Dear editor:

Responding to your guest editorial of May 18 — if the corner crossing debate weren’t so infuriating, I’d find it funny.

As an American citizen, I’m part owner of parcels 14 and 24 near Rattlesnake Pass road, as are “the group of hunters from Missouri.” While I might find it irksome that nonresidents fish on “my” river or hunt in “my” mountains, the fact is, they’ve paid a premium to do it and have as much right to access public resources as I do. If this group has figured out a way to circumvent the obstacles placed in their way, without setting foot on private property to do it, more power to ‘em. It seems pretty straightforward to me, and a jury in Carbon County agreed with my point of view.

Now they (the Missourians) are facing a civil suit involving millions of dollars. If I had any legal standing in the case, I’d be considering a counter-suit, claiming that the value of the property was artificially inflated based on a misrepresentation of the actual acreage of deeded land. (If I were to own two non-adjacent lots in my subdivision, I certainly wouldn’t be able to claim the lot between them as my own!) I’m reminded of a similar case in New York, in which the organization owned by a certain unindicted co-conspirator was found guilty of fraud based in part on misrepresentation of square footage of his condominium.

If “airspace” is the issue, would a ruling in the plaintiff’s favor serve as precedent for me to sue the commercial airlines that periodically fly over my house? If a neighbor is continually flying drones over my property, my local sheriff might agree that I have cause to be upset because of a noise nuisance or privacy concerns; it’s unlikely he’d take me seriously if I were to call him because my neighbor kept waving his hand over my fence. Likewise, harassing livestock is a separate issue and, in this case, I find it unlikely that the defendants were chasing cattle on four-wheelers, or that their dogs were...they’d have had to haul those things up a ladder and over a fence. And simply walking through a patch of land can’t be considered “harassing livestock,” otherwise we’d all be guilty of it when we visit the Bighorns or Beartooths.

I’m all for friendly conversations with landowners when it actually comes down to accessing private property. But this issue appears pretty black-and-white to me. Fred Eshelman and Iron Bar Holdings were trying to landlock public land.

(I have forwarded a copy of this letter to the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, original publisher of the editorial.)

Phil Anthony

Powell