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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

While it isn't the most pressing issue in the article, a quote that jumped out at me is: "For years, he assumed the road was public..."

Public land in the West isn't well-marked, and the difference in usage rights between private, state, and federals lands is not well understood by the general public, and sometimes not possible to know without recent data from the managing organizations regarding current permits and claims on various parcels. I've been thinking for years that I should write an app that reads your location, looks up related data, and tells you exactly what land you are on and what the allowed uses are. Especially out in the Western wilderness areas when you may be crossing into different parcels and walking in and out of various mining and mineral claims without even realizing it.

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That guy was using the road for access to public land. It doesn't necessarily matter who owns the land under a road because the use of the road is supposed to offer access rights. The problem is the guy doesn't have enough money to take on billionaires to assert his access rights.

It abolished be pretty cheap to prove the easement by default or if official.

Totally agree, and that is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to call out - because land ownership is just the first step in knowing what you can and cannot do on that land. There are many other factors.

Likewise, sometimes mining claimants believe they can keep people off their claim, which isn't the legal reality - they have the rights to the materials on the land, not exclusive access. Yet another reality of the West is that you don't argue legalities with the prospector who is holding a gun on you telling you to go away.

> the prospector who is holding a gun on you telling you to go away.

That would qualify as assault [1], and should result in the prospector going to jail. But if the US legal system worked as it should, it would be almost completely unrecognizable...

[1] https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2016/01/is-it-a-crime-to-p...

This seems like a feature that will eventually be baked into onX, which I happily pay for. Right now though it only draws a distinct line between public/private in my state and some public parcels (like city or land trust owned property) appear as private land. Still after a while you get a good sense of whether the parcel is accessible by the name alone.

https://www.onxmaps.com/

Oh, that is terrific! I didn't know this existed, and may very well happily pay for it myself. Thanks for sharing it!

I love OnX. Between it, and the USFS PDF maps (which can be keyed to GPS using other free apps), I've been able to do a bunch of exploring.

For example, last December, I drew a tag for the Whetstone mountains in AZ. The primary route that everyone used into the western side of the mountain range was a 2.5 hour drive in from the far west, with significantly challenging terrain toe cross. However, between OnX and the USFS maps, I was able to find a route from the south that had an unmarked, but official, USFS service road through private property.

Without that kind of info, I would never have even thought to approach the gate into the property (other hints at arrival help - there was a USFS placard saying to keep gate closed). It saved me dozens of hours of travel during the trip as we were staying in a nearby town.

Nice, I use it mostly for finding river frontage in Maine that I can access for fishing. Maine also has a ton of land trusts and conservancies, so I will use it to map out their borders.

Hope you filled that tag!

I've thought the same thing and then realized the impossibility of it. The reason being, in most western states, there are tens of thousands of patented mining claims. When a claim gets patented, it is private property, including both mineral and surface rights. Lode claims, the most common, are 10.66 acres. I was trying to find the boundaries of a lode claim, knowing which quarter (160 ac) it was in. I ended up finding an old mineral survey marker for one corner of the claim and nothing else. So making an app that lets hikers skirt around private property is going to be quite imperfect unless things are resurveyed with modern technology, a huge and expensive undertaking.

I got in an argument last year with a pissy middle manager at Boeing about where I was parked.

The spot was unmarked, un-gated, on a road with a stoplight at the intersection, and I was having engine trouble. This little man told me the road was private property, and I had to move my truck immediately.

I ended up getting banned from Battlebots last year over that situation.

The hard part is getting the data together cheaply enough that you can sell it to consumers.

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