In 2019, hunters Brad Cape and Phil Yeomans were scouting for elk in southeast Wyoming when they came across a rocky peak that seemed perfect for elk hunting, a suspicion only heightened by its name: Elk Mountain. But finding a way onto Elk Mountain would turn out to be extremely difficult, and whether Brad and Phil succeeded would have lasting consequences for the future of land use everywhere in the U.S. because the single largest obstacle preventing the hunters from making it onto the mountain wasn’t the elevation or the topography. It was that the mountain was on a special type of land known as “the checkerboard”.
The checkerboard is a pattern of land ownership, unique to the American West, found in huge areas from New Mexico all the way up to Washington. On a map, these particular areas resemble a checkerboard, but instead of alternating black and white squares, checkerboarded land alternates between single square-mile parcels of public land and square mile parcels of private land.
In Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, the Stanford historian Richard White explains that the checkerboard was created at the tail-end of the Civil War, when the U.S. government gave the railroad companies long corridors of land—up to eighty miles wide—on which to build new rail lines and encourage westward migration. But almost all of this land was given away in alternating, one-square-mile sections. This checkerboard pattern allowed the government to keep all the undeveloped sections in between and wait for them to go up in value before turning around and selling them to developers. Most checkerboarded land today, regardless of who owns the private squares now, is descended from these initial railroad grants.
But the checkerboard would pose a problem for Brad and Phil. You can’t pass through private property without the landowner’s permission, so the public squares in the checkerboard are often very difficult to access, and Elk Mountain was no different. The private half of the checkerboard belonged to a ranch, and the ranch’s owner, a billionaire pharmaceutical executive, wasn’t allowing strangers to cross his land. So when they came back to hunt in the area in 2020, Brad and Phil and some other hunting buddies decided to try something called corner crossing.
To understand corner crossing, think about a literal checkerboard. In a checkers game, a piece that starts on black needs to stay on black. So the pieces only ever make diagonal movements, crossing from the corner of one square to another. Moving through checkerboarded land works in the same way. To avoid the ranch’s property, all Brad and Phil and the others had to do was move around like a checkers piece. They’d start on public land and then make sure to stay on public land, by crossing into new squares diagonally, at the corners where all those public squares touch.
The hunters hiked from a public road towards the checkerboard’s nearest approachable corner, where they found two no-trespassing signs, along with a couple of posts with a chain strung between them, obstructing the one spot where they could legally cross. So they grabbed hold of the top of the posts and swung their feet around, making absolutely sure they didn’t touch private property. From that point on, they stayed entirely on public land inside the checkerboard, corner crossing from one public square to another as they hunted for elk on Elk Mountain.
But in the middle of their hunt, a manager for the ranch approached them and insisted that touching the ranch’s posts counted as trespassing. So when they came back to hunt Elk Mountain the next year, Brad brought a ladder that unfolded to a specific height, length and width, allowing the hunters to go right over the t-posts and across the corner, all without ever touching the ranch’s property.
But this didn’t placate the ranch’s owner. He had the ranch’s manager keep contacting the authorities until eventually the county attorney charged the hunters with criminal trespass. The chance of jail time was slim, so the hunters could have ended things there by paying a small fine and promising to stay away from Elk Mountain and go hunt elk somewhere else. But the hunters believed the public should have the right to access public land—including in the checkerboard. So instead of paying the fine, the hunters decided to fight the case.
The resulting five-year legal battle, which grew to include two criminal charges and a multimillion-dollar civil case, revolved around the central question of whether corner crossing is or should be legal, and with it, effectively who really controlled millions of acres of public land. Along the way, the stakes attracted private landowners, public land users, lobbying groups on both sides of the divide, and the national media. Eventually the case landed before the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled in favor of the hunters, saying that the public was owed its half of the deal that the government had struck with the railroads a century and a half earlier.
The Tenth Circuit’s decision won’t bring total closure. Its decision only affects six western states, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the case, which means that, for now, the status of corner crossing and public land access in the other 44 states remains murky. It’s unlikely Brad and Phil will be involved in whatever comes next. One thing is for sure though: they’re eager to go back to hunt Elk Mountain.