Montana’s Access Wars Heat Up as Corner Crossing, Water Rights Collide

A flurry of legal rulings, agency declarations, and legislative pushes have converged on the question of where anglers and hunters can go in Big Sky Country—and the answer depends on who you ask.

Montana’s long-simmering fight over public land and water access boiled over in February, driven by parallel developments that underscore how contested the state’s outdoor landscape has become. In rapid succession, two Montana legislators announced a renewed push to legalize corner crossing, the Montana Supreme Court handed down a water rights decision on a chronically dewatered trout stream, and Wyoming advanced a bill to codify corner crossing into state law.

For fly fishers planning a season on Montana’s blue ribbon waters, the message is plain: the legal ground beneath your wading boots is shifting.

FWP Holds the Line on Corner Crossing

The catalyst for much of the current friction is Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks’ repeated declaration that corner crossing—stepping from one parcel of public land to another at a checkerboard corner without touching private soil—remains unlawful in the state. FWP Director Christy Clark reaffirmed the position in November 2025, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Wyoming’s Iron Bar Holdings v. Cape case. That refusal left intact a 10th Circuit ruling that corner crossing is legal—but only in the six states within that circuit: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New Mexico. Montana, which sits in the 9th Circuit, was unaffected.

FWP’s stance has drawn sustained pushback from Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. Jake Schwaller, now chair of BHA’s Montana chapter, told Montana Free Press in October 2025 that while the 10th Circuit ruling carries “persuasive authority” in Montana, the state still needs to resolve the question on its own terms. In a 2024 guest column in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Schwaller — then BHA’s Eastern Montana conservation leader—wrote that FWP’s declaration was “both factually incorrect and false,” noting that no Montana statute or case law makes corner crossing either legal or illegal. The practice exists in a gray area, he argued, one the executive branch has no authority to resolve by fiat.

On the other side, the United Property Owners of Montana has consistently argued that any crossing of a checkerboard corner constitutes trespass, regardless of whether a boot touches private ground. UPOM’s position rests on airspace doctrine and the premise that expanding access amounts to a taking of private property rights.

The stakes are concrete. According to OnX mapping data, roughly 871,000 acres of Montana public land are corner-locked — parcels of federal or state ground that can only be reached at the point where two checkerboard corners of public land meet. That figure is a subset of some three million acres of Montana public land blocked by surrounding private holdings.

Legislators Push for Clarity

In mid-February 2026, two Montana lawmakers stepped directly into the breach. Sen. Ellie Boldman, D-Missoula, and Rep. Josh Seckinger, D-Bozeman—co-chairs of the Montana Legislative Sportsmen’s Caucus—announced their intent to push corner-crossing legislation, writing that they have reintroduced a bill to clarify that moving from public land to public land at a shared corner, without touching private property or causing damage, is not criminal trespass. Montana’s legislature meets in regular session only in odd-numbered years, so the effort is aimed at the 2027 session or a potential interim committee action.

Seckinger, a Bozeman fly fishing guide, framed the issue in terms his clients understand. Access determines opportunity, he wrote, and opportunity drives both participation and conservation funding. When access shrinks, everything downstream shrinks with it.

Boldman carried the first major attempt to legalize corner crossing in 2013 with HB 235. That bill drew busloads of blaze-orange-clad sportsmen to the Capitol but fell short, receiving just 45 votes in the 100-member House—15 shy of the 60 needed to advance. The access problem, she and Seckinger wrote, did not go away.

Meanwhile, Wyoming is further along. The Wyoming House passed HB 19 in February to codify the 10th Circuit’s ruling into state statute. A Senate committee forwarded the bill to the full chamber on February 26, though ranching groups pushed back on its scope. Oregon is pursuing similar legislation of its own.

Water Rights Ruling Adds Fuel

On February 24, the Montana Supreme Court issued its decision in Petrich Family Limited Partnership v. Trout Unlimited (2026 MT 34), a case rooted in the decades-old adjudication of water rights on Mill Creek in Park County.

Mill Creek is a key tributary of the Yellowstone River and a source of spawning habitat for Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii bouvieri). It is also, according to FWP, chronically dewatered—a stream where irrigation claims already exceed physically available supply. The case centered on whether landowners could expand the period of use for water rights originally decreed as “flood water” claims, limited to the May 1 through July 15 window when high flows make excess water available.

Trout Unlimited had objected to the claims during Montana’s general water adjudication, arguing that generating new “implied” water rights to extend use beyond the decreed period would increase the burden on an already over-appropriated stream. The Clark Fork Coalition filed an amicus brief supporting TU’s position, warning that the Water Court’s approach to implied claims could set a precedent allowing irrigators across the state to expand their diversions at the expense of instream flows.

The case is technically a water adjudication dispute, but its implications ripple outward. For anglers who fish Mill Creek or the Yellowstone River mainstem below it, the question of how much water stays in the channel during late summer directly determines whether cutthroat trout can spawn, rear, and move between tributaries and the river.

What It Means for Anglers

These developments sit at the intersection of two pillars that define Montana fly fishing: stream access and water. Montana’s Stream Access Law of 1985 remains among the strongest in the nation, guaranteeing recreational use of all surface water below the ordinary high-water mark. Corner crossing is, in many ways, stream access’s landlocked cousin — the question of whether the public can physically reach the water it already has the right to use.

The practical upshot for anyone planning a 2026 season: corner crossing in Montana remains legally murky. FWP wardens will continue referring suspected cases to county attorneys, though no corner-crossing prosecution has gone to trial in recent memory—charges stemming from a 2021 incident involving a Townsend bowhunter were dropped in 2023 just as the case was headed to a jury. Anglers and hunters who choose to cross at checkerboard corners do so at their own risk, and the risk varies county by county.

On the water side, Mill Creek and streams like it across the Yellowstone basin face continued pressure from agricultural withdrawals, and the Petrich ruling may shape how aggressively those claims expand. Trout Unlimited’s water program, which has pursued settlements on Mill Creek water rights since 2019, will likely weigh the decision’s implications before determining next steps.

One thing is clear: the tension between public access and private property rights in Montana is not resolving itself. Whether the answer comes from the legislature, the courts, or some combination of the two, the outcome will determine what Montana’s public waters look like for a generation.

The post Montana’s Access Wars Heat Up as Corner Crossing, Water Rights Collide appeared first on MidCurrent.

Source: Fish2