Buzz Hettick crosses between two “No Trespassing” signs on private property to get from one parcel of public land to another in Elk Mountain, Wyo. (Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post) ELK MOUNTAIN, Wyo. - Here is what’s at the center of a federal lawsuit that could unblock millions of acres of public land in the American West: a steel stepladder, quickly welded together in a home workshop, then placed on the rolling hills here in the fall of 2021.
Four Missouri elk hunters used it to climb over an invisible corner from one parcel of Bureau of Land Management terrain to another. They never touched a toe on two adjacent swaths of private property marked by “No Trespassing” signs. But to the owner of that property, a North Carolina multimillionaire whose portfolio includes 22,000 acres of this game-rich mountain, the hunters’ aerial corner-cross was trespassing all the same.
Whether he is correct - and the extent to which private property rights can thwart the public’s ability to access its land on thousands of similar corners - is now being weighed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.
This wild Western legal duel is rooted in a shortsighted 19th-century plan to expand the federal government’s dominion toward the Pacific by granting railroad companies alternating squares of land in exchange for train tracks. The cash-strapped government figured the rail line would make the tracts in between, hardscrabble though they were, appealing to buy.
