Access to public lands is one of the biggest challenges facing hunters in the West, where millions of public acres are “landlocked” — that is, surrounded by private ground, making them legally unreachable to the public. Some of those barriers were removed Wednesday, thanks to a new public access initiative led by Infinite Outdoors.
Based in Casper, Wyoming, Infinite is often likened to an Airbnb service for hunters and anglers. The app-based platform connects paying sportsmen with landowners willing to lease out access by the day, and it now has more than a million private acres enrolled across 16 states. The Access Granted Initiative is the company’s first step into the public access arena. Infinite uses funds from its paid memberships to compensate landowners for providing access to a public-land area, while the users themselves pay nothing. Outdoor brands HUSH and Primos are also supporting the program financially.
As of Wednesday, around a dozen properties in Colorado and Wyoming had already signed up for the program, unlocking more than 45,000 acres of new access on BLM, state, and national forest lands. The program has been widely supported by fish-and-game agencies in both states, which have long worked to provide more public access through their own programs, along with land swaps and conservation easements.
“For decades, there has been debate around why there are millions of acres of public land that the public cannot access,” Infinite’s founder and CEO Sam Seeton said in Wednesday’s announcement. “We built the Access Granted Initiative to fix this issue, using our own funds and industry partnerships to tear down the invisible fences and let people experience the land that was meant for all of us free of cost.”
All public land users have to do is go to the IO website and download the app, find a parcel they want to access, and book their dates, free of charge. The new program isn’t limited to hunters and anglers. Mountain bikers, climbers, and other outdoor lovers can take advantage of the new access, too. Infinite will, however, limit the number of people who can use a particular access point, and the number of days they can utilize it — just as it does on its private membership platform — in order to prioritize conservation and keep game populations healthy.
Infinite calls the new initiative “a game-changing move” for hunters and anglers in the region, who can now legally access millions more acres of previously (and questionably) inaccessible public ground due to a 10th Circuit federal appeals court ruling in March. That monumental court decision confirmed the legality of corner-crossing, the act of stepping from one public parcel to another when those parcels meet at a common corner with two private parcels in a checkerboard pattern.
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There are still, however, plenty of landlocked and very isolated public parcels where corner-crossing your way in is out of the question — but where a willing private landowner could theoretically give sportsmen an entry point. These are the doors that Infinite’s Access Granted Initiative is working to unlock.
“There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing public land is right there yet having no way for the average person to legally get to it,” Seeton said. “We are passionate about our public lands being public.”
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