Landowners bar access

Private landowners bar access to 500,000 acres of California public land

Katie Dowd

More than half a million acres of California’s public lands are locked away by private landowners, a report from the New York Times found this week. 

The Times story used data from a popular hunting app called OnX. The app uses publicly available state and federal records to show private property lines, critical information for hunters trying to avoid trespassing. Although the intention of the app’s creators wasn’t to spotlight the conflict between public land and private ownership, its maps inadvertently show how many public areas are surrounded by private property, creating landlocked pockets around the Western U.S.

“The revelation that millions of acres of public lands aren’t really open to the public has increased tensions in several communities and resonated far beyond the audience for whom OnX was intended,” the Times reports.

Millions of acres of California land should be free for all to enjoy. According to the Bureau of Land Management, 15 million acres of California, representing 15% of its land mass, fall under the agency’s jurisdiction. BLM land is freely available for camping, hiking, hunting, fishing and other outdoor recreation. But, as maps from OnX show, more than 500,000 acres of public land are surrounded by private property, preventing recreators from reaching it without trespassing. 

Unsurprisingly, many of these areas are in far Northern California, where sparsely populated regions are a mixture of national and state parks, land in state trusts, U.S. Forest Service areas, BLM land and privately owned ranches. Maps from OnX frequently show pockets of public land, seen below in green, surrounded by private property, marked by red lines.

According to a report by OnX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, “6.35 million acres of Western state lands are entirely landlocked by private lands, preventing legal access for outdoor recreation without permission from a neighboring landowner.” The report is particularly critical of the lack of transparency in record-keeping; it says that of 37,000 U.S. Forest Service easements, only 5,000 have been digitized, leading to incomplete and difficult-to-access information on private land.

The battle for open access to public lands is a familiar one to Bay Area residents. Since 2008, there’s been an ongoing legal battle between billionaire Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and San Mateo County locals over Martins Beach. After buying property nearby, Khosla closed the only road that gave access down to the beach. A series of lawsuits has closed and reopened the beach to the public.

With countless individual roads and easements in California mixing public and private property, there are no clear solutions to the problem, said Ben Ryder Howe, a freelancer for the New York Times.

“A checkerboard pattern is basically a guarantee of future conflict,” Howe said.