Public and Private lands in Wyoming

Hmmm. I found this post sitting in my drafts folder. I would have sworn I'd published this. Oh well.

After spending the last couple weeks back east, I'm heading back to Utah's Cache Valley with twenty one tons of Wisconsin cheese. Strangely, the Cache Valley is known for only one thing - cheese. Why would Wisconsin cheese be shipping to the Cache Valley?

I'm reading the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver and she's filled it with lots of very interesting facts about the American food production system. Like this: The US exports 1.1 million tons of potatoes each year, while at the same time importing 1.4 million tons of potatoes. Sounds like someone is getting rich on the distribution end of the deal.

Anyways... I'm spending the night in Rawlins, Wyoming. The last couple of times I've driven into this town from the west, I've admired a mountain just north of town called Cherokee Peak. Tonight was my opportunity to bag it. The Flying-J truckstop I'm parked at is just down the ridge from the peak so I headed uphill and reached the summit in a couple of hours.

Interesting land markings I saw from near the summit. Do you see the straight line in the middle of the photo? I'm sure it's made by an ancient alien race. Human's couldn't possibly make a line that straight. And is that light green circular section closest to us actually two overlapping circles? Is it a symbol for something?

Hiking down, after a fun close approach with a pronghorn antelope, near the bottom I climbed through a barbed wire fence and looked over the edge of a bluff into a verdant little valley with a farm house, some horses, another pronghorn antelope drinking water from a stream, and not thirty feet from the antelope a man yelling up at me "What are you doing up there?". I really need a new eye glass prescription because I couldn't tell if he was facing me or not. So I just yelled down, "HIKING", and continued down, crossed the fence again, and went down a dirt road toward the truckstop. Not five minutes later one of those little two-seat four-wheelers with a roof comes barreling up the dirt road. I thought I was going to get shot.

It turns out it's the guy who was at the bottom of the bluff at least two miles away via dirt roads. The guy then proceeds to explain to me the rules of private property in Wyoming, which are essentially - the burden to know which property is private and which is public rests on me, not on the property owners to post their land. He further explains that most of Wyoming was originally broken up by the US government as one square mile blocks - 640 acres - which were then sold off to private landowners in a mostly checkerboard arrangement. The land he and I were standing on (well, he was sitting in his little vehicle), was public Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. But the land I passed through to get to that land was his, and another man's, and the land I had to pass through to get back to the truckstop was owned by someone else. In fact, Cherokee Peak is privately owned and I'd been trespassing. Apparently selling off the government land in this checkerboard pattern of private land and BLM land was somebody's way to get rich about a century ago. I'm not surprised.

We end up talking for an hour and I don't get shot, and he gave me the name and phone number of a guy who may be a good contact for the wind energy stuff I'm working on. Finally he gives me a ride back down to the truckstop through a pasture filled with bulls (which he said wouldn't have bothered me if I'd walked through, but I've never dealt with bulls before so I'm not so sure).

Funny how things work out.