I’ve been traveling the last two weeks (and this week) and was fortunate to attend the Public Lands Foundation annual conference in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Thanks to them for putting on an excellent program! The topic was access and we heard from all kinds of interesting folks, from County Commissioners, to a ranch LLC President, to the State Director. We didn’t talk much about the corner crossing issue. At the Conference, Joel Webster of TRCP (the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership) had an excellent presentation on access. Joel said that it was equivalent to this video, so here is the video.
It starts kind of slowly (IMHO) but about 8:15 starts talking about easements and the difficulties of figuring out what is public and what isn’t, and how TRCP and others are working on it. It includes an interview with an FS Region 1 Lands person. The video mostly focuses on hunting as hunters (maybe) tend to traverse the landscape more than other kinds of recreationists.
As a recreating person, more access for me is an unalloyed good. At the same time, even hikers impact wildlife. So perhaps it raises the question of how alloyed the good might be in some cases. And of course people, including hunters can exhibit poor behavior, and who pays to clean it up? Nothing in the federal lands business is simple..
And a great big shout-out to FS and BLM lands folks!!!