The MeatEater Podcast - Locked Out

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt, Eric Siegfried and Lisa Nichols of OnX, Joel Webster of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects discussed: A major MeatEater announcement; the 9-million acres you own but can’t use; defining landlocked; a brief history of how things got this bad; an OnX Pro Tip; historic uses and prescriptive easements; Janis discusses what the hell a “checkerboard” is; LWCF success stories; clarifying stream access laws; what’s best for hunters and anglers?; Steve’s early OnX days; discovering the nooks and crannies; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We call it the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We are the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. You're telling me, you're telling me, 9.52, 9.52 million acres of American ground.

Publicly owned American ground is inaccessible to people who like to hunt and fish and walk around. Landlocked. Landlocked. If you added up all the acreage I own, that's 4.256 million times the acreage that i own it's a big chunk of land dude yeah yeah uh how do you put it in terms of uh how do you put it in terms of like you know everybody when everyone's trying to make something seem big they compare it to rhode island right if you want to make something small you compare it compare it to Rhode Island. Right? If you want to make something small, you compare it to Texas.

But you guys don't even need to do the Rhode Island comparison. New Hampshire and Connecticut, right? You did a two-state combo. It's still the dinky states in the east, but still, 9.52 million acres of landlocked land in America.

Well, isn't Yellowstone like 2 million acres? That's a good way of putting it. It's like five times that size. Five Yellowstone National Parks owned by the American people, but not accessible to the public. And most of them are BLM land. It's mostly BLM. And it's like a western deal, right?

There's not a lot of landlocked land in the east. Listen, easterners do not tune out because we're talking about your ground, your dirt here. It's just far away from your house. But it's in the west. Well, that's what we looked at.

I mean, the majority of it is, but I'm sure there's landlocked lands across the nation that we just what we looked at i mean the majority of it is but i'm sure there's landlocked lands across the nation that we just haven't looked at can you guys introduce yourselves go ahead joel all right sure i'm joel webster i'm the western lands director with uh theodore roosevelt conservation partnership trcp i'm based in montana i grew up out west and i work across the west on public land issues. So habitat conservation, but also access. I'm Eric Siegfried. I'm the founder of OnX.

We make a GPS app that helps people get outdoors and stay safe and stay legal. And stay frustrated when they're looking at landlocked land, being like, dude, but it's right there. I just can't get to it. No matter how I finagle my way around, I cannot get to it. We're going to define landlocked land in a minute here. Okay. And I'm Lisa Nichols.

I'm one of the GIS supervisors at Onyx. Explain GIS. Geographic Information Systems or Geographic Information Science. at onyx and explain gis geographic information systems or geographic information science um basically compiling data that has a location component into a system so that you can make maps from it or run analyses like this okay and then uh mark canyon from wired to hunts here yes sir mark deals with this on a daily basis. I don't know about daily basis. Being in Michigan. You deal with it a lot.

You were just dealing with it the other day. Why are you trying to knock me down? You got to be like, hourly, bro. I was dealing with this like two weeks ago on my whitetail hunt in Montana. And then this weekend, chasing elk. I wasn't dealing with this all the time, but I was looking at a couple of situations like that on my map, using my Onyx maps all weekend. So, yeah. Very well aware

of the issue. And then Janice Poodless. Hello. Still here. Still here after all these years. So define landlocked, man. I feel like everybody's going to know because one of my favorite things to talk about

is I like to talk about corner hopping how it's right that's right it's kind of illegal right behind chew spitting not recommended well yeah i yeah the idea i had to find by i like my two favorite subjects lately would be like different names for how one loads chew and then um things that make turkeys gobble and then corner hopping is right up there with it but but we'll get into corner hopping maybe who wants to take on what landlocked land is i will okay okay so um for this analysis we were just looking at places where public roads do not provide access to pieces of public land So certainly there's opportunities to fly into places with helicopters. There's opportunities to access places by water. When you say public roads,

public roads or trails or anything? Well, just for this was public roads. Yeah. There's certainly places where you could hike in, you know, that a landowner would allow you to cross their land or that there's an established trail and there's a trailhead outside of the land but for this perp for the purpose of this analysis we were just looking at access from roads okay uh quickly what happens that number if you turn it into that you can walk in on across public land it's just not um something that we could really capture with the data that's available what do you call national What do you call designated wilderness? You can't walk, you can't drive on it. It's not landlocked. Can you explain the direct-indirect analysis?

Yeah, so we kind of broke it down into two different categories. So the direct access component would be if you had a public road that would cross or intersect a piece of public land or actually skirt it alongside next to the public land where you could park your vehicle, get out, and get a piece of public land or actually skirted alongside next to the public land where you could park your vehicle get out and get right onto the public land without crossing any sort of private property okay that's direct access and then the indirect access component was if you could access um a piece of public land through another accessible land so

like if you could take blm to get to Forest Service or vice versa, then we consider that indirect access. And that's not counted in this figure. So yeah, if you could access it indirectly, it's not part of this number. It's not part of the 9.52 million. And I think trail access across private land to public land with established permanent easements, which we'll get into. That's pretty rare. That's rare. It's pretty rare. Yeah, I got you. But Steve, to your point of, can you walk across it? Yeah, if there's a road that touches any piece of that public land and it's a huge chunk of public land, we considered it accessible. As long as there was a public road

touching it anywhere, you could walk across anywhere. There might be trails. But yeah, it was considered in the – well, not considered in the number of landlocked because it is accessible. A million-acre parcel with one road to the corner, that would be considered accessible. I got you. So it's not the need to be able to drive across it, but you can get to it. That's right. So I think actually if you wanted to look at accessibility in terms of terrain, there could be a giant piece of land that has an access point on one side of it and the other side of it's very difficult to access.

That's pretty inaccessible, but that was not counted to this report so i think you could actually argue that there's a lot more land in this that is inaccessible if you wanted to change the definition but we had to create a definition so that's what we did can we talk for a minute uh can we talk for a minute just to help people understand what we're talking about uh the durfee hills situation because here you have, unless there's a better case study. Do you guys not like that one because it's so sticky? I think it's great. It's controversial.

Okay, so there is a place in Montana known as the Durfee Hills, which five years ago, 10 years ago, whatever it was, no one knew what the Durfee Hills were. But they've become an emblem. They've become symbolic of landlocked lands in general where you have a 2,500-acre chunk of ground that has really good hunting on it, has a lot of elk on it, surrounded by lands owned by two individuals.

There's a pair of brothers that own the land surrounding this thing. There's no public access to it. One of the reasons that makes it kind of sticky and interesting is that at some point in time, people started saying, well, okay, if I can't access it by walking in or driving in, I'm going to find a way to start accessing it with aircraft. So some number of people, maybe 30 to 60 people a year, have begun flying in on helicopters or flying in on fixed-wing aircraft

and landing on old roads to go and hunt this landlocked area. And I think on one hand, they're making a statement. Is that fair? And on one hand, they just want to get some good hunting. There's a lot of good hunting. I think it's almost like, it's not even civil disobedience because it's not disobedient it's like uh exercising of one's rights to fly in to the durfee hills the way this gets even more interesting as a as a case study is that the same people that own the durfee hills own a bunch more properties, including a property that has the potential to block vehicular access to 50,000 acres of public land. And some years ago, they proposed to the Bureau of Land Management. They came and said, I'll tell you what, I'll give you one of my ranches, which will open up roaded access to 50,000 acres of public land

in exchange for the 2,500 acres of public land that you own in the middle of my ranch. And the BLM wasn't able to take the deal. There must be some big bulls on that ranch. Well, so when this ranch that allows access to the 50,000 acres, when they enrolled themselves in a public access program, 800 public users signed up to access through that ranch. So 800 public users used that ranch to access the Bullwacker Creek drainage. And around 30 people hunt this durfee hills section so there was like competing interest where some people saying it's not a fair swap the hunting opportunities aren't equal or it's not a fair swap for whatever but anyways the blm i i

think not because they weren't interested because of cost and manpower and other issues with roads and whatnot. They were not able to seriously entertain the deal. Why are you guys giving knowing glances? Well, I think the reason that deal wasn't entertained is because there was so much backlash from Montana sportsmen in central Montana. You mean the 30 guys that like hunting the Durfee Hills? No, I mean there was significant blowback from that proposal.

What was the, I only see the, real quick, I only, like without knowing the particulars, it seemed like at the surface level, for what I explained, it seems like an enticing deal. But I haven't dug into it. What makes it not enticing?

I, you know? I'm not claiming to be an expert on the sort of bullwhacker deal. I do know that there was an alternative route proposed to access those BLM lands down there. Oh, we've hunted off canoes. Yeah, and you can also get in there if you walk a long ways from a different direction. Okay. I just know that there's some folks that are pretty passionate about the Durfys,

and they love to hunt it. You know, there's some pretty good elk hunting and then there's some big bulls on that ranch around there. And so aircraft, I think part of it too, is that there was a big, you know,

legal fight over and I'll get into easements probably later, but you know, there was a route that crossed that ranch that was open to the public. And then the Wilkes brothers who own that piece of property closed it. There was some litigation over that that went to court. And the sportsman's community lost, people who were involved in that. And so as a result, that route was closed. And so I also think that there's a little bit of a taste in people's mouths.

