Great ruling. The private/public checkerboard is pretty bizarre in the first place. A much more forethought approach would be to add a public buffer around everything (basically shrink the private plots by 6' or so).
You can do what you want as long as you do block passage between adjacent, or event reasonable nearby, public land.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/califor...
I am curious with the technology available at the time, how much either method would have increased the surveying time, accuracy, and other generally important parameters?
And in particular checkout the section titled: Survey design and execution.
Now keep in mind errors happened a lot over large distances with difficult terrain and lines got skewed. But defining a chunk of land as the "Southwest quarter of the Northeast quarter", and then breaking it down from there by physical corners set in the ground is pretty sensical even when things get skewed. With hexagons, you COULD do the same thing, but I don't think the errors would come out so well. You'd have to be more careful to tie to more points/lines in order to not accidentally create conflicting definitions.
It sounds like a nightmare honestly.
Perhaps hexagons cut in half (causing 6-corner intersections) or the isosceles trapezoid pattern below would work.
https://robertlovespi.net/2020/06/03/tessellation-of-isoscel...
Partly it'd be cool to have it look like Settlers of Catan.
I think this is only having the areas not be "cut off" in the mathematical sense, though.
And there's no need to shrink all the plots if there's a reasonable way already present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad...
Wouldn't chamfering the corners by 6' have the same effect?
I guess I don't much care, being neither a rural Wyoming property owner nor someone who wants access to all that public land in the checkerboard. But the net effect of this setup is that "big private ranches" are effectively illegal in Wyoming, and that strikes me as no less irrational than "you can't get to public land if it's surrounded".
No they aren't. All the private ranch owner has to do is purchase the land from its current owner. IE the government.
A private ranch can't steal that land from the government though, through some complicate surround maneuver, like from the board game "Go", of course.
If you say "It is illegal for me, ajross, to purchase stale2002's house".
And then I respond by saying "No, it is not illegal for you to do that. All you have to do is get me to agree to sell you the house"
And then your response to this is by saying "But you aren't selling your house!"
This final response by you, does not prove the first statement you made to be true.
It continues to be legal for you to purchase my house, if I agree to it. Just like it continues to be legal for a rancher to purchase land from the government, if they agree to it.
Just because you are not very good at convincing the government/state legislator to sell you that land, does not make it illegal for you to purchase the land from them, if they choose to sell it to you.
You can't have a big ranch. That's silly. You also can't use "corners" to prevent access to land you don't own, because that too would be silly. Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were. Someone should fix this, because the regulatory regime is bananas. This court case isn't doing anything to help, it's just negating the silly.
You absolutely are allowed to do this! All you have to do is purchase the land from the people who own it.
> which is that large ranches in Wyoming are de facto illegal.
They aren't! Someone refusing to sell you something, is not the same as it being illegal.
Just like it isn't "defacto illegal" for you to purchase my house.
> your response does nothing to refute my point
it absolutely does, because it is not defacto illegal for you to buy my house, even if I refuse to sell it to you.
It is disingenuous to say that it is defacto illegal for you to buy my house, because I refuse to sell it to you.
> Two sillies don't make a sane, as it were
It is not silly for someone to refuse to sell you something.
The analogy would be like if you said "its silly for me to steal your home". And "it is also silly that it is defacto illegal for me to purchase your home".
It is not silly that you cannot buy my home, if I refuse to sell it to you. It is not defacto illegal for you to buy my home, because I refuse to sell it to you.
Your point is a "de jure" argument, you're telling me what the law says (and for the record: I don't disagree). I'm making a "de facto" point: regardless of what the law says, owning large unbroken tracts of land in this area is a practical impossibility. And since the entity refusing to sell the land is the government itself (the body that makes and enforces those laws), I don't think it's at all a stretch to categorize this as de facto illegal: any action that resulted in big ranches not being impossible as a matter of practice would be by definition an act of lawmaking.
Stated slightly differently: if the government needs to change a law in order to make something possible, then that thing was "illegal" previously.
Fine the owner for having blocked access to the public land with chains. Uno reverse card.
Might make sense where land is amazingly spacious (like wyoming in this case), but I wonder how that would work in other locales, say row houses, or manhattan or california lots which are measured in square feet...