Navigating Landlocked Public Lands: Insights from a GIS Specialist

Transcript

Dirty Freehub

This is The Connection, a Dirty Freehub podcast connecting gravel cyclists to where they ride through short stories about culture, history, people, places, and lands. So given you are a map specialist, could you tell us a little bit about your favorite maps and or maps that you might make?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yeah, sure. So right now, in my current role with the Bureau of Land Management, I make maps for everything from timber sales to wildfire response to support land use policy or to be displayed at recreation areas. Outside of work, I use maps for things like backpacking or hunting or rockhounding. And let’s see, I think my favorite map is one from my favorite class in college. The class was called Geomorphology, which is the study of landscapes. And one of our field trips was down to the Desolation Wilderness in the Sierra Nevada to look at glacial valleys. And we were given just this ridiculously detailed topographic map of the area. And we spent the entire trip drawing in the paths that ancient glaciers would have taken, figuring out how thick they would have been 30,000 years ago, and figuring out which features of the modern landscape were there because of these glaciers. And I think it’s a really cool map. It’s informative and it’s interesting and it’s a really good reminder of that class and all of the friends that I made on that trip in particular. That’s very neat. Yeah, it’s definitely my favorite for sure.

Dirty Freehub

Welcome to the Dirty Freehub Connection. I’m Kira Corbett and today I have Ben Purcell, a GIS specialist with the Bureau of Land Management to talk not only about maps, but particularly landlocked public lands and how to work with those when out on a gravel ride. Yeah, we also get a lot of questions about accessing a lot of like landlocked public lands, especially as cyclists. What are so-called landlocked public lands and how do they pose obstacles for cyclists or other recreational users?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

So when we talk about landlocked public lands, we don’t mean landlocked in the traditional sense of not having access to the ocean. Landlocked in this case means public lands that are surrounded by private land and that don’t have any public access. So these are lands that are owned by the government and managed for the benefit of the public, but the public is prevented from recreating on them by lack of access. So this could be something as simple as a little tiny 300 acre cattle ranch that’s shaped like a donut and has a 40 acre parcel of BLM land right in the middle, or it could be something more complex Like the Sabinosa Wilderness in New Mexico, which is a 30,000 acre piece of BLM land that was completely surrounded by private land and totally inaccessible to the public until 2017. In both of those cases, only the private landowners could access those public parcels unless you could get a helicopter to drop you off in the middle.

Dirty Freehub

Whoa, I didn’t realize that.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yeah, and it’s a lot more common than you might think. In 2018 and 2019, the mapping company OnX and the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership did a really thorough study of landlocked public lands, and they found that there are about nine million acres of public lands that are landlocked in situations like this.

Dirty Freehub

Oh, that’s interesting. I can think of a couple off the top of my head, even here in Bend, or so I think they are pursued, like landlocked public lands.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yeah, they’re kind of all over the place. And because of that, for cyclists, it really means that you have to navigate around public lands, maybe when you’re not expecting it, especially on longer tours or on self-planned routes. I’m sure that plenty of people have had the experience of cruising down a BLM road or a Forest Service road only to hit a gate or a private property sign. And you check your GPS, and that road, sure enough, goes over private, but it might only be on private for like 400 yards, and then it’s back on public land, but you can’t get to that public land without trespassing. And in a lot of cases, in my experience at least, like the route descriptions might not have mentioned that at all, but if you check the comments, you’ll see a bunch of people who have the same issue. And it can be really frustrating to have to add extra miles or extra hours to your ride instead of just, you know, cruising through that little quarter mile of private that would take you like two minutes to get through.

Dirty Freehub

Yeah, especially if you’re already really tired or pretty far in.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Exactly.

Dirty Freehub

Do you think any of these areas could threaten wildlife or could opening up some of these areas either be useful or have negative consequences?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yeah, so this is a question that our agency gets pretty frequently when talking about opening up additional public lands. And opening these parcels would have really one big benefit and then some consequences associated with that benefit. The big benefit, of course, just being improved public recreational access, more land to play on. And the biggest risks are going to be the consequences that come with having more people on the landscape. So that could be things like disturbances to wildlife, impacts to the physical landscape itself, things like trail erosion. It could be a visual impact from people leaving trash around or people disturbing the landscape. And it could be conflicts between different user groups, things like cyclists and equestrians or hikers and OHV drivers.

Dirty Freehub

What does this all mean for, like, gravel cycling?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

So for gravel cycling in particular, I would venture so far as to say that the potential benefits really heavily outweigh the risks because our community, we’re mostly looking for parcels that have existing roads on them. They’re the same roads that we’re already riding. We just want to use the segments that cross private property or get to segments that exist that we just couldn’t get to before. So we’re not going to be adding a whole lot of impact onto the landscape, aside from maybe some dispersed campsites. We’re not going to be bulldozing new roads. Our community, at least, doesn’t usually do a whole lot of single track development, because for the most part, we’re just going to be chasing graded gravel and double track, and that’s pretty much it. I will also point out too, because this is an argument that we get a lot, is that in a lot of cases these parcels aren’t just sitting there totally unused. It’s not like they’re pristine wilderness in most cases. Just because they’re inaccessible to the public, it doesn’t mean that there’s nobody out there using them. They’re just being used by the private landowners. So, for example, if a parcel is landlocked by cattle ranches, it’ll frequently be grazed by those ranchers. Or private landowners might offer access permits saying like, hey, if you give me 200 bucks, I’ll let you cut through my land so you can go hunt on this piece of public land that nobody else can access. Hey, pay me and I’ll let you come and use my private network of OHV trails on this piece of public land. And so with a lot of these parcels, recreation by the public isn’t going to be a totally new source of disturbance. And I think that in particular from the gravel cycling community, it’s really going to be a minimal amount of disturbance to begin with.