Yeah, I got you. There's another one, just to give people another example of what we're talking about when we talk about struggles over landlocked lands. There's a ranch in Colorado where Joel, you and I have been there. Why are you giving a knowing glance? We're good. Okay. There's a ranch called the High Lonesome Ranch who's in a big legal pissing match with the county in this case where there's a county road that accesses public lands and they're in a protracted legal battle where the county gets outspent the county

already you know they put forty thousand dollars in the legal fees and it's not i don't know if it's sustainable they keep getting outspent but they're saying hey man that's our road that's an open road the ranch has it gated they say no it's not open we got a gate across it yeah to prevent to prevent people from accessing big chunks of public land so the point being these are like battles that are being weighed there's like battles being waged around public land access all the time and i know that you're not coming at it saying that everything should turn into a fight because there's a lot of situations where these things can be resolved with willing sellers, willing buyers. There's public money available.

I don't want to act like it's all contentious and nasty and people suing each other, but I'm just trying to raise the idea that there are little battles in the war over public land access that do turn ugly and contentious. And I think those battles are becoming more common as we see a shift in ownership patterns across the West with, you know, new people moving in with a lot of money

who aren't from there that maybe don't, you know, traditionally a lot of these places were open, you know, just by knocking on the door or helping somebody out on their ranch or whatever, you get access to go hunt their property and that's changed. And so as a result, there's more and more conflict. And I think, conflict. And I think what's going on in Colorado, I think what's happened in the Crazy Mountains is just emblematic of what's happening in today's world. I think the intent of this project we're working on and we put together here, though, is to really focus on cooperative solutions that bring people together to help solve this problem, prevent that from happening in the first place. Can you give me a quick rundown, anyone, on if you had to say generally what allowed lands to become landlocked? What were the mechanisms in place?

It seems like a really weird oversight, right? Well, I think it just happened by the nature of the West and how the West was settled. There's a whole bunch of laws that are tied to, I mean, it all started out with the Homestead Act, right? Which in 1862 was the first one. And there were several where settlers were coming out from the East and coming out here

and getting their 160 acres and they were gonna make a go at it. But that was when you like staked the claim. That's right. There's a lot of movies on that. And that's where it all began. But then there were the railroad land grants, where there were these individual attempts by Congress

to get these railroads to these specific areas where if a company went and built a railroad, they'd get alternating sections. So a checkerboard, checkerboarded style landscape, you know, alternating sections would be given to that railroad across the landscapes. You'd have a, you know, one section's owned by the federal government or the general land office at the time. And then the other section's owned by that railroad.

And they allowed them to be corner to corner. Corner to corner. I know you guys have talked a lot about the access implications. Oh, no kidding. So that's like, I mean, there you can like vividly see the problem yeah and there's other crazy stuff too like during the depression and um there's this one thing this one law that was called the bankhead jones farm tenant act which i find really interesting it was passed in 1937 and what it did is it bought a bunch of failed farms back from private landowners in places where it just wasn't suitable for farming. People had gone and homesteaded that land.

It was rough and rocky, and they probably used it pretty hard, and it just wasn't proving. And so the federal government actually went and bought that land back. And that went back. It originally all went to the Forest Service, but some of it ended up going to the BLM. And if you look at the Dakota grasslands in North Dakota and South Dakota, that Badlands country, which is really great mule deer hunting. You look at the High Line in Montana and then also the Lewistown, some of that breaks country right around it anyway um and then also down in wyoming and uh and new mexico and colorado there's this 11 million acres went went back to the federal estate that were private right and this is all happening in a disjointed fashion as long as their surrounding

neighbors stayed solvent that piece of land in the middle became federally owned but not federally accessible that's right that's right and there's like you know the notorious oregon and california sort of railroad scheme where um there were like 3.7 million acres made available um for a railroad company that would build a railroad across western oregon again in a checkerboard pattern and then then they were required to sell that land to settlers in 160-acre chunks for $2.50 an acre. But they found it. I bought all that stuff, man.

What's that? At that price, I bought it all. I'll take it. I'll take it. And I think they felt the same way because they wanted to turn it into timber companies. And so instead of giving it to settlers, they figured out a scheme to turn

it into timber companies so they could cut a bunch of trees and make a bunch of money. Just to have ghost individuals purchase it. Yeah, they'd go down to the bar, I think, and get somebody to help them to come in and buy that land for $2.50 an acre. And then they'd get it from them for the same price, probably. I don't know what they'd give them in exchange for it. I'm sure there was some compensation. But then they just accumulated these mass hold mass holdings of land and then you know a bunch of people went to jail for it and then in 1916 2.8 million acres of that land came back to the general land office which eventually became blm land oregon and california lands

in like southwest and northern california and if you look at that on the map it's a mess and that stuff wound up being messy and inaccessible. It's messy, yeah. And some of it's accessible because there's a lot of timber production in that country where you've got a lot of timber roads. And so they kind of cut in and out of the checkerboard pattern. So not all checkerboard lands are inaccessible, right? Especially like in timber country where oftentimes a forest service will own a road easement across that private land onto their own section. And as a result, that access is sort of maintained to some of those sections where those roads exist, but not all. And we're talking about a lot more. When we say a section, we're talking about a square mile. So like if you live in one of the many states that has townships,

your township is six by six. So 36 square miles is a township. A square mile is only 640 acres. But what's the biggest chunk of landlocked land in the country? The biggest one that we found was 22,264 acres in Southern Wyoming. 22,000 acres in one chunk. It's like 35 square miles. So without getting into names, does the dude who owns some of this, is he just like,

man, I really like this setup. Where basically you have access to a lot of land. You have no tax burden. I'm sure some dudes are. Oh, they got to be. Yeah, yeah. Some people got gotta hate that this is a conversation that's going on right now they gotta be like man i just want to keep quiet enjoy my 22 000 acres of land that i don't pay taxes on there are like five to twenty thousand acre parcels all over the place that have no permanent legal public access. And it doesn't mean that some of them aren't.

Five to 20,000 acre pieces. No, just all over the place. There's tons of them. I see where you got it broken out by a state where California has almost a half million. But then Wyoming far and away, three million acres in Wyoming is landlocked. It's not something you want to win at dude it's incredible so how um this has always been the case because like when was bankhead jones again

that was in 37 okay so we started making our problems around the time they were cutting big railroads like the northern pacific and stuff well 1862 with the homestead acts when it really started and people began to accumulate chunks of land and they were just i mean if you look at you know if you if you hunt right yeah you're trying to figure out like where's that topography where i can go kill a mealy buck or whatever in eastern montana or eastern you know wyoming and you're looking oftentimes that public land is like following falling like a little break of a stream or it's in some badlands or some coolies where it's just not good farmland or ranchland.

And so a lot of these guys were, they were settling in the prime land. In Nevada, they were settling in the riparian areas where the water was. That's the only place there's water and they're leaving the uplands in public. The railroad stuff is a real mess in Nevada. But, you know, in places like eastern Montana and Wyoming, like, it was really about, you know,

which land is most suitable for farming and ranching, and the rest was left public. And it's rough. It's rough country. And so these guys would, you know, some people would be really good at accumulating land, and they'd get these giant ranches, and they just ended up, you know, having these public parcels inside their estates and it wasn't it was inadvertent but it happened hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the great white north can be part of it.

Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. So what is your, I want you guys to explain how TRCP and Onyx work together to compile information and what the goal of it was. But what was the thing that initiated the conversation in the first place?

Well, Joel, you can tell your story, what you learned from being in D.C. so much. Okay, okay. That's the start of it. It is. Yeah. So one of the things that happened at the beginning of this administration under the Secretary Ranzinke of the Department of the Interior is he issued a series of secretarial orders, which were like directives to the different bureaus of the Department of the Interior. And so you've got like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM is the largest public land management agency in the country.

They administer 245 million acres. And through these orders, there are a couple of them where he directed the bureaus to identify places where access is limited or nonexistent and opportunities to make those lands accessible. Really? Yeah. It's good stuff. That's good stuff. And what did they have in mind there

because was it looking for ways to spend land and water conservation fund money or yeah i think they recognize that you know public access access is a huge issue for the hunting and fishing community and i think they wanted to do something that was beneficial for the hunting and fishing community tied to access. And this is a pretty logical place to go. But what surprised me a little bit is just knowing that it was going to be received. It was almost inevitably going to be received

as adversarial to private landowners. It doesn't need to be. I mean, I think this is all about being respectful to private property owners and focusing on cooperative and voluntary agreements, not forcing anybody to do anything through like eminent domain or whatever. This is all about willing buyer, willing seller type arrangements. I, you know, and I'll give him credit for this. He has been, ever since he was in Congress, he's been pretty clear about his support for the land and water conservation fund. He's been pretty good on access. And so I think on those issues,

like this is sort of a natural fit for him. But one of the things we noticed and I noticed just, you know, I've, I hunt out West, I'm from west. I've been using OnX's technology, you know, first with my handheld GPS, then with my smartphone for years. And just like a lot of folks who live out here and hunt a lot on public land, I've learned how to navigate public lands using that phone. You didn't know how to use a map in the old days? Well, I think it's pretty different when – Yeah, that's why this this is gonna

hear me out okay that's why i hate on x because it used to be that you had to have special secrety skills to find how to get into places now anyone so it's like how i hated the internet because i was good in the library and then all of a sudden they made information just available to everyone. And now I'm like, ah, man, now I lost my advantage. And OnX, yeah, it lets you get to walk around and look at the landscape and understand it in a large-scale sense easily. That's fair. And it makes you, yeah.

