navigable waters...
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.
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.
Here in central Wisconsin , Adams county, there is a 40 foot set back rule facing any body of water including streams ponds or lakes which prohibits the owner clearing or maintaining any vegetation that is growing there.
Yeah, you can’t privatize waterways. The feds will smack this down eventually when the lawsuits get to that level. In the meantime, carry a pair of wirecutters if you are going boating in New Mexico, I guess.
Just about every location has some very confusing rules about where ownership starts and stops when it comes to rivers, lakes, oceans etc.
For Michigan, it’s been the case since 2005 that the public had the right to be on any beach property wherever it was (and regardless of whether there was a landowner who owned the adjacent property) as long as they did not go past the ‘high water mark’. I believe that this right however was restricted to the activity of ‘just passing through’…. not setting down a towel and sunbathing there for the day. Next door in Ontario, this also was the case but this got changed in 1951 to be the ‘low water mark’ which obviously makes a world of difference. In 2012, there was legislation in the works to revert back to the 1951 ruling but it never made it past the finish line and what they got now is a bit of a hodgepodge mess.
As for barbed wire fences across the river, I would imagine that if a canoer made it around the bend on a fast flowing river and couldn’t avoid coming up against the barbed wire and drowned, there would be hell to pay….sort of along the lines of booby trapping a house to not just keep an intruder out but to kill the intruder.
There’s a river near us that has a small dam. We take the boats out a portage across the dam. The portage is on private property.
There are some No Trespassing signs nailed to a tree.
Once when we were there, the property caretaker came by. He said the No Trespassing signs were for the rope swing and that people were free to portage. By law, he has to allow that.
We had a very pleasant conversation.