Dirty Freehub

Yeah, it definitely seems like it’s kind of a tricky situation. There’s both sides of the story here.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yep, exactly. On the one hand, you’ve got everybody who wants to go and recreate. And on the other hand, you’ve got a lot of the private landowners who aren’t really inclined to let people access this land. And you have, in some cases, sensitive resources that might be harmed by additional recreation. So it is kind of a balancing act.

Dirty Freehub

Is there steps for ordinary public land users to take on these parcels of lands or like other ways to improve access to these areas we recreate?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yes, absolutely. So thankfully, landlocked public lands don’t always stay landlocked. Historically, opening up parcels was a little bit of a process. You’d need a non-profit group like the Trust for Public Lands or the Wilderness Land Trust. would step in and buy one of the private properties surrounding a landlocked parcel, and then they would donate that property to the management agency that owned the landlocked parcel. And so this donation would make that public parcel a little bit bigger, and it would provide a source of access. It’s a difficult task, though, since it requires, one, just a lot of money. The Sabinosa Wilderness in New Mexico that I mentioned earlier was opened up with a purchase of, I think it was $3 million, which can be hard for a non-profit to raise. And it requires a willing landowner who is willing to sell their property which could be pretty hard to find, especially if the surrounding landowners are kind of enjoying the benefits of having this landlocked public land all to themselves. However, after ONX and the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership did that big case study, Congress passed the Dingell Act in 2019, which did a bunch of really good stuff. It designated a bunch of protected areas and it gave full funding to the Land and Water Conservation Fund in perpetuity. it directed the BLM and the Forest Service to look at ways to improve access to public land. And so, as a result, every two years, starting back in 2020 and going until 2030, the BLM and the Forest Service are going to look for parcels that are landlocked or that have very limited access, and they’re going to evaluate them for acquiring new access. And so when they say limited access, what they mean is maybe this parcel is not like 100% landlocked, but maybe there’s additional barriers to access. Maybe it’s like a 10,000 acre parcel that has a road at one end, but there’s a canyon that separates most of the parcel from that one road. And by acquiring access, what they mean is either getting an easement to use an existing road that crosses private land, getting a right-of-way, or by purchasing or exchanging land from one of those private landowners. Yeah, so the important part of the Dingle Act is that the BLM and the Forest Service are accepting public nominations of parcels. And so what that means is that if you or I or any other member of the public comes across a landlocked parcel, like the one that we described earlier that you’d like to be able to access, you can submit that parcel to an agency and they’ll evaluate it. And the more times a parcel gets nominated, the more it will be prioritized by that agency. And this is a great tool for us and for our community because it lets us advocate for ourselves. It lets us advocate for the land that we want to be able to recreate on. And this is handy, especially since the parcels that we are interested in are probably going to be different from the parcels that other users are interested in. So for example, a backcountry hunter is probably going to aim for the largest parcel possible that doesn’t have any roads around at all, because that’s going to provide the best habitat to hunt on. Whereas us gravel cyclists are probably going to be looking at smaller parcels that would strategically improve the connectivity of the road network. So different user groups want different land for different reasons, and this process kind of lets us pick and choose what we want the BLM and the Forest Service to look at the most.

Dirty Freehub

So let’s say that you and I wanted to petition in on this particular parcel of land to cut through that 400 yards. How would you go about doing that?

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Yeah, so in 2020 and 2022, there were web maps run by the BLM where you could go online, draw a little box around the parcel that you wanted nominated, and then there were a couple fields where you could add a description of, you know, why you think the parcel should get access and what users you envision using that parcel would be. As far as I’m aware, there’s no web portal for 2024 nominations, at least not yet. But you can still submit parcels by just writing an email and sending it to your local forest service or BLM office. I would fire up an app like Google Maps. The BLM has a web map that shows public lands on their homepage. You could use something like Dirty Freehub and just take a screenshot of whatever parcel, write up a quick paragraph about why you think this parcel should be nominated, and fire off the email with a title of 2024 Dingle Act nomination or something like that. And somebody will have a look at it and see about evaluating it for additional access.

Dirty Freehub

This was very interesting to learn more about.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

Public lands are something that I care really passionately about both, I guess, for work and outside of work. So I’m really happy to be able to come on and spread the word and hopefully get people to advocate for their own public land access.

Dirty Freehub

Thank you so much.

Ben Purcell – Cartographer

No problem.

Dirty Freehub

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