I'm joking about not liking it. I'm just saying, like, it was like when we used to drive around with, like, stacks of maps trying to put these complex puzzles together of how to get into these hard to reach places. It's just that your fingertips. Some of them are hard though. Like I just know going in some of these places

where you had a lot of private and you had these small slivers of public and you're trying to figure out like, how do I line it up with my map and my odometer and figure out how I can hit that 100-yard shot where that public land hits that public road where I know I can get on there. And you get there and there's no survey markers,

there's no fence lines. There's no line fences. I delineate it and I'm just like, I'm not going to risk it. No, we would bail all the time on missions like that because the minute you hit a fence that doesn't line up with your understanding, I don't like to hunt looking over my shoulder. No.

So when we used to try to do things off paper, it didn't give you the certainty because we had this conversation the other day where we're using on X elk hunting and we're showing a property boundary and the fence in the old days, I would have viewed this fence as being inviolable, right? A line fence, clearly not on the line.

And then the more you look at it, the more you can see that they ran the fence just in what looked like a good, suitable place to run a fence. But the fence didn't conform at all to the property line. But in the old days, I would have been like, well, the fence knows better than me. And I would have just let the fence win the argument. And now you can kind of look and there's another way to – there's an extra data point to put in there when you're trying to figure out where you're at.

That's right. I don't want to sidetrack you too much. So there you are. You guys are one of the few that actually knew how Department of the Interior and to D.C. to educate them on how hunters and the public are actually using technology to help access any type of public land. And if it's accessible, the public is finding a way to access it. Even in the case of air flight in the Durfee Hills, if it's accessible by some legal means, they're going to get there. Because they know about it now. When you are evaluating acquisition and disposal of public land make sure you take access into consideration that was one of the big things that jewel wanted

to make sure everybody understood in dc i also didn't want them to only be looking at putting in new trail heads with big parking lots and toilets like developed facilities that are really costly and i think you look back to like know, the way you think about the way that the public accesses public lands, right? We drive up to the trailhead, we park our car, I go use the pit toilet, we might have a picnic there and then you can hike in on the trail, right? And I think there's a lot of people who still think

that that's how everybody accesses public lands. And that's- That's a good point. Because we even use the term trailhead in absence of trailheads. public lands and that's that's a good point because we even use the term trailhead in the absence of trailheads it's kind of means sort of like where i started to walk yeah yeah and one of the things that we were i was really worried about in particular are just you know you got folks back in dc they're looking at how to provide access, right? And they've got this big chunk of 2 million acres of public land. Um, and they're going to be very likely trying to figure out how

to like create another access point on that. Instead of thinking about what about this 5,000 acre chunk over here, um, that has awesome hunting, um, opportunities potentially. Um, but it's lower profile. It's not as sexy, but it's really purposefully important. And that's something that I think this project feeds into in terms of this report. But also that visit is just really trying to help direct their work. We're really trying to help them focus on the fact that they should be looking at these smaller chunks that, you know, I mean, heck five, 10 square miles. If you could buy 40 acres to tie that to a road or buy an easement, you could open that up to the public. It's not that expensive.

It's actually pretty inexpensive. And that's a huge amount of land you just opened up for everybody to go use. And it doesn't require a toilet and a parking area and maintenance and all that. So basically advising on how to get kind of more bang for the buck on public access. That's right, but also to not ignore these lands either, which I think historically people haven't been looking at them because this technology didn't exist. People thought that they couldn't be accessed,

and so people have been ignoring them for a really long time, and that's changed in recent years, and we're trying to help drive that change so what was the moment when what was the moment when when like a non-profit and a tech company decide to like come together around an idea well we had uh i guess that was late 2017 as a company we had defined for ourselves a company purpose to give back to access-related causes. Because that's what made our company what we are today. We show people where you can go in the outdoors. So we wanted to give back to that.

So we defined a company purpose for giving back to access-related causes, started to look around. And that's when, by who knows what higher power, Joel shows up on her doorstep and says, hey, I've got this problem. Would you mind coming to D.C. and talking about how technology helps people access these public lands in eastern Montana? And random. But at that point, you hadn't started to put together all the information. Right. So because we made that, we started making this presentation for DC, and then we're like, oh, Joel, we were talking about let's present like a use case of eastern Montana,

how many landlocked public lands there are so we can give them an idea of the scale of the issue. And we did that, and like, well, now we've got LWCF coming up. Why don't we do a full analysis and get the whole picture of the Western landlocked public lands? So is this analysis more exhaustive than anything that the feds have put together? I haven't seen anything else like it. And part of the reason I think this happened is because the feds have expressed an interest in this. We've been down and sat not only with interior officials about this, the Department of the Interior, but we sat down with Bureau of Land Management staff. They're like, we've been directed to figure out where these inaccessible lands are. We're trying

to figure out exactly what we're going to do here. We're just looking at each other like, maybe we can help with this. Well, I don't think they necessarily can because our team has done a ton more work to actually look at the public lands, compare them with the parcel data, and we'll use those BLM data sets that say this is public, this is private, and they'll have all these errors in it. And we compare that with tax records and it says there's an owner that you say this is BLM land, but there's actually an owner on it. So there's a conflict there and we determined that actually it is privately owned. So we actually have done that across the West, across a lot of the U.S.

to make the most accurate picture of land ownership, which our customers really love. 93% is BLM land. 93% of landlocked acreage belongs to BLM. That's right. So that's who you're primarily having a conversation with. I think there's certainly other access challenges with Forest Service land, but because of the way that like the Forest Service

was established, right? With these forest reserves of people like Theodore Roosevelt setting them aside or the refuge system or the parks, right? Those are identified areas of importance that were set aside a long time ago because people were like, these are special. BLM lands kind of happened by accident in a way.

Although I have to admit, they're like some of my favorite hunting and fishing country. I love them. I love them. Like I love, I really like them because I feel that on BLM land, you get the greatest sense of sort of the greatest sense of kind of freedom. And also the greatest sense of in a weird way oftentimes like an exclusivity

where there's just always like blm kind of like hidey holes out there you know like not very visited places i think that you know the national forest is by the mere fact of being national forest generates some amount of user awareness but there's just like some blm lands you get out there and you just feel like you could sit there a month and nothing's gonna change you know they're also great for western style hunting if you like to sit behind a spotter and glass things up from a mile away yeah now am i correct this is just federal lands you guys looked at that's right do we have any idea of what the quantity of state lands might be their land lack?

Because I've run across a lot of that too. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, so we just were looking at federal lands because state and local land have so many different uses. So there's a lot of times where state lands are to generate revenue for the state. Same thing with municipal lands, county and city lands. And so they might not, the state, same thing with, you know, municipal lands, county and city lands. Um,

and so they might not, the state and municipal lands might actually not be for public use. Um, and so in order to do this sort of standardized analysis across all 13 states, we, we just limited it to, um, the federal land for the output. Uh, but if there was a way to cross state land that was open to access federal land, we did include, or rather we didn't include that in the total landlocked acreage figure. And it's just a time thing. I mean, our GIS team's mainly focused on creating accurate land ownership and updating land ownership. So I sprung this on them after the whole year's plan was out there and they graciously took it on and did a great job and put in extra time to make it happen and it's i'm thankful for that if you had to guess where his state land at i saw lisa if you had to take a wild stab at the total

for all the these 13 i got god i have no idea percentage. Okay, here's what I like to do. Tell me that you'd be surprised if it was less than X and surprised if it was more than X. Why? I have no idea how to answer that. Okay, if I told you, you know what? There's only one section of landlocked state land in the American West. Would that surprise you? That's not true.

Okay, if I told you there is a billion acres of landlocked. Okay, so we're getting closer. Now, let's say I came to you and said 100,000 acres of state land. It's only 100,000 acres. Across these all 13 states, 100,000 acres. I think it'd still be higher than that. Okay, so we're getting there. Yeah. So it's a siz000 acres. I think it'd still be higher than that. So we're getting there. Yeah.

So it's a sizable chunk. I think it's pretty high. I mean, if you look at the way that the states were granted land, they received two sections per township. And so they're like randomly situated in the landscape. I think I saw, and I'm pulling from memory here, so I might be slightly off on the acreage, but I think Montana, the DNRC did an evaluation,

and they found 1.2 million acres in the state of Montana if state lands were landlocked. What? Yeah. I mean, look, you think about it, right? Let me check my pamphlet here. You've got these sections, right? Was it 16 and 36?

