Three 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judges on Tuesday affirmed the ruling of lower courts that hunters can corner cross as long as hunters do not physically touch private land.

Nearly half of Wyoming is federal public land, and millions acres of public land across the West are platted into checkerboard squares of public and private land.

Roughly 8.3 million acres of public land across the West is “corner-locked.”

A Carbon County Circuit Court jury in 2022 found four Missouri hunters not guilty of trespassing after the hunters used a ladder to cross from one square of Bureau of Land Management land to another near Elk Mountain in Carbon County in 2020 and 2021.

The group never set foot on the private ranch adjacent to the public land.

The Iron Bar ranch spans 50 square miles and interspersed within its holdings are 27 federal and state public parcels totaling 11,000 acres, according to court documents.

The land owner, North Carolina businessman Fred Eshelman, appealed to the decision by filing a civil suit with the U.S. District Court of Wyoming.

Chief U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl in May 2023 also ruled in favor of the hunters, but Eshelman appealed the decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.

The attorney of the four hunters, Ryan Semerad, was not immediately available for comment.

Wyoming Director of Western Watersheds Project Dagny Signorelli told the Star-Tribune the ruling is a “key win in the battle to keep these public lands in public lands.”

“This ruling ensures public access to millions of acres of corner-locked public lands in Wyoming, and facilitates wildlife management, supports ecological research and deepens people's connection with the landscape,” Signorelli added in a press release.

Details of the ruling

The panel of three judges — Nancy Louise Moritz, David Ebel and Timothy Tymkovich — affirmed Skavdahl’s earlier ruling that the hunters can corner cross as long as private land is not touched.

Applying that law here, Iron Bar cannot implement a program which has the effect of ‘deny[ing] access to [federal] public lands for lawful purposes[.],’” Tymkovich wrote. “So the district court was correct to hold that the Hunters could corner-cross as long as they did not physically touch Iron Bar’s land.”

Iron Bar is a landholding company controlled by Eshelman.

The core argument of Iron Bar is that the company has property rights to the airspace above its land, and the corresponding right to exclude corner-crossers from that airspace, according to court documents.