Map project highlights access to public lands in Idaho previously thought to be blocked

Recent work by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service has digitized easements identifying access routes to 450 tracts of public land, including about 29,600 acres in Montana and Idaho that had previously been identified as landlocked, according to onX, a Montana-based digital mapping company.

“The BLM and Forest Service are doing incredible work,” said Lisa Nichols, access advocacy manager for onX, which has incorporated the new information into its three apps that are downloadable to cellphones. On the apps, the routes show up as yellow outlines with green cross hatches.

Not all of the routes are going to be marked or signed as public, Nichols added, noting some may be old roads showing little recent use.

“We just want to emphasize, please keep in mind, that these are routes for passing through private property,” she said.

The information can also be found online at the BLM MT Public Land Access Web App where the new easements show up as yellow lines overlying existing roads.

Expanding mapping across states

“Now we’re trying to do the same thing for all the western states exclusive of Alaska,” said Adam Carr, public access project manager for BLM’s Montana-Dakotas State Office, who is based in Lewistown, Montana.

“It’s neat to find these areas that have access that, in some cases, the field office didn’t even know about,” he added.

The undertaking won’t be easy. Carr estimated there are 5,000 easements and 12,000 patent reservations stored in BLM file cabinets awaiting digitization, many dating back to the 1960s. Patent reservations are where the agency has preserved access across lands it has sold.

Out of the many easements, one of the largest blocks of BLM land where public access was digitized and published was 12,000 acres in the Humbug Spires south of Butte, Montana, part of which is a wilderness study area.

“I hate saying it’s new, it’s not new, it’s just made publicly available,” Carr said.

Groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation have been vocal advocates of digitizing such records.

“As RMEF continues to lead quality public access improvement projects across the West, we see this as a model to improve hunt planning and navigation,” Jennifer Doherty, RMEF’s director of lands, told the BLM.

Efforts are also underway via legislation introduced in Congress. Both the House and Senate are considering the MAPLand Act, co-sponsored by Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, which would help federal agencies paying for the hours of research and work to conduct easement digitization. The act would also require the work to be completed in three years.

“Access is one of the most important issues facing hunters and anglers today, and the MAPLand Act is a commonsense investment to ensure all Americans can take full advantage of the recreational opportunities on our public lands,” said Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, in a press release.

Access efforts take time, expertise

Out of the 450 access points identified in Montana and Idaho, 378 provide public access, Carr qualified. The rest provide only administrative access, allowing land managers access to oversee federal lands.

“Uses of the administrative access can be for timber sales, hazardous fuel reduction, livestock grazing management and others,” he wrote in an email.

Carr credited BLM realty specialist and land tenure lead Jim Ledger, who works in the BLM’s Missoula office, with leading his agency’s pioneering effort in Montana and the Dakotas, calling him a “walking encyclopedia” of information.

“It’s surprising how complicated some of them can be, and the ways access is gained,” Carr said. “It really is an interesting part of federal land management that I hadn’t been exposed to.”

“The process of combing through historical documents and deeds, deciphering the notes, legally verifying the records, and then digitizing the data in the correct location can be difficult and time consuming,” onX noted after meeting with Forest Service Region 1 personnel. “It may take hours to days to accurately digitize one easement.”

To help with its workload, Carr said the BLM is getting extra help from an outside contractor, Premier Data Services.

“States and field offices have a limited number of realty specialists to complete their regular duties, let alone the research and GIS work for the access project,” Carr wrote. “The state and field offices are providing the documents to the contractor who is completing the research and creating the GIS features. We are hoping to publish more data toward the middle of 2022 and have the project completed by July of 2023.”

Once the information is digitized, Nichols said onX can quickly upload and incorporate the information into its apps.

“It makes a huge difference to have it digitized,” she said.

Prior to the recently compiled easement data, onX calculated that Montana had more than 3 million acres of inaccessible public lands – about 1.52 million federal and 1.56 million state. Montana has the dubious distinction of having the most landlocked state lands in the West and ranks third for federally inaccessible acreage, behind Wyoming (3.05 million acres) and Nevada (2.05 million acres). Idaho had 71,000 landlocked acres of public land.

Across the West the 2018 onX study, conducted with the help of TRCP, calculated a total of 9.52 million acres of federal land with no permanent legal access. The 2019 state land study identified 6.35 million acres off-limits to the public. In Montana and the Dakotas alone the BLM oversees 8.3 million acres of land. In Idaho, it manages even more — almost 12 million acres, which is about a quarter of the state’s total acreage.

“As we get more states done it can make a big difference in letting people know where they can go,” Carr said.

Making such information public does have one drawback, he noted.

“Some people’s honey holes will be found out.”