Hunting Land in Nevada: The Checkerboard Access Problem

Where the checkerboard came from, and how big it is

Nevada's checkerboard pattern dates to the 1862 and 1864 Pacific Railroad Acts, under which the federal government granted the Central Pacific Railroad alternating, odd-numbered one-square-mile sections in a corridor along its right-of-way -- eventually a band stretching roughly 40 miles wide (20 miles on each side of the track) across northern Nevada, generally following the route the railroad and, later, Interstate 80 would take. The even-numbered sections in between stayed in federal ownership. The scale is real: more than 5 million acres of Nevada land passed to the railroad under this grant, and while a meaningful share has since been sold off to other private owners over the past century and a half, a large share remains in a private/public checkerboard today, concentrated in a band across the northern part of the state and especially dense in counties like Pershing.

The practical result of this pattern, more than a century and a half later, is that a section of public BLM land can be completely surrounded by privately owned sections at its four corners, with no public road or recorded easement reaching it -- and a private section can likewise be boxed in by public land with no guaranteed private access route. A 2019 study by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership found roughly 2 million acres of public land in Nevada effectively inaccessible for exactly this reason. For a hunter or a hunting-land buyer, that is not an abstract land-tenure curiosity -- it is the concrete question of whether the parcel you're buying, or the public hunting unit next to it, can actually be reached at all.

What this means specifically for hunting-land access

Two access questions matter for a Nevada hunting-land purchase in or near a checkerboarded area, and they're distinct from each other. First: does the private parcel you're buying have a legally recorded easement or right-of-way to reach it, or does the only practical route cross someone else's private section with no documented right to be there? A road that's been used for decades without incident is not the same thing as a recorded easement, and a change in ownership on an intervening parcel can end informal access overnight. Second, and often more relevant to why someone buys hunting land in the first place: can you legally reach the adjoining public BLM section to hunt it, or is that public section itself landlocked by private sections at its corners, reachable only by crossing private land you don't have permission to cross?

The second question has been complicated -- and for hunters, improved -- by a genuinely live legal development. "Corner-crossing" is the practice of stepping from one public section to a diagonally adjacent public section at the checkerboard's corner point, without ever setting foot on the private sections that occupy the other two corners. Landowners in checkerboarded country have long argued that even passing through the airspace above their corner constitutes trespass; hunters have argued the opposite. In March 2025, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Iron Bar Holdings v. Cape that hunters who corner-crossed without physically touching private land -- using a specially built step-ladder-like device to clear the corner -- did not commit unlawful trespass, reasoning that the federal Unlawful Inclosures Act of 1885 protects the public's right to pass over public land even where private ownership meets it at a point. The Tenth Circuit's ruling directly binds only the states within that circuit (Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico) -- Nevada sits in the Ninth Circuit, so this decision is not binding law there. But it is a significant, closely watched precedent for exactly this checkerboard-access question across the West, and it's a live reason Nevada hunters and landowners alike are paying attention, even though a Nevada-specific ruling on corner-crossing has not been decided.

What to actually check before buying

• Confirm recorded legal access to the parcel itself with a title company -- don't rely on an existing dirt road or the seller's description of how they've always gotten in.
• Ask BLM's Nevada state or district office directly whether the adjacent public section(s) you intend to hunt are themselves landlocked, and what access options (if any) BLM recognizes -- including any BLM-held or -acquired easements across intervening private land.
• If corner-crossing to reach a public hunting unit is part of your plan, understand that Nevada has no binding appellate ruling of its own on the practice -- the Tenth Circuit's Iron Bar Holdings decision is persuasive, not controlling, here, and a Nevada landowner could still attempt to challenge it.
• Check whether the parcel or the surrounding public land sits within Pershing County's historic railroad-grant corridor or another documented checkerboard area -- some Nevada counties have pursued land-exchange or consolidation agreements specifically to unwind checkerboard parcels, which can change access on a multi-year timeline.