Nearly a decade before four Missouri Hunters drove to Wyoming for a now-famous hunting trip that landed them before state and federal judges on trespassing charges, Bozeman-based hunting personality Randy Newburg planned something similar. Like the Missouri hunters, Newburg was going to use a ladder to avoid stepping on private property as he corner-crossed, or climbed over the point where two-square-mile sections of public land meet two-square-mile sections of private land.

Newburg, who stars in a hunting-themed TV show and podcast, said he picked a "high-profile" corner in central Montana's Crazy Mountains involving a wealthy, access-adverse landowner's property that, once crossed, opened access to thousands of acres of U.S. Forest Service land with plentiful elk hunting. An accountant by trade, Newburg even worked out a script to guide his interactions with the property's ranch manager.

"I was going to call the county sheriff [and] the landowner and say, 'This is what I'm doing opening morning,'" he recalled.

Newburg said he'd hoped that the resulting conversations would provide something that's sorely needed in Montana: clarity on whether corner-crossing is legal, so that hunters, landowners, land managers and law enforcement officials can work off of a common understanding of Montana law. After consulting a Bozeman law firm founded by Jim Goetz, the attorney who secured for the state what is widely considered to be the most progressive stream access law in the country, Newburg scrapped his plan to establish a corner-crossing "test case" in Montana.

moar

I can't even fathom how much of an uptight prick you'd have to be to stand against corner crossing.

That would definitely be a jury that I would want to be on. But I don't think it'll ever go to court here in montana. Just for the fact that they know enough locals would be able to be on the jury that it would never lead to a conviction.
I can't say that I'm looking forward to the days when we get to just dispose of those kinds of humans. But....