Private Property

[rmattas]

I am not familiar with this road but I'm fairly certain the gate is illegal. If a FS road crosses your property it creates an easement.Can't buy your way out of this. Just find an attorney to file the paperwork. The landowner will lose and their attorney will confirm.

tell that to the people in CB. it's not working to well. for the 3rd year, nobody has been allowed to access green lake. the only way (IMO) to slow down the "buy and block" strategy is for people to take it to court. if we win great, if we lose, then build a trail /road right around them. like real close to the property. real close. the strategy backfires, thus sending a message.

[LURE]

I'm no lawyer (so no need to berate me where i go wrong, just correct me), but i feel it's the case that just cause the forest service put in a road doesn't mean it has a public easement associated it. forest service fire roads that everyone loves to use are only public cause they originate on and cross federal public property, they don't necessarily have a recorded public easement associated with them. similar deal with all the BLM two tracks, you can drive all you want on BLM two tracks but if it crosses private at some point you would be trespassing if you continued - if the BLM didn't create a public easement for it there is nothing you can do.

so, if there is an actual recorded public easement created by the forest service on the road discussed by the OP, the courts shouldn't necessarily have to get involved, really just the local sheriff. If the fight continues perhaps the DA can get the court to issue an injunction, which wouldn't seem to me to require filing suit by private parties, just making the issue known to the local sheriff, commissioners, or petitioning the DA about the issue.

again, not a lawyer, but I have a feeling the reason many of these are hard to fight is that there is little ammo to fight with. I don't understand much, if anything, about the process of prescriptive easements, but those are always an option when no easements were previously present for something which was regularly used by the public.

[LURE]

In any event, it appears from my maps that the MVU designation of this road ends about 150 yards from the the subject private property being discussed.

edit: any real property attorney's with federal land experience out there? does MVU designation equal public easement? I'd think it would have to, but the feds can still restrict use to season and vehicle type. but lack of MVU designation can't also equal lack of public easement? probably, typically, yes it does. but sometimes easements get forgotten about, or lost in the weeds, not no longer enforceable, but forgotten

[dwoodward13]

tell that to the people in CB. it's not working to well. for the 3rd year, nobody has been allowed to access green lake. the only way (IMO) to slow down the "buy and block" strategy is for people to take it to court. if we win great, if we lose, then build a trail /road right around them. like real close to the property. real close. the strategy backfires, thus sending a message.

I was wondering if this access ever got resolved since I was thwarted by his gate on approach to Mount Owen back in fall 2017. Looks like Gunnison County is now involved in legal action to get a determination on if the FS Road is a public right of way, and therefore illegal to block.

http://crestedbuttenews.com/2019/02/gun ... d-lawsuit/

[rmattas]

tell that to the people in CB. it's not working to well. for the 3rd year, nobody has been allowed to access green lake. the only way (IMO) to slow down the "buy and block" strategy is for people to take it to court. if we win great, if we lose, then build a trail /road right around them. like real close to the property. real close. the strategy backfires, thus sending a message.

I was wondering if this access ever got resolved since I was thwarted by his gate on approach to Mount Owen back in fall 2017. Looks like Gunnison County is now involved in legal action to get a determination on if the FS Road is a public right of way, and therefore illegal to block.

http://crestedbuttenews.com/2019/02/gun ... d-lawsuit/

they are taking a time out. convenient, just in time for summer.

http://crestedbuttenews.com/2019/05/par ... -time-out/

someone has to lose, preferably spectacularly. word will get out...

[gb]

Thankfully with Green Lake/Irwin, there's a local landowner who is also a lawyer who also cares and is the one doing all the work to get the county and USFS to do something about that gate...

[rmattas]

Thankfully with Green Lake/Irwin, there's a local landowner who is also a lawyer who also cares and is the one doing all the work to get the county and USFS to do something about that gate...

Thank God...I'm not a lawyer, but to hurry this process along, if I could, I'd file another suit for lost revenue.

[RyGuy]

GAIA premium has a private land layer that works great. I actually use it a lot when I'm showing property in CB- lots of unmarked and random plots of vacant land around here...

Yup. One more reason I love GAIA!

[easyridertme]

I am not familiar with this road but I'm fairly certain the gate is illegal. If a FS road crosses your property it creates an easement.Can't buy your way out of this. Just find an attorney to file the paperwork. The landowner will lose and their attorney will confirm.

This is incorrect. There are lots of ways easements can be created and lost--people write whole treatises on the subject--but suffice it to say an easement isn't automatically created simply by the fact there is a road crossing your property regardless of the fact the FS owns the land on each side. If your attorney tells you otherwise, I'd suggest finding a new attorney.

People are blowing a lot of smoke about this gate/road in this thread about things that may or may not have ever been legally determined. I can think of circumstances where the landowner has a right to motorized access over the Forest Service road to access the private property, but none of us Joe Schmoes have a right to use the Forest Service road by anything other than foot (and obviously this would also mean no public access over the private property). I can equally imagine circumstances where this guy is exactly the jerk some people in the thread believe him to be, trying to create his private (yet publicly-funded) wonderland. There's an infinite series of fact patterns that could lead to different conclusions in any given case. The bottom line is that, yeah the gate sucks, but until someone wants to do the title research (and maybe file a lawsuit if that doesn't clear things up), we're only spitballing and sharpening our pitchforks to please ourselves.

In any event, it appears from my maps that the MVU designation of this road ends about 150 yards from the the subject private property being discussed.

edit: any real property attorney's with federal land experience out there? does MVU designation equal public easement? I'd think it would have to, but the feds can still restrict use to season and vehicle type. but lack of MVU designation can't also equal lack of public easement? probably, typically, yes it does. but sometimes easements get forgotten about, or lost in the weeds, not no longer enforceable, but forgotten

My take on the MVU issue is similar to yours: a section of Forest Service road designated for MVU that passes through private property almost certainly indicates some sort of public easement. The Forest Service isn't going to (and legally can't, according to its Travel Management Rule) designate a road that they don't have some right of control over.

But, the converse doesn't necessarily hold. You are again probably right that it often means no easement. The fact that a section of Forest Service road passing through private property has not been designated for motor vehicle use, however, can't reliably be used to determine that a public easement does not exist--not only for the reasons you mention, but also because the Forest Service may choose not to designate a road for MVU (say, because of concerns about the impacts on resources).

[434stonemill]

And here we go again...another battle for access when gates are put up on what appeared to be a public road.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/w ... iness.html

[peter303]

And here we go again...another battle for access when gates are put up on what appeared to be a public road.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/w ... iness.html

Any day they'll sell off the rest of the 14ers to pay down the deficit.

[RichH]

And here we go again...another battle for access when gates are put up on what appeared to be a public road.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/w ... iness.html

This will continue to get worse as a small number of people buy up much of the west. 100 families own 42 million acres in the US. Some of them have good intentions and want to protect the land but a lot don't.

I wish the Wilkes Brothers would stay in Texas... "Afterward, the Wilks family hired a lobbyist to push for a law that would stiffen penalties for trespass. It Passed." So sad.