Is that? I think the two sections of every township were given to the states. And, um, as a result of that, like they're just randomly placed on the landscape and oftentimes there'll be in holdings, right. On national forest or BLM land, but oftentimes too, they're just stuck right in a ranch. Some of them are inside national parks too. Um, and so it's kind of a mess. And, uh, I know that I know that there's certain states that are working on trying to address that issue, but it's the whole, again, historical way in which the lands are allocated has resulted in this situation. When I started whitetail hunting in Montana a few years ago on

public land, I was trying to find spots like this, some decent public land. I was in a river valley where there's a bunch of state land, found some stuff that looked like it had road access to it i was really excited showed up there and there's no trespassing signs on the roads that come right off the main county road like 10 yards in and i'm so confused but this shows public land on the map i was looking at a paper map at this point i'm like this shirt looks like public so i wasn't sure though called local game warden or whatever official it was whatever office i can't remember who i called but turns out that neighbor a rancher through there bought the railroad line that runs right along the side that blocked all the road access to this several state parcels that were right there along the road

but just a five yard wide railroad or 10 yard wide past easement or whatever oh no i noticed that when we were verifying some of these parcels you know one of the things um that lisa and her team did is they they flagged about 60 parcels that were big that had what they called questionable access and so there were like identified two tracks crossing ranches onto these public parcels. And we weren't sure whether or not they had access or not. And so she handed that over to the TRCP team

and we put this out to our field reps who then reached out to like the BLM and Forest Service lands and realty specialists. And they reached out to the county recorders and were trying to figure out whether or not there were easements to these parcels. and it was actually pretty astounding how few there were but one of the things we found was also these these crazy railroad lines like running through these parcels that separated them and stuff and it's just like what's going on here and I

I was I didn't I wasn't aware that they actually owned that land I figured they just you know had their tracks on top of it. But yeah, it's kind of crazy. So what was the process of compiling all the information? And who do you decide then to present it to? So one of the advantages that we had coming into this as Onyx, we already had a lot of this data compiled for our products. So like Eric was saying, you know, we could have just used the public land data sets directly from

the public agencies, but those are typically generalized boundaries. And so to really drill down to the scale of analysis, we had to use data that had already been reconciled with the private parcel data. So we already had that done. So that gave us a finer scale to work with. And then the second step was to really define landlocked, as we said. There's certainly places where you can access it from water, from air, from hiking in. But in order to really address this large scale 13 state area, Western half the United States, practically, um, we had to, we had to normalize what we were going

to call accessible. Um, and, and so that's when we decided to just look at road access. And then from there we had to decide what was a public road versus a private road. But there's no national data set for public versus private road. Most road data sets that are available are classified according to whether it's an interstate, a highway, a county road, or surface type pavement versus dirt versus gravel. So there's no classification in these data sets. So our in-house road data expert sort of advised that we define a public road as anything that's maintained at the county level or higher, and then some Forest Service road classifications. So once we pulled that data, we were able to look at a road right-of-way standard width. And then we looked at where those road

right-of-ways cross the public lands. And then we were able to factor in through using the magics of GIS, the indirect access as well. And then anything that essentially the road right of way across the public land, we gave it a flag. So every single record of public land got a flag as either landlocked or not landlocked. And then we had a script that, or an algorithm that would add all that up by state and by agency. And that's how we came up with these numbers. When you guys were doing this, were you doing it because you wanted to make the public aware of the magnitude? I'll call it a problem. i don't know if you use that word you want to make the public aware of the magnitude of the problem or are you doing it because you felt that it would be useful

for land management agencies to have all this at their fingertips both it's also trying to help get the land trust to to help them address the issue but um i mean i think the tool to solve this problem at least in terms of voluntary means of people working together is the land and water conservation fund which uses none of you've talked about this on the show but a whole bunch man yeah uses the revenue let's talk about it more all right real quick uses revenue from offshore oil and gas development um and then there's basically so it's a congrats it's a federal program where it's been around since 1965 and every year 900 million dollars go from offshore oil and gas receipts and go into a trust fund back up on that a little bit because offshore stuff is owned offshore oil leases are federal oil leases they're not they're not

individually owned that's right and they have to pay their energy companies have to pay royalties on those to the u.s government to the u.s government and the land and water conservation fund like earmarks or gets a portion of those okay and every county now here's a not western thing every single county in the United States of America has had a land and water conservation project. Baseball fields, municipal swimming pools, boat launches, on up to, you know. Trailheads maybe.

Yeah, major access points into large parcels of previously landlocked stuff. It's like the key. I mean, it is the key driver for public access. That's right. Everything recreation. And like half of it goes to the states and local governments

and half of it goes to federal programs for the most part in the recent years. Talk about, as long as we're on this subject real quick, get into what's going on with it. Yeah, sure. So the program is currently scheduled to expire on September 30th. So I imagine by the time this show airs, this program will have expired and the authorization will be gone. Because they throw a little – it's meant to – initially, it was funded.

It had decades, right? 25 years. Yeah, and then they kind of like threw it like a lifeline yeah i got no one can even explain why it's controversial well it's like the one thing that like 99 99 senators seem to agree on it's not anymore so on september 13th um chairman bishop rob bishop you had on your show. He helped, he worked out a deal with Democrats, with Grijalva and that committee,

and they moved a bill out of committee. That's great. It's clean. It actually increases funding for access acquisition. It's a fantastic bill. And I know he was on your show. He floated the idea. It was interesting that land and water conservation fund dollars should be used to train oil field engineers he's done the right thing here and i want to give him credit for that as well yeah and that part of

it didn't make it in there that's right and. And they did right by sportsmen, too, by increasing the access allocation. And let me explain something real quick. So LWCF's been around since 1965. This is one of the things we discovered through this project. But it wasn't until 2012 that they actually started to specifically direct money to public access. And so what we found is when we were putting this report together, we wanted to find some like great case studies, right? And of public access being opened up with LWCF.

They've only been funding the public access piece of it for six years. And so while there's some good checkerboard consolidation projects that are from a long time ago, these isolated parcels, so these chunks, like to the checkerboards, the checkerboard on the landscape, the isolated parcels are like these individual pieces that are you think everyone

knows about when we talk about checkerboards are you nervous about that janice i think we should hit it real quick okay go ahead and hit it because you have a brief one you haven't done anything i'm just over here making sure the red light is still on i look at it at least every five seconds okay yeah so yanni's gonna do a guest so Yanni's going to do a guest appearance. Yeah, imagine if you're... He's going to do a guest appearance and explain a checkerboarded, what we mean when we say it's all... When you come back, someone's like, how'd you like that new area? And you go, oh, dude, it's all checkerboarded. In less than 60 seconds.

That's my goal. Okay. So imagine you're looking at a wall with a big map on it and then transpose the checkerboard on there now let's just say that all the black spots are private all the red spots are public well and that sort of in most states and you guys correct me if i'm wrong but i don't think it's really been defined but in most states you can't go from red to red you can't hop on that corner so that's what we mean by checkerboarded yeah how's that

you can only step in the red places but you can't cross your can't corner hop you can't corner hop you can't bring your foot over any black either even if you're only setting it down in the red because the lines are infinitely thin and all kinds of other issues. That's right. And you can only step foot in the red if there's a public road that goes and touches it. And to even enter the red piece that has to have a public road. Is that anything that's been

broached? Is that an access idea that's been broached at all? Oh yeah. As far as trying to get that access corner to corner? I think you're beating your head against the wall. They floated the idea in a number of places. A number of states, it's uneasy. It's uneasy. People will be, a number of states,

people have been cited for it, challenged it. It hasn't been solved to really anyone's satisfaction. I wonder how much of this landlocked land could be solved for simply by allowing stepping from corner to corner, which seems like reasonable public... I would say the bulk of it. I would say a large portion of it.

You'd be surprised. Lisa, can you plug that algorithm in real quick and give that to us? I'll give you two figures. We've had that question a few times, just saying if we just changed the policy on corner crossing, exactly how many acres would that open up? That's certainly a data challenge right there.

That's a data challenge? Yeah, it's a data challenge. Meaning challenging. Yeah. There's places where the uh the corners aren't actually being represented by corners uh in the actual data sets and so um you know when you look at it you know like your human eye can kind of see that it looks like a corner but if you zoom way way way way way way in the the data itself is not actually meeting at a precise corner.

And so in order to define that, it can be done. It's just a matter of like, do we have the time to define that? Can you really assign someone to explore every section? Yeah. You're trying to capture things with broad strokes. Although I think she's pointing to the one place where you can legally cross some corners where they do overlap. Yeah, I mean the edges of the surveys. Yeah, if you're a real student

of the map. So like some surveyor screwed up and now you can do it? Well, when they did those township range sections, the earth isn't square, so they put all these squares on there. Occasionally they had to do this correction where there's either a gap or an overlap when there's an overlap once you guys publish like a state by state guide to the overlap hey man you're giving away because you would hate us even more

this is an on x pro tip right here wow that's that's good oh i've seen it both ways but yeah in colorado where i used to guide we had that exactly we i just kept like coming up to this corner that we thought was the corner and then we realized that it was actually an overlap of 10 feet and the next thing you know we were just gliding over that i think i i think if you can show the map and how it overlaps that's the law what i think i don't even want you guys to weigh in on this because it's going to be the kind of thing that makes you give knowing glances to each other. So I'm just talking to you, honest and Mark. What I think would be a good exercise, just talking to you, honest and Mark, to put together a sort of legal defense fund.

