Millionaire ranch owner loses legal fight to box off public lands

10th Circuit upholds public access to "corner-locked" lands.

A photo from case records showing the interspersed lands at issue. Public lands are highlighted in red and yellow, while the ranch land is green.

Hunters and their allies secured a significant public lands victory this week after years of fighting for access to a remote plot of federal land surrounded by a pharmaceutical executive’s private retreat.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver resolved the unique dispute by ruling that hunter Bradley Cape and others have the right to access public lands even when they are "corner-locked," meaning the path involves crossing diagonally over two corners of private property.

To illustrate the problem: In the western United States, vast swaths of land are divided into 640-acre plots, creating a grid-like pattern. Some of it is public, and some of it is private, and sometimes there’s a checkerboard of both.

The dispute between the hunters and Fred Eshelman — a healthcare investment company founder whose Wyoming ranch plots surround a prime hunting spot known as Elk Mountain — centered on whether the public has the right to step diagonally from one parcel of public land to another on that checkerboard, crossing over private property at the corners.

The three-judge panel in Denver ruled in favor of public access, citing a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent that states private landowners cannot erect barriers that impede complete access to public lands under the 1885 Unlawful Inclosures Act.

“While the dispute may seem trivial, at its core, it implicates centuries of property law and the settlement of the American West,” wrote Circuit Judge Timothy Tymkovich, an appointee of President George W. Bush.

Cape and fellow Missouri hunters Phillip Yeomans, John Slowensky and Zachary Smith have been embroiled in the case since 2021, when they used a specially made ladder to bypass "No Trespassing" signs marking the two corners of Eshelman’s ranch to reach Elk Mountain.

The men hunted on the public land for a week and were subsequently pursued by Eshelman’s ranch hands in pickup trucks and later cited for criminal trespassing by a fish and game warden.

Those original charges were dismissed by a jury, but Eshelman followed up with a civil lawsuit seeking up to $7 million for property damage. He argued that he has the right to control his private land and the airspace above it.

The case, pitting four hunters against a pharmaceutical executive who sought to restrict access to 11,000 acres of land owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the state of Wyoming, has garnered attention from environmentalists and sporting groups nationwide.

The case’s significance extends beyond Elk Mountain’s aspen groves and meadows, which attract big game: Approximately 8.3 million acres of public land in the West are "corner-locked" with no trails or public roads providing access.

Tom Delehanty, an attorney with the law firm Earthjustice, told Landmark that the “heart of this case is that an extremely wealthy, private landowner in Wyoming is essentially trying to appropriate public land for himself.”

Allowing private landowners to claim public space like that would be a “shift away from what makes us different from our forebear countries” where “land barons” called the shots, he said.

Delehanty added that there are other efforts to dial back public lands access across the West, including through legal efforts to force the sell off of federal land in places like Utah and potential efforts to reduce the size of national monuments.

“We’re facing a really serious and troubling wave of efforts to try to take away some of the most cherished and important treasures of America — which is our public lands —and turn them over to a rich ruling class, which is the opposite of what this country was founded on,” he said