Posted on 03/15/2018 6:06:44 AM PDT by C19fan
As Scott Carpenter and a few friends paddled down the Pecos river in New Mexico last May, taking advantage of spring run-off, the lead boater yelled out and made a swirling hand motion over his head in the universal signal to pull over to shore. The paddlers eddied out in time to avoid running straight through three strings of barbed wire obstructing the river.
Swinging in the wind, the sign hanging from the fence read “PRIVATE PROPERTY: No Trespassing”.
Sign up for This Land is Your Land, our monthly email on public lands Read more One member of their party waded into the swift water to lift the wire with a paddle for the others to float under. As they continued downstream, Carpenter, a recreational boater from Albuquerque, looked over his shoulder a see a figure standing outside the big ranch house up the hill. He offered a wave, but received nothing in return.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
navigable waters...
Navigable waters used to actually mean something. Now that the feds/EPA consider every little wet-weather stream and swale to be “navigable waters”, not so much...
And they’ll divert the water from conservatives into the lib cities.
They should be.
Using this logic, if someone owned property on both sides of the Mississippi, they’d own that slice of the river flowing thru it. Insane.
North of Bend, Oregon, there are large, wide irrigation canals. They are NOT public waterways. They are part of an irrigation system built years ago, and it belongs to & is maintained by the ranch owners who received the water for their animals & crops.
The massive invasion of yuppies into the Bend area has brought another problem. The yuppies like ‘to be outdoors’. But they do NOT purchase large properties. They trespass.
They have been using kayaks & canoes to ‘go down the ‘river’ or ‘stream’, as they refer to the canals.
There definately is barbed wire across the canals at property lines, because cattle & horses need to stay on the correct property. So- many of these avid paddlers have invaded the canals in the spring, especially, and have been seriously injured. They refused to understand that these were mad-made irrigation canals.
YOU CAN’T FIX STUPID.
If people respected the land, and many do, owners wouldn’t try to lock them out.
Even on State and Federal land the lessee has provide liability insurance. Lawsuits have happened time and again.
We need “Loser Pays” laws.
According to my plat I own to the half way point of the river. I often wonder if somebody drowns in the river in front of my house would I be held accountable.
During the summer weekends I see over 50 canoes, rafts and inner tubes pass by the house.
These numbers are growing, a lot of Yankess are moving to here from up North. The major issue we run into here is people wanting access to the river from our property. Another issue is people leaving their trash in the river.
We sent them away to the public access points mainly for parking issues and property insurance reasons.
The owners can put fences on their property warning boaters that the land up off the riverbank is private property, but hanging barbed wire across a major river like the Pecos is NOT “protecting private property”. Rivers constitute a public right of way through property. When you buy land with a river running through it, you are not buying a section of the river, just the land on either side of it.
True enough, the EPA has tried to extend their WRIT to every spec of water in the U.S. But the Pecos river is no isolated spec of water, it’s a major river.
Don't fence me in.
It’s not just rivers. I’ve been hollered at across a lake before because the river I was kayaking passed through it.
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Navigable waterways are the property of the United States of America.
Non-navigable waterways are the property of those whose land they pass. The water flowing therein is the property of all through whose land the water passes.
You only own that water which you can obtain and use without damming the stream.
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Search “Riparian Rights.”
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This is just wrong. These are rivers, public, not private. A real shame these landowners want to privatize and monetize access to the public river. I hope this is stopped soon and they lose big, maybe even their own land for the the theft they are attempting.
This is one of the most alarming news pieces I have seen in a long time. It has been well known for eons that if you buy property on a free flowing stream / river you don’t own that water. The sense of being navigable does not mean that it must be suitable for commercial barge traffic or anything even closely resembling that. You may prohibit anyone from stepping on the shore but you can’t stop them from being in the water and passing through. The issue of trespass on the shore and littering has been a long standing problem on streams around here and in the Texas hill country.
The Barron Fork is one such stream that has regular float, canoe and kayak traffic. If you buy property along the stream it is understood that you will have all manner of floaters passing through your property in the summer. You can keep them off the shore but you can’t stop their passage. When you buy a piece of property you accept those terms if you improve the habitat or not and these people who are raising this rucus and building fences should be smart enough to know what they have done is at risk of public use. Tough crackers.
I considered such a piece of land and because I did not want the constant parade of summer floaters and the inherent liability of them trespassing I did not buy it since I could not legally control it. I own a place with a small creek on it and I control that legally because it is not passable without walking on my land. If it were floatable I’d be out of luck.
What is taking place here is wealthy, well connected whiners in New Mexico commandeering the law for their benefit. It is simply wrong.
There are some places with very small streams that are “private” water owing to the fact that you simply can’t traverse them without getting on the land. Some of the fishing in these locations is great and i have paid very good money for the opportunity to fish them without begrudging the control of the owner. It is his right. Blocking streams like the Pecos and the Barron Fork is not permitted.
I would think that those fences would be torn down every year during flood season. I know that the rivers in Michigan would have destroyed a fence like that every spring, between ice rafts and fallen trees and such floating downstream in the floods ...
The public access points are there because they do not have the right to trespass on your property. They do have the right to use the water and pass through your property.
The access points have been there for a long time and the reason is that for a long time it has been expected and lawful for the public to use the water that passes through your land. The access points were not established just because land owners agreed to allow passage.
It is really stupid that this is debated since the notion of private water has been struck down so many times in test cases involving recreational float traffic.
I would say that is an unintended consequence of the Water of the US mess but I somehow doubt it.
Used to be people had some common sense about things.
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