It might seem like an unimportant story in Saturday morning’s Washington Post, and the ruling won’t affect all that many people, but it demonstrates the willingness of some people to be absolute assholes — note that I used the word directly rather than my more usual [insert slang term for the anus here] — for no good reason. Yes, sometimes we need government officials to be [insert plural slang term for the anus here] for the good of government and of the country, but this kind of behavior over pettiness is just plain stupid.
‘Corner-crossing’ to reach public lands is legal, appeals court rules
The decision, in a case that pitted four Missouri hunters against a millionaire Wyoming landowner, protects public access to millions of acres across the West.
by Karen Brulliard | Saturday, March 22, 2025
Four Missouri hunters who stepped diagonally from one parcel of federal land in Wyoming to another did not illegally trespass on the airspace of adjacent private property, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The decision, issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver, firmly protects public access to millions of acres of land in the court’s six-state jurisdiction and substantially strengthens the rights of “corner-crossers” throughout the West.
The case is rooted in a quirk of the region, where vast swaths of terrain have been divided since the 19th century in a checkerboard pattern of alternating private and public parcels. Lawmakers have long grappled with how to balance the rights of recreationists and private landowners at the corners where four pieces of property meet, and previous court rulings had not settled whether corner-crossing is legal.
For those who are not subscribers to the Post, and are blocked by the newspaper’s paywall, you can read the story here for free.
The question “may seem trivial,” Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote in Tuesday’s decision, but “it implicates centuries of property law and the settlement of the American West.” Any barrier that prevents access to public land — including the threat of legal action, which the court likened to a “virtual wall” — is prohibited under the 1885 Unlawful Inclosures Act, the appellate court ruled.
The case began in 2020, when the Missouri men set out to hunt on Elk Mountain, a southern Wyoming peak that is home to an abundant elk population as well as 22,000 acres that are privately owned by a North Carolina pharmaceutical magnate. The landowner, Fred Eshelman, alleged that the hunters violated his airspace when they stepped that year over his “No Trespassing” signs from one patch of Bureau of Land Management territory to another, and again the following year when they used a homemade stepladder to cross the same corner.
Think about this. The distinguished Mr Eshelman claimed that four men “violated his airspace” by crossing at a single point in which public and private land met in the corners like the red-and-black squares on a chessboard. Since that comes to a single point, I have no doubt that the men did at least swing their arms over his property, but how much of an asshole do you have to be to first take the men to court for criminal trespassing, and then, after the men were acquitted by a local jury, use one of his corporations, Iron Bar Holdings, to take them to court in a civil lawsuit. Failing at the district court level, Mr Eshelman then appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. With a November 1, 2024 estimated net worth of $229 million, this fine gentleman could certainly afford to keep going in court, if he wants to be stupid.
The website WyoFile gives Mr Eshelman’s side of the story:
Elk Mountain Ranch owner Fred Eshelman has stated in just-filed court papers why he believes four Missouri hunters who stepped from public land to public land, over a corner of his Carbon County property in 2021 are guilty of trespass and should pay him $7.75 million or more in damages.
“Our position is that we should have control over who crosses the private land,” Eshelman said, according to a transcript of a deposition. That “private land” includes the airspace above his ranch, he clarified in an answer to a follow-up question posed by one of the hunters’ lawyers.
Last week’s court filings are part of Eshelman’s federal civil lawsuit against Bradly Cape, Phillip Yeomans, John Slowensky and Zachary Smith alleging they caused millions in damages without setting foot on his ranch.
This is an interesting point. The landowner claimed that the hunters caused damages to his ranch by violating his airspace. If such a claim were upheld, then any environmentalist whacko — and we have millions of them in this country — could claim that automobile and truck exhaust which crossed into their airspace caused property damage, that anyone walking his dog which pooped or peed even in the curb strip between the sidewalk and curb caused damage by scent, even if the dog owner scooped the poop.
The federal civil case follows a Carbon County criminal case in which a jury of the hunters’ peers last year found them not guilty of criminal trespass or trespass to hunt.
Elk Mountain Ranch covers 22,042 acres and enmeshes thousands of additional acres of public land in a checkerboard pattern of ownership. The hunters contend they have a right to corner cross — step from public parcel to public parcel at the common corners with two adjacent private properties — if they don’t step on the private land.
And that is why they built the ladder, to enable them to cross without setting foot on Mr Eshelman’s land or climbing the fences that he set up; they knew that he was a fanatic about it, and had instructed his ranch personnel to call law enforcement when people attempted to corner cross.
The men hunted on some 3,000 acres of public land on Elk Mountain, killing two elk and a deer in 2021. But they illegally trespassed to reach that public land by passing through airspace at the edge of his property, Eshelman’s civil suit claims.
The plaintiff isn’t even an anti-hunting advocate, as he stated in his deposition that he has allowed people he chose to cross his land to hunt. What he was doing was attempting to shut off publicly-owned land, Bureau of Land Management land, for his own private use.