Let me back up there's a good story about when someone was trying to clarify montana's stream access law that they knew that they had a way they wanted to challenge it and rather and what they challenged it with was a group of women going tubing right wasn't like a guy shooting ducks where he's blasting shocking off crazy directions and scaring people it was like a guy shooting ducks where he's blasting and shocking off in crazy directions and scaring people. It was like a group of young women on a tubing trip became the legal case to challenge and clarify some issue around stream access law. I think that it would be good, Mark and Janice, to establish a legal defense fund and have someone go to a place where they feel that there would be a chance,

do a corner hop, and then move it through the courts and have someone voluntarily be like, I will carry this cross, and if it winds up that I'm just shot down. We could easily get all of our fans to chip in a couple bucks, five bucks to start this fund and then just have someone go in and just see where it leads if you really if you went to a state where it's in question and just went to see like where does it really lead if you if you really had the energy to challenge decisions and then challenge decisions and challenge decisions eventually

set legal precedent and then just be interested to clarify maybe you'd be clarified in a way that you're that would just reaffirm the assumption that it's illegal and then you'd be like okay now we know uh back to our guests um so i i think to your point though steven like um see i called you steven that's right um that's my mom name me i think that's the only way this issue is ever going to be solved is in a court. I don't think any legislature is ever going to have the courage to sort of pick the battles on that issue. I do wonder though,

I think part of the reason it's never gone to a state Supreme Court is I think most judges are probably unwilling to entertain it. And I don't know how to set up that. I don't know how that scenario would be established, but I just would imagine, I'm not taking a position on this,

but I'm just sort of thinking about a scenario in my head. Like if you go to a corner pin, you got your Onyx app in your hand, right? And you walk up, you can see the corners clearly delineated. There's other markers on the landscape that make it so you know for a fact you're stepping over that boundary from public land to public land, never setting foot on private land. And you were able to really demonstrate that and document that and then get cited for it and then go to court. I think a judge will throw it out.

And so how do you actually get a case that's able or capable of going to the top? I don't know the answer to that. Throw it out on what grounds? He's not going to convict somebody for that. Oh, like he's not going to put you in a situation to appeal it. That's right. Go ahead.

That is my hypothesis. We heard that from someone else. An attorney in wyoming was explained that he's looked and he's yet to found as much as it's illegal i hate to keep talking about this but i do like this subject it's a good one as much as it's illegal he's yet to find someone who was actually who had who not that people weren't cited but anyone that was actually successfully prosecuted. They get cited, but when they challenge it. Back to our guests.

So I know it makes you uncomfortable to say that the solution is to have black helicopters flying and people kick down the doors and seize the land and hand the land back to the American people. Like that's not what we're really after here, right? That's not the way to increase access. Despite what social media comments might have you believe, yes, we are supporting cooperative agreements that bring people together.

What does one of these look like? I laid out the one that didn't go anywhere. Yeah. Well, that would have been a, hey, check it out. So let me, can I finish my thought real quick from before? Oh, yeah, man.

So there's these isolated chunks, right? And these are like these 10,000 acre parcels or these 20,000 acre parcels. And they just started in 2012 directing money specifically to access. And before that, when they like scored projects, right? You were like, you bring a project forward,

we're going to acquire this private land, make it Forest Service or BLM. Access was not a part of the consideration, historically. They were looking at things like ecosystems and threatened species and clean water. And so checkerboard stuff generally got in because it's sort of tied into that. But these big chunks of isolated,

like in Eastern Wyoming, they were not. And so we found through our research that in places like Eastern Montana where the Miles City Field Office, so like it's just a big chunk of Region 7, right? Everybody's heard of Region 7 for mule deer. There's a pile of deer out there. And there's never been an LWCF project out there

on public land. Same with the Miles City Field Office in Wyoming. And so- Related to access. Since 2012. We're not even aware of any LWCF projects on those public land parcels. On public land. Because all that money was being directed to where you've got connectivity.

And that stuff's really important. I don't want to disparage it at all. And that stuff needs to continue to happen. However, in 2012, they actually started directing money specifically for the purpose of access. Like saying, meaning that you'd point out a thing and be like, hey, if we bought this 40-acre chunk that's for sale, it would open up access to this 3,000 acres of currently land.

That's right. That would be like an example of what you're talking about. And the money has to be used for that. And so this latest bill that just passed out of the House Committee, it has up to $27 million annually that would go just for access. And so this issue is, in terms of solving this problem, it's in front of us. It's not something that our grandparents did. You know, like the greatest generation, they were restoring wildlife. I think it's time for of us it's not something that our grandparents did you know like the greatest generation they were restoring wildlife

i think it's time for the germans that's right yeah that's right and i think you know it's going to be really the next 20 30 years is when we open these lands up to access and this program which is going to expire on the 30th is what we need in order to do it. Okay. See, now there's a couple of balls in the air right now. It's still going to expire, but the framework for an agreement has been put in place. That's right. So just to put that to bed, what needs to happen to get the LWCF funded,

like max funding in perpetuity being the best case scenario? Yeah. I mean, I think what we need is leadership in the House and in the Senate to put it up for a vote. If they would put it up for a vote, it would pass tomorrow. But that won't happen until after the midterms. That's right. That is our best guess. I mean, it's very unlikely. I mean, it seems like the House of Representatives is going to be done this Friday until the election. And so we're really looking at the lame duck as the earliest time that this is likely going to happen. I mean,

I'd love to eat my words, but, um, uh, and I think then at that point, it's going to depend on, you know, how good of a night the Democrats have. I think if they do really well, um, that they're going to be like, well, let's just wait until Congress turns over and then we can write our LWCF bill. And so, um, I think there's that, right? But I think that there's a pretty good deal on the table and we'd like to see dedicated funding. So right now they have to appropriate it every year. So appropriators actually have to, even though there's money in the trust fund, they have to every year appropriate it. We want to see dedicated funding. So it's just like social security or Medicare where every year it just rolls over and

appropriators don't even have to mess with it that money's in the pot and we know it's there it's not a new tax no it's not this has been around since 65 yeah that's why people start freaking out about it yeah it's not coming out it's coming out of there's no problems federal oil leases and it's always been that way it's just like what it's being used for yeah all right so they're not kicking doors down um there's a path forward does in your analysis does it really seem like the best solution where we should be putting all of our attention is what are we doing with lwcf funds you say that again i'm sorry in solving in helping to increase access to landlocked lands is it that oh no uh the lwcf is just one of many ways that we could begin to address this issue or

do you look at all of the tools and the the tool kit so to speak and it winds up being there's just like a hammer and it's the lwcf well i think the LWCF is by far and away the most powerful tool, and it can do the most. However, there are other tools in the box. There's also potential state programs or existing state programs that can help crack at this issue as well. And so I think we need to be looking at all options, but $27 million every year specifically for access. In addition to the other projects, they're doing good habitat work and benefit access by default, right? So the other LWCF projects still do good things for access.

They just don't do it as their primary goal. And so as a result, the money ends up going other places. But I mean, there's nothing, nothing even compares to this because states just don't have that kind of money. Have you guys worked with any non-profits because i mean like rocky mountain elk foundation has opened up a lot of access through acquisitions they do great work yeah they've got a whole team that's dedicated i think to utilize those lwcf funds in 2012 for access so they have a whole team that looks at these

projects and and they're actually making the acquisition because when the landowner is willing or they have a relationship with the landowner, they've got to act on that when the landowner is willing. So they have to have this coffer of money to be able to act on that transaction. Then over the five years where LWCF gets approved or however long it takes for them to go through the government process of getting the LWCF funds. So they do do that work. That's an RMEF, to your point and to your question. RMEF does a lot of that great work, and local land trusts would be great organizations to give to

if you want to see. That's another way, private funding, if we're really passionate about this issue, like, hey, pony up, give to RMEF, give to your local land trust, and they're doing that type of work, and they're utilizing LWCF when they can. A very dear friend of mine passed away a couple years ago, and they're doing that type of work and they're utilizing ldbcf when it's when they can a very

dear friend of mine passed away a couple years ago and and um his family when they resolved all his estate they use it to secure a bunch of uh foot access along the madison through a strategic purchase it's really cool stories like that yeah so it's interesting that the people that were looking to do that, you know, they're doing like those really annoying, annoying fundraisers, um,

on public radio and they have what's called amplifiers, like someone who matches, like if you want to spend private dollars for public good, it's a great amplifier to buy land that provides connectivity to landlocked land. Because you might be buying 40 acres, but you're really sort of, you might be buying 40 acres as a public gesture, but you're handing the public 240 acres.

