Landlocked Property and the Checkerboard in Sweetwater County, Wyoming

Who actually owns the private squares of the checkerboard today

The 1862 congressional land grant that created the checkerboard handed alternating one-square-mile sections to the Union Pacific Railroad, but the railroad itself hasn't owned that land for decades. The mineral and surface package passed through Union Pacific Resources, then Anadarko Petroleum, then Occidental Petroleum, before Occidental sold roughly 850,000 fee surface acres and about 4.5 million mineral acres across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado -- the bulk of it the southern Wyoming checkerboard -- to Orion Resource Partners and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan in a 2023 transaction valued at roughly $1.33 billion. The resulting entity, Sweetwater Royalties LLC, based in Lakewood, Colorado, is now one of the largest private landowners in the country and holds most of the private checkerboard sections across Sweetwater, Carbon, and Albany counties.

For a buyer, that's a materially different situation than a checkerboard held by dozens of individual ranching families. It means the private section diagonally or directly adjacent to a parcel you're considering is more likely than not to be owned by a single institutional landholder rather than a neighbor you can knock on the door of -- with its own policies (or lack of any public-facing policy) on granting access, leasing hunting rights, or negotiating an easement. Before assuming a neighborly handshake agreement is realistic, or that a small landholder will be flexible on granting an access easement, check the recorded owner of the specific adjoining section rather than assuming it's still a family ranch.

Corner-crossing is now legal here -- but only in a narrow, specific way

The single biggest legal development affecting checkerboarded land in Wyoming in years didn't come from the state legislature or Sweetwater County -- it came from a federal court case, and it directly changes what "landlocked" means on this kind of land. In Iron Bar Holdings, LLC v. Cape, four hunters were sued for stepping, on foot, from one BLM section to a diagonally adjacent BLM section at a shared corner point, without touching the private land at the other two corners, on a Carbon County ranch (not in Sweetwater County itself, but the ruling applies the same way here). A Tenth Circuit panel ruled on March 18, 2025 that corner-crossing on foot -- without touching the surface of the private parcels and without damaging property -- is not trespass under federal law; the U.S. Supreme Court denied Iron Bar's petition for review on October 20, 2025, leaving the ruling as settled, binding law across the entire Tenth Circuit, which includes Wyoming.

What this actually means for a Sweetwater County buyer is narrower than "checkerboard access is solved," though. The ruling covers foot travel between two diagonally touching public parcels without setting foot on the private corners in between -- it does not create an easement, does not cover driving a vehicle, ATV, or horse across the corner, and does not give anyone a right to build a permanent crossing structure (the hunters in the underlying case used a temporary, removable stepladder specifically designed not to touch Iron Bar's land). It also has nothing to do with a private parcel's own access to a public road: the ruling protects moving between two public sections, not a private landowner's ability to reach their own land across a neighboring private section. If your own parcel is a private checkerboard section with no direct road frontage, the corner-crossing ruling doesn't help you at all -- you still need an actual recorded easement or legal road access, exactly as before.

What this means if you're buying to hunt or recreate on adjoining BLM land

If part of the appeal of a Sweetwater County parcel is proximity to what looks like open public land, the practical rule from Wyoming Game and Fish Department guidance still applies: you need actual, legal public access to reach that BLM section, whether by a public road, a recorded right-of-way, or -- since March 2025 -- a corner crossing from another public section on foot. A driveway or access route that crosses a private checkerboard section (including one now owned by Sweetwater Royalties) still requires that landowner's permission or a recorded easement; the corner-crossing ruling doesn't substitute for that. Tools like the BLM's land status/surface management maps, or a GPS mapping app that overlays parcel ownership on public land boundaries, are the practical way to confirm section-by-section status before assuming a specific BLM parcel is actually reachable.

Before you buy: how to actually check a specific parcel's status

1. Pull the BLM's land status/surface management map for the specific sections your parcel touches -- don't rely on a county assessor plat or a listing photo alone to determine what's public and what's private.
2. Check the recorded owner of any adjoining private section directly -- a large share of Sweetwater County's checkerboard is now held by Sweetwater Royalties LLC (successor to Union Pacific/Anadarko/Occidental's land package) rather than an individual rancher, which changes who you'd actually be negotiating with for an easement or access agreement.
3. Order a title search that specifically addresses recorded ingress-egress easements -- proximity to a public road or to BLM land on a map is not proof of legal access, whether or not corner-crossing law has changed.
4. If the appeal of the parcel includes access to adjoining BLM land via a shared section corner, understand that the 2025 corner-crossing ruling protects foot travel only, not vehicle access, and doesn't grant a right to modify or build a permanent crossing at that corner.
5. If your own parcel is itself a private checkerboard section, confirm its access independently -- the corner-crossing ruling has no bearing on a private landowner's own road access, which still depends entirely on recorded easements or road frontage.