many parcels that they think are inaccessible are likely accessible through means not represented in public transportation data sets that they utilized to come to their initial determination. I know thousands of acres locally, for which this is the case and I brought them up as a use case.

Secondly, they would be crowdsourcing people keeping their eyes peeled for opportunity. There are thousands of examples of landlocked chunks of public land that if only a land trust, conservation Org or public agency would purchase, it would open up orders of magnitude more than the purchase or easement itself. Imagine a for sale sign popping up on one of these key parcels unexpectedly, and the small window of opportunity that would exist to capitalize on such a purchase for the public. There is a tiny temporal aspect to many opportunities that could make a difference forever.

Lastly, it may just spark unique ideas in people. OnX I is incredibly widely used. We can mock local or on the ground knowledge as it pertains to wildlife and the barstool, but I have seen firsthand, local knowledge can sometimes trump any analysis and even the knowledge of the agencies that manage the land, when it comes to access. There are things buried in paper that may not even exist on the landscape that can be tools for access.

Anyway, it was a privilege for me for him to give me the time to pitch the thought to him. He did say he would bring it back to his access team and that he liked it, but there were some obvious concerns about how it might upset some landowners.

I think this is one thing we should just get out of the way from the get-go. Unlocking access to previously locked public lands is going to piss off those who have enjoyed exclusive access to them in recent history.

So be it.

 

[Nameless Range]

Here’s a question from a fried mind on a Friday:

Imagine a corner on which two sections of BLM share ownership. The other two sections are private. BLM has subsurface ownership of all four parcels though, or at the very least three.

Could the BLM dig a tunnel under the corner to connect the two public parcels? Call it an investment in infrastructure? An inverted bridge.

It would be a fun GIS exercise to identify all those corners on which one of the two private parcels had public subsurface ownership.

 

[Deleted member 16014]

fun GIS exercise

Lies.