It's just interesting when people, like when individuals are like, you know, I'll chip when people like when individuals like you know i'll chip in do my part yeah i'm really curious to see how passionate the public is about this and will they be willing to donate to organizations a lot of old in holdings too like just have been purchased over the years where you'll find old structures and apple trees with bears hanging on them about this time of year we have these examples in the report like beaver tail the bear mouth yeah 30 mile creek yeah that 30 mile creek is the only example we found of isolated parcels being acquired with lwcf funding it's currently underway and that's um western rivers

conservancy who led that one um and uh they've really figured out how to use this excess money. So that's an LWCF story. These are both BeaverTail to Bear Mouth 2, which is a Montana one that's being done by the Trust for Public Lands. But yeah, they're both LWCF-funded success stories that open landlocked lands to the public. And great success stories with cooperating with landowners and getting to the table and talking about the challenge.

Do you feel that it's just going to happen? Is it certain at this point that the LWCF will get fully funded and that it will have the earmarked money for access? Well, I think we need to be diligent. I wouldn't take it for granted that it's going to happen. But I think if we continue to pound the table and say we must have this, I think it will. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes

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are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. When you were working on this, did you ever look and have kind of like a holy shit moment where you saw just some little dinky sliver of land that was, you know, like if you could like buy an acre,

it would have some dramatic impact on access issues? Did you have some times like that? It was all over the place. Really? Yeah, yeah, for sure. There was some places, you know, just doing some quality control work after the automated process ran.

You know, we were zooming in, panning around the map, kind of looking at different land ownership patterns, making sure that the analysis as we ran it actually worked. And we saw stuff that was like, oh, well, there's a road right there. It must be accessible. And we zoom in, use all the imagery that we possibly could to verify it. And it's like, nope, there's definitely no way to get on there without going across private there was a story in the in bugle the out foundations magazine about a guy that he was going to pick up some ammo or something had to do a long unexpected drive up in the northern part of montana and his wife picks up one of those his wife or girlfriend picks up one of those like

little local like wheeler dealer magazines where people sell used cars and stuff out of them and she happens to find a piece of land for sale while they're driving and they're not even really in the market but like oh that's weird they go to look at it and it wound up being um and it wound up being a a blocker to a bunch of public access so that person um helped facilitate and fund the purchase of that land and they put in a they put in a little trailhead there for a blm access that's pretty awesome yeah that was just like because imagine the power at your fingertips this is just a dude driving along reading a classified ad in a newspaper and identified stuff. So maybe rather than our legal

defense fund for the checkered board case, we should just put together a kickstart for this. I think that it would be an interesting thing if it'd be an interesting thing to look at the places like you recognize, these places where

you're kind of like these sort sort of wow moments of right there you tell me it's so close but not there yeah and we're able to at the same time put something in place to monitor when those again like the willing seller willing buyer model to monitor when those places come up or to make to initiate making offers on those places and just see what sort of public support one would get in driving those dollars. What does that initiation look like? So you guys brought this information to DC, right? Did they do anything with it? They just go, hey, thanks. That's interesting. Or have you heard any feedback? Yeah, let me answer that a little differently, I guess. So what we're trying to do is

provide information on where these big inaccessible parcels are to people who can help open them up to cooperative agreements. And one of those partners, obviously, is the Bureau of Land Management, but there's also land trusts out there. And there's people out there who do this for a living where they work with landowners. They sit down over coffee. They're non-threatening. You know, they want to like work out a deal that works for that landowner as well as for the public and can help broker those deals. And those things take years, right? You know, you got to build that trust. And so that's how i think we want to use this information not um not create a polarizing fight with some of these landowners because there's a lot of people

who believe that um you know that it should be a right that private landowners should have to let them cross their land to access these public lands that idea is not going to get i know it's not but we also don't want to, you know, pour gasoline on the fire. And I think... You know, Scotland, they have a right to roam. Yeah. Well, there's prescriptive easements here,

which happen in some places, but for the most part, right? I mean, you've got to get... What's a prescriptive easement? So, and this is something that's, you know, playing out in the crazy mountains right now, where you've got... There's not a prescriptive easement there, but you have checkerboard land, historic trails that have been open to the public for, you know, 100 years or

whatever. And each state has its own set of laws. But if you can prove like through sort of regular and continuous use and other sort of conditions in a court of law that you've used that for a certain period of time, then you can get, theoretically, an easement. But it's a pretty contentious process, and it definitely, you know, puts people against each other. Because you're trying to codify a sort of loose understanding. Yeah, I mean, there's a historic use there, and there's never been any effort to purchase that or sort of get a donation of that use like a trail

or a road i mean historically right like the blm or the forest service you know did and should have been um acquiring easements across private land where they actually approach a landowner they purchase that route they get a you know whatever right away a 60 foot right away across that private land and then in perpetuity it's recorded's recorded in that title or that deed or whatever that that's a public route. And in some of these places, they never did that. And so people were using them for 100 years. That place changed its hands. And all of a sudden, it's like, well, we don't like you coming on our property for various reasons.

Some of them are probably legitimate, but obviously people have been using that for a long time. And so it creates a lot of conflict. And that was one of the things too, that I think not only acquisitions are important, but we need to really be thinking about how we can secure access across these trails and roads. Because one of the things we looked at, especially when we were doing some fact checking on these big chunks, is some of them have existing routes across that private land on the public and the public is currently using it, but there's nothing in law that protects it. And so we're kind of at the beginning of what could be happening

with access being shut down and the crazy mountains are just a symptom of what's to come. I think there's a potential risk with that. And so it's really important that I think there's a potential risk with that. And so it's really important that I think there's money on the table that people can identify where these important access areas are, where we actually have access, but it's not guaranteed. And how do we maintain that access? And I think buying an easement across that property is how we do that. And it's a lot better approach than waiting until somebody

decides they don't want you anymore and it wants you there anymore and it goes to court i mean that's pretty ugly really and um and so i mean that's something that you know we've really tried to bring attention to and something we found to this project it's actually kind of frightening um how few easements there are you mean things that people are enjoying now that could be taken away tomorrow if if and i don't know what the situation is but i imagine there's a lot of private landowners that think that those are public routes and that there is something recorded but there isn't and if they became aware of that then um they might close it. And so it's a delicate situation.

Yeah. It's frightening to think about losing acreage and sitting here talking about all the ways to gain it. Well, and I think some of these parcels that we've flagged as being large parcels, some of them have some public access, but the way that we defined the landlocked is if it requires permission from a private landowner, then it's considered landlocked. And so if it's enrolled, like if that private land's enrolled in like a state walk-in access program, like Access Yes in Idaho or whatever, that gives you access to that public land. It's temporary access, right?

It's provisional and temporary. So it's still landlocked in terms of when it comes to permanent access. And we also found some places where there is some existing public use across private land where those landowners continue to allow it. But there's nothing there that protects it tomorrow. Do you guys feel like you'll... So you did this collaboration and took this idea and produced a report and have presumably raised a lot of public awareness um what's next i mean is this do you guys walk out the door now and go your separate directions and never talk again or no it's just a start we continue to work with the blm to make sure they define those easements like where where are easements where are your easements not and at least have a data set that says, these are our easements, here's what we're doing. Then we

can combine that with our data and then say, hey, we should probably look at this piece right here. Who knows who the landowner is going to be in the future? And we need to maybe secure that access point. Yeah, I forgot to mention the federal agencies oftentimes don't know where their easements are either. So we're trying to get that standardized and fixed. I think one thing too, we've had a lot of interest in land trust community. And so, you know,

I have been talking with them about some specific parcels that are fairly big, but we, that's one thing we're talking about too, is how we can provide them with some information on, you know, the most sizable parcels that we think should be a priority for access acquisition that they can then go through and screen.

But every parcel over so big a size or whatever, things like that we're talking about. At OnX, are you guys, is it surprising that you in some way, not transitioned, but added on? Like originally you were just trying to describe the world, right? You're describing the world as it is. And that led to a situation where now you're trying to provide, you're inviting the idea of change, right?

You're looking like, here's how it is. Here's how it could be. Here's how it should be. Is that a tough decision? Like to go in that direction? I don't think it was tough. Just to my points earlier, like we want to be able to give back.

That's what made our business. Showing people here's where you can access and here's the public lands. Here's roads across public land. You can park on that road and go walking. So like you said, we show people where you can access and now it makes sense to give back

to making sure they keep securing those places where they can access. So it's natural. Because you view it that it's all in service of your customer. Yep. It's all in service of your customer. Yep. Yeah. It's all in service for helping people get outdoors and have a great experience.

It's good that you're doing that. I hope it doesn't... I can't see it causing any trouble for you. Yeah, there's a little. I mean, our landowners are our customers and obviously the public are our customers and we want them... We believe in the cooperation of the two groups to come together, and we don't want to see anything, to Joel's point,

of forcing landowners to do anything they don't want to do. Well, there's not really a mechanism for it anyway. Yep. Landowners have rights. I've never heard of an eminent domain project in order to give to open up some access. No, but there's a lot of folks who don't know what the law says and they imagine the worst.

Yes. And there's people that don't like to lose battles and I think that this will be the last thing I'll say on the issue, but if you look at I read this piece on Outside Not Long ago I was looking at some stuff along, I think it this will be the last thing I'll say on the issue, but if you look at, you know, I read this piece on Outside Not Long. I was looking at some stuff along.

