Colorado’s public lands are a major economic force in the state, but hundreds of square miles of federal land are inaccessible to the hikers, anglers and hunters who use them.

More than 269,000 acres of federal public lands in Colorado are essentially inaccessible to the public because they are surrounded by private property, lack a public road to the area or are blocked off because of a parceling system from the railroad era, a recent study found. That’s about 450 square miles — an area slightly bigger than Rocky Mountain National Park.

About 80 percent of the inaccessible parcels belongs to the Bureau of Land Management and another 36,000 acres belong to the U.S. Forest Service, according to the assessment by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and onX, a Missoula-based mapping company that created an app that helps hunters navigate land ownership.

Not only are those lands important to backcountry enthusiasts but also to Colorado’s expanding outdoor industry and population growth, said Brien Webster, coordinator for the Colorado and Wyoming chapters of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

“Public lands are there for you,” he said. “They belong to you. It’s one of the most democratic things we got in this country.”

Across the West, about 9.5 million acres are surrounded by private lands with the largest number of acres in Wyoming, Nevada and Montana, the study found. North Dakota had the lowest number of inaccessible acres.

In Colorado, the inaccessible land is broken into more than 5,600 separate parcels, onX spokesman Doug Stuart said. The largest block in the state is 5,286 acres of rugged Bureau of Land Management forest and hills northeast of Meeker.

Most of Colorado’s landlocked public land exists in the the northwest corner of the state or in the south, but more than 54,000 acres of inaccessible land lies within 100 miles of Denver, Stuart said.

The Bureau of Land Management continuously works to buy land or create easements to open up property under their management that is made inaccessible, said Jayson Barangan, spokesman for the BLM Colorado office.

“It’s a normal part of what we do day to day,” he said.

The locked-up lands also make it difficult for the bureau’s employees to complete work or surveys on those parcels, he said.

The study has limits, however.

Engineers behind the study could not check every parcel with local authorities to see if a specific easement had been created or if landowners have historically allowed people to travel through private land en route to the federal lands. There is no overarching database for such information, Stuart said. The study also doesn’t account for seasonal road closures or situations in which landowners have blocked people from otherwise accessible lands.

Despite those limits, the study found far more accessible land in Colorado than a 2013 analysis by Denver-based Center for Western Priorities, which found 540,539 acres of public land blocked off.

Some of the land counted in onX’s study is separated in a checkerboard pattern remaining from the federal government’s attempts in the 1800s to lure railroad developers to build in the frontier. The government offered railroad companies alternating square miles of land along a proposed rail line so the companies could sell the land and raise money. Vestiges of the pattern remain and access to the parcels that are public is often foiled by laws that make it illegal to cross from one square into another through adjoining corners.

The inaccessible parcels represent about 1 percent of the more than 23 million acres of federal public land in the state, but the need for public land will only grow as the state’s population continues to boom, Webster said.

Colorado’s outdoor industry is worth about $62.5 billion and supports more than half a million jobs, a recent state analysis found. Access to the land is one of the factors that draws people to the state, Webster said, but public lands are enduring increasing pressure by people that love them, sometimes to the detriment of the wilderness itself.

“More public lands just means we have more places to recreate close to home, which often leads to more days in the field,” he said. “If we eliminate barriers, people are going to spend more time outside.” Related Articles Feds’ plan to allow more drilling in western Colorado nets second lawsuit

Letters: Pendley not good for BLM (9/8/20)

Outdoor recreation industry sees some rebound from pandemic, but future remains uncertain

Colorado’s historic Pine Gulch fire darkens immediate future for Western Slope ranchers

Difficulty finding places to hunt and fish can turn people away from the sports, which help fund many conservation efforts and land acquisition through license sales, Webster said.

Congress should reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the federal fund used for conservation projects and for creating access to public lands, said Eric Siegfried, founder of onX. The deadline for reauthorizing the fund, created by lawmakers in 1964, expired on Sept. 30 without action despite bipartisan support.

“People need to get more involved and support their local land trust,” he said. “There’s a lot of work out there to do.”