Iron Bar Holdings, LLC v. Cape.
No. 23-8043. 3/18/2025. D.Wyo. Judge Tymkovich. Checkerboard Land Parcels—Trespass—Corner-Crossing—Unlawful Inclosures Act—Summary Judgment.
March 25, 2025
Iron Bar Holdings, LLC (Iron Bar) owns a ranch that spans 50 square miles in the area of Elk Mountain. The ranch comprises land that is “checkerboarded” among 27 federal and state public parcels totaling 11,000 acres (the public lands). The only way to access the public lands located around the ranch, other than by aircraft, is by “corner-crossing”—stepping across adjoining corners of public land. The public lands are a destination for elk hunting, which is authorized by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). However, Iron Bar sought to prohibit corner-crossing by erecting “no trespassing” signposts over the US Geological Survey marker caps denoting the corners of the public lands. The signposts were chained together over the marker caps. Iron Bar also had an ongoing practice of having its employees confront persons found on or near its property—which it considered suspected trespassers—even if a person was in fact on public land. Suspected trespassers were instructed to leave under threat of Iron Bar’s seeking a criminal trespass citation or other prosecution. In 2020, a group of three hunters traveled to Elk Mountain to hunt elk. They set up their camp on BLM land and used a GPS system to navigate to the corners of public land overlaying Elk Mountain. The hunters could not fit between the signposts and under the chain to corner-cross, but were each able to grab one of the steel posts and swing around it. The hunters thus “corner-crossed” at the marker caps, stepping directly from the corner of one public parcel to the corner of the other, momentarily occupying Iron Bar’s airspace but never contacting the surface of Iron Bar’s land. Over the next several days, the hunters hunted on public parcels. Consistent with its policy, Iron Bar’s property manager found the hunters on Elk Mountain public land and requested that they leave the area. The hunters refused, so the manager contacted law enforcement, but the responding sheriff did not issue a warning or citation after the hunters explained that they had merely corner-crossed. The hunters completed their trip without further incident.
In 2021, the hunters returned with a fourth group member, and they brought a steel A-frame ladder to cross over the property corners without touching Iron Bar’s signposts. The Iron Bar property manager and another employee confronted the hunters multiple times and drove motorized vehicles across public parcels to scare away game. There is no evidence that the hunters made physical contact with or damaged Iron Bar’s property. Nevertheless, at Iron Bar’s behest, the hunters were prosecuted on Wyoming criminal trespass charges but were ultimately acquitted. Iron Bar then sued the hunters for civil trespass, alleging $9 million in damages for alleged diminution of its property value. The parties cross-moved for summary judgment. The district court denied Iron Bar’s motion and granted the hunters’ motion as to all claims of trespassing involving the hunters’ corner-crossing, holding that “corner-crossing on foot in the checkerboard pattern of land ownership without physically contacting private land and without causing damage to private property does not constitute an unlawful trespass.”
On appeal, Iron Bar argued that it has a property right to the airspace above its land and the corresponding right to exclude corner-crossers from that airspace. Under Wyoming law, subject to aircraft flight, Iron Bar owns the airspace above its land. Thus, the Tenth Circuit concluded that Wyoming would deem the hunters’ corner-crossing an actionable civil trespass. However, as interpreted by the US Supreme Court and circuit courts, the Unlawful Inclosures Act (UIA), 43 USC §§ 1061–66, prohibits inclosures of public lands and restricts obstruction of settlement on or transit over such lands. And the UIA preempts conflicting state law. Accordingly, checkerboard landowners cannot maintain a barrier that effectively fully incloses public lands and prevents complete access thereon for a lawful purpose. Additionally, because Iron Bar never had the right to inclose federal land, it did not suffer a diminishment of its property rights that would entitle it to just compensation. Therefore, the district court did not err in dismissing Iron Bar’s claims.
The judgment was affirmed.