I think it was like the Russian River. I think it was the Russian. That there was, you know, for everyone's memory, you could canoe the river and get out on the beaches and have lunch. And that was just how it always went. And then like a new class of landowner came in and they had an enhanced awareness of not what's happened, but what they could do.

And it emboldened some people to be like, you know what, I could make a case that I can shut that down. And then that idea became infectious. And so you had this river that had once upon a time just been like, and people were shocked to learn that it wasn't actually this way. But someone that had the time and the money could come in and begin challenging public access and having some legal wins,

or at least clouding the issue enough to create the necessary level of uncertainty to push people away from using public resources. The story they follow, the specific story they follow in the article, the guy winds up losing. And in fact, he was chaining off a beach that was not his to chain off. But it's kind of like, I think that that's the way in which these things get tested all the time, is you sort of, you brought this thing to the crazies too. It's like always been how we do it, and then at some point in time,

someone comes in and starts pushing and prying on that a little bit to see where it leads, and that can lead to excess loss. So I think that clarifying this stuff, or I use the word like codifying and clarifying some of these issues is probably pretty important too, just to head off future dispute. That's right. And information's becoming way more available every day. And so I think-

Because the internet. That's right. The damn internet. It is, which is an amazing resource. But I think it also informs people of things that they can do that maybe it's not necessarily in the interest of public access. And so we need this money now more than ever to maintain and secure and open access

because I think the longer we wait wait the harder it's going to get yeah professionally where i'm at is when i look at an issue i try to be like what's in the best interest of hunters and anglers and that's how i make a lot of my decisions in life it doesn't mean that i don't understand both sides of it it's great to have uh you know it's great to have exclusivity like i can see that i understand i could articulate the viewpoint but i generally look and be like what's in the best interest of like the broad spectrum of hunters and anglers and when i look at that when it comes to access i'm generally generally, I believe there should be more access, enhanced access.

That's my general goal in life is to see that happen, realizing that within that, there will be some contentious moments and some unhappy people. But that's generally where I'm going to lean on any of these case-by-case scenarios that come up. What do you got to say about all that, Anas? I like it. You did a good job on that checkerboard deal. Thanks. Yeah, when you think of the revenues brought in from the outdoor recreation industry,

and you think of rural communities, if you can actually make trailheads and open up outdoor activities for some of these public lands, you're going to see a benefit to the community in general. And you see the numbers like $887 billion, with a B, billion-dollar industry. It's getting close to being the outdoor industry is getting close to being the trillion-dollar industry. Wow.

It'll get there. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. dollar industry wow it'll get there no yeah absolutely people have to start paying attention to that stuff that it's a huge sustainable economic driver that's right and people being able to go outside is economically valuable and 72 percent of western hunters use public lands for their access and you think about the fact that there's some of these places where you know a quarter of the lands are landlocked just think about all that missed opportunity and also a box just hiding out there you know we were talking about that it's like, look at that coulee on that parcel. I bet you there's some bucks in there.

One of my, this is early on X days. I remember driving along one time and just like happened. I was driving along with my buddy that passed away a couple years ago. We were driving down the road and I had to like look out. We're going turkey hunting. One place I happened to look out and I'm looking like we're crossing this the road um and i had like look out we're going turkey hunt in one place i happened to look out and i'm looking like we're crossing this kind of coulee and uh i looked out and saw a turkey and i'm like oh a turkey i remember someone going like it's public just like slamming on the brakes you know because like the rest of your life you just drift past but now

you drive around that thing open on your gps or wherever you got your phone you just drive around going oh yeah look at that look at that oh i never knew that that little corner comes up and hits the road you know and off you go yeah that's what we're trying to make sure everybody understood is that most people probably think when they think accessing public lands they're thinking trailhead they're thinking like this parking area, but that's truly not the case anymore with technology. All you got to do is drive down any road in Western United States. Heck, the whole United States, you could be driving down an interstate and not realize the public land that comes in touch is there

that you can technically park on the side of the road and start walking. It's the nooks and crannies, man. The nooks and crannies. Yeah. We've gotten a lot of emails from guys over the years talking about all the nooks and crannies they discovered. The nooks and crannies. We've got a lot of emails from guys over the years talking about all the nooks and crannies they discovered in their neighborhood they didn't know about. Yeah, we got a lot of emails from people.

They're like, I used my paper maps and you figured this spot out and now there's more people here, but they're still happy about it. Oh, I found another spot, so not a big deal. Yeah, I found three more because I'm ambitious. And as the rest of the world has less and less of this and just becomes more and more developed, the more we have this stuff and save it, I just think the economic value of it,

we can't even foresee what it's going to be like in a couple generations. We look at it as a spot. It's like, oh, it's Sagebrush Coulee where you can find a big buck. I might go there two to four weeks out of the year. There might be someone that flies over from japan in the middle of july just to walk out there and go this is the american west and that's pretty cool that i can just walk off this road and walk into this country and that person's air flight and then the uber ride and the you know all that stuff just like it's yeah

we just don't know how valuable it's gonna be no that's the point i'm always trying to make when i'm talking about um land habitat preservation and stuff is uh people are always asking like we were just talking about oh it's a trillion dollar industry like people are always asking that like it has to justify itself economically that somehow wildlife habitat and it's a and i'm glad people do it because it's to some people it's the only thing they understand it's the only thing they understand is they got to apply dollars to it so you have to play their game and be like oh you want to talk dollars yeah i welcome it dude let's talk dollars because there's some serious dollars at play here

but on the other hand you're like well yeah but it's it's not quantified like the value of it isn't quantifiable that way but in terms of if you do go and play the dollar game the thing that i wind up trying to express to people all the time is we don't know where this whole thing is headed but when you look at globe like just the global environment and global news around habitat you're not reading a lot of stories about all this new habitat that's being created every day i've yet to read every day it's a every day there's a net loss every minute of every day there's a net loss so in forecasting out the value of i'm not even talking pristine, of open, semi-pristine, publicly accessible patches of undeveloped land, you cannot anticipate

what that's going to mean in 100 years. If you want to just talk dollars. It's shallow existence to be one that can only look at life through dollar bills, but there are those out there. Yeah, they're out there. Got any concluders, Yanni? No, that's it.

Mark Canyon? I'm just glad you guys did this. I mean, it's something that, to Steve's point, I don't want to be knocking you down like you said at the beginning. I was just dealing with this very issue two weeks ago, literally trying to hunt bucks in Montana, had this public land I wanted to hunt, couldn't get to it, thought I had permission to cross the private land to get to it.

Then a week before the hunt, found out, oh, no, I can't. Now I'm scrambling. What happened there? Because of the railroad deal. That was three years ago. So every time I hunt Montana whitetails, I'm dealing with this, I guess. So I had a piece of landlocked public land. What about in the Dakotas?

You don't run into this in the Dakotas? In this case, I didn't, no. There's quite a bit of it, though, on the western side. So go on. But, yeah, so I had found this piece of public. It looked great. It was on the backside of some private land with food on it, alfalfa fields. And I thought I could access it publicly turns out that there's

like gray areas around if you can use this river to access it or not so i was okay i need private land permission to make sure this is golden had that permission this spring so i was gonna head back out this year i was like all right i'm golden gonna go on for this hunt it's gonna be great and then the week before the hunt i called the private landowner just to double check on it just to be safe and he's like oh no i got family coming out when you're like you remember how you were saying exactly and so now i'm i'm lost i have nowhere to go it's a few days before the hunt so i was going to drive out there and use my onyx app and just drive up and down the roads trying to look at some new spots and so much in this drainage or this valley that I was hunting,

almost all of the public land that would have whitetails on it, which would be along the river, was landlocked. So many pieces of landlocked public all along there. So then I'm like, okay, well, I just need to start knocking on doors to try to get permission to hunt the public land. And luckily, I stopped by the landowner's house one more time just hoping maybe something would change. And after a nice two-hour hoping maybe something would change and after a

nice two-hour conversation something did change and i did get that permission and he then says you know what my family isn't coming i was lying to you i don't think it was that i think it was more so like maybe the date range is off or something and he's like oh yeah so and so probably won't be out till next weekend i think this i feel like, I haven't been there or talked to him. I feel like it was way off, and he was like, it's easier to, it's less, is frictious a word? I don't know. It would cause less friction.

Yeah. To be like, oh, yeah, sure, go ahead. Then, it's like when people say to me, like, hey, man, in a year, do you want to go do whatever? I'm always like, yeah, man, great. Right? Yeah. Then when it's a month out, I'm like, oh, man, what did I say?

How did I make that happen? I think then when you were coming, he's like, no, no. My cousin's coming. Then he met you. He's like, this guy's all right. Okay. You don't think that was it? I don't care how it happened.

I'm just glad it happened. I certainly appreciate it but i mean it was so that that big whitetail buck you got public land near this place yeah that's where guilt killed it really yeah but access through private accessed by a river so that's a whole weird thing but It should be. It's a public river. The stream access laws allow me to walk it and fish it. But to be super safe, I also had to get permission to do that because I was accessing this public, the other river, to hunt. And I've heard people saying there's some weird things around that. We'll have to pick this up later because I've never, I don't know. Can you explain that, Joel?

