Months after releasing a report detailing the extent of inaccessible federal lands in Idaho, an environmental advocacy group and a technology company have again teamed up to analyze how many acres of state-owned lands are blocked.
The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and onX, a GPS hunting app, recently published a study on state-owned land across the West. It found 6.3 million acres of “landlocked” parcels in 11 states, meaning the public land can’t be accessed without permission from a private landowner.
In Idaho, the team found 71,000 acres of inaccessible state-owned land, in addition to the 208,000 acres in inaccessible federal lands. Combined, the blocked lands make up less than 1 percent of Idaho’s 34.5 million acres of public land. However, the study notes that some easements and access information are not legally documented or easily available.
Officials did say Idaho’s information is some of the most accurate data in the set thanks to tools from the Idaho Department of Lands.
The groups say the state land data differed from the trends they noticed in blocked-off federal lands. Where inaccessible federal lands sometimes covered broad swaths, the state parcels showed obvious remnants of the township system by which states acquired territory when they first joined the Union.
Of the 11 states analyzed, Idaho’s total landlocked acreage was one of the lowest. Only Nevada, Oregon, and California had fewer acres of inaccessible state-owned land, while Montana, with 1.56 million inaccessible acres, had the most.
Idaho also had some of the lowest total landlocked acres of both state and federal land. (Idaho Statesman)
