Who can travel and who can shut the gate on publicly-mapped and maintained roads that cross private property enroute to public lands? Those were two of the many questions debated last Friday in the first hearing of Frank Ranches v. Jonathan Ratner.
The landmark case, which pits ranchers against environmentalists, has already spawned controversial data trespass legislation — state laws which some contend make photographs, like this one of a forest service access road northwest of Cody, illegal.