Hiking Public Lands Shouldn't Require a Ladder

Imagine you were part owner of a nice piece of rural land, maybe with a trout stream running through it. But your neighbors won’t let you in. You don’t have to imagine, because access to far too much public land is legally blocked by private property owners, causing headaches throughout the West.

If you look at a map of the region, big tracts of land run in a “checkerboard” pattern of mixed public and private land ownership. The West is literally diced up into alternating square-mile sections of federally managed land and private ground, which is generally owned by a timber company...