My property butts up against National Park property, it has been in my wife’s family back into the 19th century before there was a park. In fact her great grandfather gave the park some of his property when it opened. Her father lamented that decision until the day he died. The park routinely sent letters to her father telling him what he could and couldn’t do on his own property. He essentially told them to stay off his property, or be prosecuted for trespassing and when they paid the taxes on his property they could tell him what to do until then go to hell.
He passed in the 1990’s and we moved in a house on the property in 2000 time frame. One day after moving in I was in town and my wife heard a knock on the front door and it was some park employees asking for permission to cut across our property to work on park property. Remembering her Dad’s clashes with them she said, sorry but you stay off our property end of discussion. They haven’t bothered us for nearly twenty years. We know the regular employees and they are pretty good people but Rangers are the biggest jerks on the planet, punks with a badge. I put nothing past park administration and rangers.
My parents owned some property in Vermont. The railroads came through and were granted an easement for the rails, plus 20 feet on either side of the grading.
100 years later, the tracks were dug up. The State of Vermont decided it would be a good place for a bike path and with no legal right, they just started calling it a bike path. People were riding their bikes up and down the path, cutting through property to get to the lake from our lawn. Their dogs would run loose, getting our dogs worked up, getting into fights, hunters would shoot deer on the gravel grade. All sorts of crap.
Ten years in court, and the owners were given a token amount for the land that was literally stolen from them. And the state not only took the track bed, plus the forty feet...but they took the rest of the property strip on the other side of the tracks (maybe 10-20 feet more.)
I will NEVER sign an easement. If they need the property that badly, take it through due process and be done with it.
Yep... they are GOD, and these public lands belong to them personally as far as they are concerned. And this attitude does not do those who want to access public lands any favors. They create animosity and hatred from the get go with their disrespectful overzealous authoritarianism. And access to public lands across private property suffers because of it.