Overview
Over the past two centuries, legislation, random chance, and a variety of land deals have left the American West with a patchwork landscape of public and private land. Within the patchwork lie swaths of alternating sections of public and private land, like the squares of a checkerboard. At every point where four squares meet, there is a property corner ripe for controversy. With the issue of corner-crossing in the news again, we decided to leverage our strengths and drill down on the data. What we discovered was shocking in its scope.
The Highlights
- Using our onX mapping technology, we identified 8.3 million acres of corner-locked lands—more than half of the West’s total landlocked area.
- 27,120 land-locking corners exist in the West.
- No law exists that specifically outlaws corner-crossing, but various attempts to make it either definitively legal or illegal have thus far failed.
- Property owners have valid concerns, and any solution to the problem must address landowner needs.
- Tools and programs for unlocking public land exist, but a widespread answer will take input and attention from a diverse group of stakeholders with varied interests.
Access matters to onX—we believe that everyone should have access to nature. When people feel connected to the land, they are more likely to protect it. Read the onX Corner-Locked Report below to gain an understanding of the issue and what’s being done to address this complex problem.
The information provided here does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice, and may not constitute the most up-to-date information. Links to third-party websites are intended for the convenience of the reader and do not endorse third-party information.
The Crux of the Issue
In October of 2021, four hunters were cited for criminal trespass in Wyoming. They had not entered a private building, nor had they touched private land.
What they had done was place an A-frame ladder across an intersection of property boundaries, the location where four parcels of land meet at a point. They climbed up one side of the ladder from public land, and down the other side of the ladder, stepping kitty-corner onto a different parcel of public land. But in doing so, their bodies also crossed through the airspace of the other two parcels meeting at that point, which were private. Their trial, set for mid-April, will decide if they trespassed when they passed through that private airspace.
Why Corner-Locked Lands Exist
The location on which these hunters set their ladder is not unique in the West. Most of the land in the Western U.S. is mapped and platted based on square, 640-acre sections arranged in neat rows and columns, a system known as the Public Land Survey System. As a rule, squares have four 90-degree angles. This means a hallmark of this system is four tracts of land meeting at a single corner point. As land was doled out to homesteaders and the newly formed states, designated for parks and forests and reservations, and retained or reclaimed by the federal government, a complex patchwork of ownership formed. Properties combined, split, and transformed into every imaginable shape, but the underlying unit—the humble, square, 640-acre section—can still be found all over the West.
In many parts of the West, land ownership boundaries are invisible on the landscape.
Quantifying the Immense Scale of Landlocked Public Land
Within this patchwork lie parcels of public land that are landlocked, that is, surrounded by private land with no public roads or trails to access them. Since at least the 1970’s, the hunting community has been well aware of inaccessible parcels, and many hunters have found particular locations with maps and binoculars that they can’t access. But nobody, including the federal land management agencies themselves, knew exactly how much public land was out of reach to the public. So in 2018 and 2019, onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership worked together to discover 15.8 million acres of landlocked federal and state land throughout the West.
When we conducted that analysis, we noticed landlocked parcels fall into one of two categories, which we now call “isolated” and “corner-locked.” Isolated parcels are fairly self-explanatory: they are parcels of public land off by themselves, like islands in a sea of private land. Corner-locked parcels, on the other hand, are those that are mostly surrounded by private land, but do touch another parcel of public land at one or more corners.
Corner-Locked:
Public land that is inaccessible to the general public because there is no public road or trail to get there AND because the legality of corner-crossing remains unclear
Most hunters in the Western U.S. refrain from stepping over a property corner from one parcel of public land to another. Doing so is referred to as corner-hopping, corner-crossing, or corner-trespassing, depending on who you ask. Outside of the world of hunting, and outside of the West, this limitation is rarely discussed. In fact, there’s no law on the books which specifically states that stepping over a property corner from public land to public land is illegal. Despite various attempts to make corner-crossing legal or illegal by state legislatures, no state has yet passed such a bill into law. This has left the decision to prosecute “corner-hoppers” in the hands of local law enforcement and local courts.
At onX, we believe that publicly accessible land plays a critical role in equalizing everyone’s access to outdoor recreation, but we also recognize private property rights. Like we did with the landlocked analysis, we wanted to quantify the issue of corner-crossing. How much land is involved? How many property owners does it affect? To get the answers, we dove back into the data.
This report on corner-locked public land reveals a complex dichotomy and history between outdoor enthusiasts and private landowners. While some favor public access and others are looking to protect private property rights, several court cases and failed legislation have effectively positioned corner-crossing in a “legal gray area.” But there are programs and tools that simultaneously benefit landowners and the public, so we conclude the report with ways that public lands are being successfully unlocked—even without a definitive policy on corner-crossing.
Corner-Locked: By The Numbers
Corner-Locked Acres
Over the past two centuries, legislation, random chance, and a variety of land deals have resulted in 27,120 property corners in the West where two parcels of public land meet on opposite sides of a point, with private land adjacent, effectively in between them. Beyond these corners lie 8.3 million acres of federal and state land that are inaccessible to the general public because the legality of corner-crossing remains unclear. In other words, more than half of all the landlocked public land in the Western U.S. would be unlocked if corner-crossing was legalized. These acres are not only off-limits to hunting but also to fishing, hiking, wildlife watching, cross-country skiing, and all other forms of enjoying the outdoors.
Corner-by-Corner Acreage Breakdown
Of the 8.3 million acres, 72% (5.98 million acres) are locked in a checkerboard land ownership pattern devised in the 19th century to promote the Western expansion of the United States through land grants to railroad companies. The scheme did not go according to plan, so the alternating sections of ownership persist to this day. The other 28% of corner-locked public lands tend to be on the edges of larger units of public land, perhaps a result of land being bought, sold, and swapped over the past 170 years. Since the majority of the unclaimed and reclaimed land in the West ended up being folded into the agency that became the Bureau of Land Management, it’s unsurprising that 70% of all the corner-locked acres we identified are managed by that agency.
Looking at a broad swath of checkerboarded land stretching out for miles on either side of a railroad line, it would be easy to assume that much of the corner-locked land would be difficult to reach on foot, even if property corners didn’t stand in the way. But 49% of corner-locked acres are just one corner away from an accessible parcel. The remaining 51% woul