Yeah, sure. I can in Montana if you want me to. I've been trying to get clarification on this myself, and I can't get it solid. This is something I have never heard of. Never. I know in Montana, you're allowed to use below the high water mark for fishing, and you're allowed to use it for waterfowl hunting,

but you're not allowed to use it for big game hunting. And so if you go below the high water mark and walk up a stream to access public land with your rifle over your shoulder you're technically trespassing there's an exception to this though no not once you jump out on the land you're fine you're not supposed to cross that private land even if you're below the high water mark that i have been told though the way to get around that is to bring your fly rod or your fishing rod or whatever. And when you leave the public land and go down into the stream,

you walk with your gun packed up in your backpack or whatever, and you fish your way up the stream. When you get to the public land, then you can lose your fishing pole and grab your gun. I'm getting uncomfortable because I feel like we're entering into an area where something's not right. I've been told by a game warden, I've been told by a game warden

that that's how you do it legally in Montana. But you certainly can float down. That's one of the access methods that we talked about at the Department of the Interior. You can float down the river to a piece of public land and get out. You're just talking about like being on the river, walking the high water mark.

Think about what you're saying. Let's say I'm on the Mississippi River. I'm floating down the Mississippi River. I'm in Mark Twain's old stomper grounds, floating on the Mississippi River. I got private land on each side. Then all of a sudden, here I am down by the Daniel Boone National Forest. But then all of a sudden, whoop, here I am at the,

I'm down by the Daniel Boone National Forest. And I hop out of my canoe and go hunt. Be like, oh, no, buddy, because you passed through private land in your canoe. You're now ineligible to access public property. So it's a state law issue, first off. So I don't know what's going on down there. But what I'm referring to as somebody like waiting i i don't know how that changes if you're in a boat and you do not touch

the bottom okay but it's every state's access laws are different every state's stream access laws are different which is why we stayed far away from that right in colorado wyoming um you cannot with the exception of maybe a couple counties you cannot um they don't have a stream access law that that you know favors the public it said it's the landowners are in control there and so it's different in every state but in montana you can't set an anchor that's some states you can't hop out of your boat that's right and so in montana as i understand if you're gonna walk down the stream through private below the high water mark to go big game hunting you must fish while you are doing that okay i was told the same thing i talked game ward said the same thing i

thought that was so bizarre but yeah i didn't want to risk anything so i just i'll just get permission that'd be a great episode steve it would listen you i don't know it's not gonna be a whole one but listen first off we're gonna we're going to have 1,000 emails. Not 1,000. We'll have a lot of emails. We'll clarify it for the next podcast. This will not go unclarified because I'm really struggling with what I'm hearing right now, but we will report back.

I'm not a certified game warden, so please verify this. You haven't presented yourself yeah you have not presented yourself as a subject matter expert on this particular subject particular side note that mark canyon so innocently raised please verify it yes yeah and you because all you just said extra safe you're being extra safe which is always smart which is the smart way it's not fun to hunt looking over your shoulder no but to tell you the truth it was it was a little frustrating to me to have to do that you know to see there's this public land right here and then there's a public stream access law that says i should be able to that's publicly accessible via that route i could fish it i could

float it it was a little bit confusing to me why I couldn't walk it to hunt. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it is what it is. I'm glad I could get in there some way and hunt it, and I appreciate the private landowner very, very much. I appreciate the public land too. Ladies and gentlemen, Mark Canyon, wired to hunt. You got any concluders, Eric?

Just on that point, I mean, in Montana, if you can put in at a fishing access site, you can float down and then you see a piece of public land. It's touching the river. You can get out and hunt it. Now, Joel agrees with that, but he's just talking about you're actually walking in the riverbed. So just to clarify that. Yeah, no, I'm with you. I'm tracking.

Gotcha. So I could have. I don't know about that. Please, please go ahead. It's Montana. Please go ahead. So I could have taken like a little rubber rubber boat

no questions asked so I would just encourage listeners to reach out to their representatives and tell them their support for LWCF yeah don't you think and then I would also encourage listeners

if they're going to look into this a little bit more go to unlockingpubliclands.org and read through the full report read through all the assumptions oh that's where all this is yep unlockingpubliclands.org oh okay trcp website and yeah you can read through the full report read through all the, and then that might answer some of the questions you're tempted to throw out there. Yeah, we put it up on the, we put up links on themeateater.com and other places. But yeah, unlockingpubliclands.org. Is that right, Joel? That's right. resources on the website where there's a few more details that break it down by agency in each state

as well as identifying the acreage of the largest parcel in each state. And to Eric's point about contacting your congressional representatives, there's an action page there. So we make it really easy. You can look at those findings and then send an email directly to your decision makers. Because I think we need to be continuing to point out the importance of this issue and the need to reauthorize the land and water conservation fund in order to get it done. Yeah. When you send your message,

just be like enough already. Exactly. Everyone knows where it's going. Just get it there. It's expiring like this week. Yeah. Pretty quick. Yeah.

Is that your concluder? I'll just say that, I mean, the one highlight of Land and Water Conservation Fund not being reauthorized permanently three years ago is I got to work on this cool project. And I'm pretty excited about this. I think it's been a fun project. And I just want to say thanks to the Onyx team. They not only make a great product, but they're a bunch of good people too. And hopefully this report is put to use and after LWCF is reauthorized,

we're able to start chipping away at this number. Yeah, knock it down to, knock a couple million acres off it. That's ambitious. Yeah, but I think it can be done. And I think, I mean, LWCF is like the big tool, right? But there's other things we can be looking at too, and I think we're going to continue to investigate that.

The image selection on the front of your report, the print version, is a provocative image. Because it's a mug who's walking through the woods. He's got his rifle. He's all ready the woods. He's got his rifle. He's all ready to hunt. He's staring at his GPS up against the barbed wire fence. Is he thinking like, I was going to jump and run? Or is he, you know, you just don't know what's going through his mind, man.

I like that picture. He's confident. He's looking at his GPS. He knows exactly where that boundary is. Yeah, he's like, oh, finally, I'm here. This is my public easement. Or maybe there's public lands like 100 yards away. That's what I see is him being like, oh, man.

No, what he's saying is, oh, man, I saw that huge deer over there five years ago and I had my paper maps. It's actually BLM across his face. Yeah, what was I thinking? I could have gone and gotten it. We've heard those stories a lot. Dude, did I miss out. If I'd only known the truth. Yep.

That was your concluder? Yeah. Got a concluder? Just more of the same. You know what a concluder is? Gathered? I got it. I yeah i got it i think i got it uh just let's keep the pressure on for ldl vcf get reauthorized so you've come to um you've come

to admire the the tool oh for sure yeah yeah definitely i mean it was it was pretty cool to get to work on some of these inset maps. Our analyst who really did the groundwork here, Brian Tutt, we went back and forth. And then we discussed things with Joel and Randall. And we were really drilling down into some of these areas to produce these inset maps. And so, yeah, it kind of brings the story alive. Yeah, that's so important for people to see like the little examples.

If not, you just get lost in these huge numbers. Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. And I mean, you can see the pretty picture and you can see the pretty map. And I think together they tell the story. And so I would encourage people

to go to the website and actually take a take a peek at the report itself i got it i got a little website i'll do that i got a little anecdote for you here just real quick based on the inset maps that lisa mentioned so on this 30 mile Creek one, we actually found a 40 acre parcel that's not on the BLM maps. And one of the things that we kind of uncovered through this project is all these emergent findings. You're like, Whoa, you know, like where did that come from? And this is one of them. So on the Beaver Tail to Bear Mouth example, there's this Department of Transportation example. And we were trying to figure out, well, how are Department of Transportation, Montana Department of Transportation lands managed?

Are they open to the public or are they closed? Like, are they managed like DNRC lands? And come to find out, yes, access is the same between Montana DOT and DNRC lands unless posted otherwise. However, in talking with the Montana Department of Transportation, they're like, yeah, there's these parcels that we own. We bought in the 60s and 70s. We don't even know we have them. And people call us now and then asking to buy them. And that's when we realized we have them. And then after that, we were working on this 30 mile deal. Which is Oregon. Which is Oregon. Like, look, there's another 40 acre parcel of BLM. And so I don't think that problem is limited

to the Montana Department of Transportation. Like, there are some errors in the data, but that's one of the cool things about, with what Onyx has done with their technology is looking at this county assessor stuff and comparing it to private lands data is they've actually uncovered some of those parcels that aren't on your standard public land map.

And that was kind of a fun little thing to discover. So BLM land that no one knew was BLM land. Well, I'm sure somewhere in some plat book, right, in the basement of a building in Portland, it's recorded as public. But I think when they probably turned it into maps, it was missed. I see. And so I'm sure that it's recorded somewhere, but somehow when it was...

Public users didn't have a way to be readily aware of it. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, yeah, so check this out. Go to unlockingpubliclands.org. Look at the findings, but also be sure and send a letter to your decision makers to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It's our most powerful public access tool. See, that's going to be the last thing anybody says. I't let it go i had to say i feel like i'm not doing

my job i appreciate that that is the last thing anybody says is what joel just said thank you you're welcome besides what you just said Yep. We'll be right back. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land,

hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.