Stewardship on America’s private lands

With 70 percent of U.S. lands in private hands and many of our best hunt and fish opportunities occurring there, investing in voluntary conservation on working lands safeguards access, strengthens habitat and water quality, and ensures resilient landscapes.

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Inaccessible Public Lands

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As GPS technology has made it possible to locate even the tiniest parcels of public land, it has also highlighted a major access challenge: Public lands that are entirely surrounded by private land with no permanent legal means of access. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership teamed up with onX to determine the scope of the landlocked problem and propose solutions for unlocking public lands. Since 2018, we have found that:

16.43 Million Acres

of Your Public Land

are landlocked in 22 states

State By State Breakdown Unlocking Public Lands How We Got Here

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#ProjectLandlocked

Inspired by this research and public land access challenges across America, #PROJECTLANDLOCKED is a new film that explores the complex history of landlocked public lands and looks at what the future may hold for our outdoor recreation access. #PROJECTLANDLOCKED was produced by Jason Matzinger and is presented by the TRCP, onX, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation—watch now!

State By State Breakdown

Public land access is foundational to America’s hunting and fishing traditions. But landlocked public lands—the local, state, and federal parcels that are surrounded by private property with no public roads or trails to reach them—guarantee access to no one except the neighboring landowners and those with permission to cross private lands. Each inaccessible acre represents lost outdoor recreation opportunities, unless we unlock these public lands using a tool like the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Click on a region to dig into the data.

The West

Across the West, 15.87 million acres of state and federal land are landlocked—this includes 6.35 million acres of inaccessible state lands and 9.52 million acres of federal public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies. They belong to all of us, but you can’t get to them without permission from a private landowner. In addition to island-like isolated parcels that are entirely surrounded by private holdings, the West’s unique history has created many checkerboard public lands where “corner crossing” is not considered a legal form of access from parcel to parcel—even where they are steps apart.

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The Midwest

Landlocked public lands in the Midwest are some of the most diverse in the nation—we have identified more than 300,000 acres of inaccessible federal, state, and local lands in Minnesota and Wisconsin alone.

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The Mid-Atlantic

While New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are dwarfed by the sheer land mass of Western states, they each have a high percentage of state-managed public lands within their borders. This includes Adirondack Park, south Jersey’s Pine Barrens, and nearly 1.5 million acres of PA State Game Lands. But according to our analysis, sportsmen and women in the region are losing out on more than 80,000 acres of public land where there is no permanent, legal access.

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The South

Places like the Ozark-St. Francis National Forest in Arkansas and the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina can provide as much of a backcountry adventure as any public lands in states farther west. And there are also millions of acres of state, county, and municipally managed lands that provide critical access for outdoor enthusiasts close to home. But in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, sportsmen and women are losing out on more than 174,000 acres of public land where there is no permanent, legal access.

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How We Got Here

Together, the TRCP and onX were the first to tackle the landlocked public lands problem by identifying inaccessible lands and proposing solutions. To learn more about the history of this project, click a year to expand each section.

2018

onX and TRCP alert decision-makers in Washington D.C. to the growing challenge of landlocked public lands, which has been made apparent by use of new GPS technology by America’s hunters and anglers. Learn More
First onX-TRCP report, “Off Limits, But Within Reach: Unlocking the West’s Inaccessible Public Lands,” reveals the broad scope of the landlocked challenge for the very first time. Study shows that 9.52 million acres of federal public lands are inaccessible across 13 Western states. Learn More

2019

2020

Partner Spotlight

"In addition to creating technology that enables people to make memories in the field or on the water, we strongly support efforts that either improve current access points or open up new opportunities for our customers. Why not start with the public lands that we rightfully own?"

Eric Siegfried

Founder, OnX

The MAPLand Act

Make a Victory for Public Lands Even More Meaningful

Our work to identify landlocked public lands across the country is based in the idea that we need to know exactly what access we have—and where we are locked out of hunting and fishing opportunities—before we can effectively solve the problem.

The best available tool to secure new access is the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which sportsmen and women championed through decades of funding battles before winning a landmark victory in 2020 with passage of the Great American Outdoors Act. There is now $27 million annually to enhance access to public lands for outdoor recreation.

Spending this money efficiently requires that we know exactly what access we have and what we need. This is why hunters and anglers championed the MAPLand Act, which was signed into law in 2022. This legislation will help public land management agencies digitize and disseminate public land access information—including many easement records that tell us where access is available across private land to isolated public parcels—that is currently only kept on paper files in the back of dusty filing cabinets.

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Hunting & Fishing Access

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Public Land Access

Brian Flynn, Two Wolf Foundation's Story

Key Issues for America’s Hunters

Chronic Wasting Disease

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