I thought that weird 'corner crossing' case or whatever with the hunters had rendered this sort of thing impossible? Is that not correct?

Still going, and we can call the guy keeping it going by his public records name - Fred Eshelman, pharma wealthy North Carolinian owns the notoriously checkerboarded Elk Mountain in Wy, which if you ever drive I80 past Laramie Wy it’s the big mountain on the south side going west.

owns 6000 acres of checkerboard land that’s effectively 20,000 acres with a notorious ranch manager.

Lost his case in Fed courts in Wyoming and on appeal, trying to do Supreme Court now.

Wyofile has consistently good coverage on this.

Sometimes the checkerboarding is the result of indian reservation agreements. For example, Palm Springs is technically like this.

Well, often in the west the big square in an undesirable desert is the reservation, and the checkerboard is the 1800’s railroad.

Not always. See Tulsa OK.

I think the corner crossing basically said that the owners of corner-corner can't claim the 'airspace' exactly at the corner and there is more or less a de facto low-airspace easement at the corner.

I'm not sure that it created any sort of ground easement.

It basically allows you to 'hop' from one quadrant to the cross quadrant without touching the other two quadrants of the corner. The guy in that case used a ladder to do that IIRC so he only violated their 'airspace' up until that ruling.

I still don't really understand this. If I own 2/4 grid squares in a checkerboard, can't I go in and put some tall fences on the "corners" of my property. Maybe the two fences are physically joined. But my fences are 16 ft tall, how are you going to put a ladder over that?

It's been awhile since I read the case; I'm not sure that it contemplated that.

If I recall correctly it was either basically just a low hanging chain or low fence, but it's awhile since I read it.

Judges are normally loathe to consider much more than the narrowest reading required, so I would be shocked if they considered the possibility of touching the fence or a fence high enough to make a ladder impractical.

Not if there's no corner to cross. It's totally possible to entirely enclose a piece of public land; it's even easier to own land under access roads, and restrict their use as seems to have been the case here.

As far as I can tell from CalTopo, land north of the Missouri, east of Birch Creek, and west of Cow Creek was previously only accessible either via this private land or by approaching from the east and fording Cow Creek here: https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=47.95479,-109.04672&z=18&b=i...

Anyways, yes, only locked out of the road, not the land.

not completely locked out of access to the area, but locked out of using one of the only available road to that area.

So not locked out of the area by any stretch of the imagination and no evil was done.

Yeah just drive around West Texas and come in the other side.

Or just use one of the other still accessible western roads.