Ask most hunters what makes land public, and they will say ownership: if the federal government owns it, anyone can hunt it. The reality across much of the West is more frustrating. Millions of acres of Bureau of Land Management ground are federally owned and legally open to hunting, yet no public road or trail reaches them. They sit surrounded by private land, visible on an onX map as a block of public color with no legal way in. The BLM now says it wants help fixing that, one parcel at a time.
According to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP), the BLM is seeking projects that would open access to Dingell Act nominated lands and other inaccessible public parcels. The agency is accepting nominations for voluntary projects with willing sellers, and the request follows September's executive order directing federal land agencies to prioritize practical access to hard-to-reach federal lands and waters.
What the BLM Is Actually Asking For
The call is for projects, not just complaints. TRCP reports that the projects would be funded through the Land and Water Conservation Fund and would open Dingell Act parcels and other landlocked tracts to more hunting and fishing. Projects can include access easements, rights-of-way or, in some cases, purchase of the land itself.
That range of tools matters. An access easement might be as modest as a legal right to walk or drive a two-track across a ranch to reach a section of BLM ground. A right-of-way can formalize a road that already exists but has never been legally open to the public. Fee purchase, where the government buys a parcel outright from a willing seller, is the most expensive option and is usually reserved for land that bridges a gap or carries significant habitat or recreation value of its own.
According to TRCP, nominations are accepted on a rolling basis through local BLM field offices, and projects are voluntary and depend on willing sellers. No deadline was given for this project call. Rolling acceptance means a good idea does not have to wait for a once-a-year window, but it also means the most organized proposals, the ones that already have a landowner on board and a clear route mapped, are likely to move first.
Two Processes That Are Easy to Confuse
Hunters who follow public land access may remember a separate BLM effort this summer, and the two are related but not the same. Under the Dingell Act, the BLM periodically asks the public to nominate parcels for its priority access list. The agency's website says the fourth round of those public nominations ran for 30 days, from July 31 to August 30, 2026, through an online map portal where users could draw polygons over public land they believed lacked access. The BLM says it is now reviewing those nominations.
That process identifies the problem parcels. The project call described by TRCP is about fixing them: lining up the easements, rights-of-way and purchases that would actually put a legal route on the ground. A parcel on the priority list is a strong candidate for a project, but the TRCP report notes that the effort also extends to other inaccessible public parcels.
The Arithmetic of Landlocked Ground
The scale of the problem is not small. In 2018, a TRCP and onX analysis found 9.52 million acres of landlocked federal land across 13 western states, most of it managed by the BLM. That study helped make "landlocked public land" a term most western hunters now recognize.
Dingell Act nominated lands are a defined subset of that picture. TRCP describes them as federal parcels of at least 640 contiguous acres where hunting, fishing and other recreation are allowed but where public access is cut off entirely or significantly restricted, often because there is no access across neighboring private land.
The BLM's own numbers give a sense of where those parcels sit. The agency's 2024 summary of its priority access list counted 1,016 parcels, with 605 nominated by the BLM and 411 nominated by the public. Those parcels included 2,759,876 acres the agency classified as legally inaccessible and 2,440,999 acres with significantly restricted access. Wyoming had the most parcels on the list at 200, followed by Idaho at 175 and Montana and the Dakotas at 173, with Oregon and Washington at 145 and Colorado at 136. Nevada had only 41 parcels, but they accounted for more than a million legally inaccessible acres, the largest total of any state office. The BLM reported 114 new nominations in its 2024 round.
Why the Checkerboard Is So Stubborn
Much of the landlocked problem dates to the nineteenth century, when the federal government granted alternating sections of land to railroads and kept the rest. The result, across large parts of Wyoming, Nevada and other states, is the checkerboard: square-mile blocks of public and private land touching only at their corners. For decades, landowners and hunters have argued over whether stepping from one public section to another at a shared corner is legal. A federal appeals court sided with a group of hunters in a high-profile Wyoming corner-crossing case in 2025, but corner crossing does nothing for parcels that are surrounded entirely by private ground. For those, a negotiated easement or a purchase is often the only realistic answer.
How a Hunter or Group Can Put a Project Forward
The route TRCP describes runs through local BLM field offices, which makes sense given how local the problem is. The people in a field office know the ranches, the roads and the history of a particular parcel, and they are the ones who would have to negotiate with a landowner and manage the resulting access.
For a hunter or a local sportsmen's club, a strong nomination usually starts with homework. Identify the parcel on a land-ownership map and confirm it is BLM land open to hunting. Look at which neighboring properties could provide a route and whether an existing road or trail already crosses them. If there is a landowner who has expressed willingness to sell an easement or a tract, that relationship is the single most valuable piece of a proposal, because the program depends entirely on willing sellers.
The BLM's requirements for the Dingell Act parcel nominations offer a useful template for what the agency wants to see. Those nominations had to include the location of the land, the total acreage affected if known, a description of the lack of access and any additional information the BLM should consider. A project proposal for an easement or purchase will need the same foundation, plus a clear explanation of what kind of access would solve the problem.
Hunters with a specific parcel in mind should contact the BLM field office that manages it and ask how that office is handling the project nominations, since TRCP's report directs them there rather than to a single national portal.
Where the Money Comes From
The funding behind this effort rests on two laws with broad bipartisan support, according to TRCP. Congress passed the Dingell Act in 2019, and in 2020 the Great American Outdoors Act guaranteed full annual funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The LWCF, which draws its money from offshore oil and gas revenues rather than general taxpayer dollars, has paid for public land acquisitions, state parks and local recreation projects across the country since the 1960s. Access advocates have long pushed to set aside part of that money specifically for projects that open existing public land, a provision tied to the Dingell Act.
TRCP said it supports using Land and Water Conservation Fund dollars for both conservation-focused acquisitions and projects specifically designed to expand public access, and that this nomination process focuses on the latter. That distinction is worth noting. A habitat acquisition might protect a migration corridor or a riparian area without adding much new hunting access. An access project might involve only a narrow strip of land but unlock thousands of acres of public ground behind it, which is often the better value for the hunter.
The September Order Behind the Timing
The project call follows an executive order signed in September. TRCP has reported that on Sept. 17, President Donald J. Trump signed two executive orders aimed at hunting and fishing priorities, including one titled Reinvigorating America's Hunting Heritage. Among other provisions, TRCP said that order calls for prioritizing practical access solutions for landlocked and other difficult-to-reach federal lands, including voluntary easements, land exchanges and cooperative agreements with states.
At the time, TRCP welcomed the orders. "Hunters and anglers have shaped this country's conservation legacy for more than a century, and they remain some of the most dedicated stewards of our fish, wildlife, and wild places today," said Joel Webster, chief conservation officer for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. "We appreciate the administration's support for wildlife corridors, access to landlocked public land, and management of invasive species and wildlife disease, as well as the emphasis on stronger fisheries science and closer coordination between federal and state managers. We look forward to working with the departments and agencies to implement several elements of these orders."
The BLM's request is one of the first concrete steps that hunters can see from that order. Whether it produces a handful of easements or a meaningful dent in millions of landlocked acres will depend on funding, staffing at field offices and, above all, the number of landowners willing to deal.
Why Willing Sellers Are the Whole Game
Every part of this program is voluntary, and that is both its strength and its limit. A landowner whose ranch surrounds a block of BLM ground has no obligation to sell an easement, and some value the privacy, the hunting or the grazing that comes with controlling the only access. Others may welcome a fair price, a well-defined route and a federal partner responsible for signage and maintenance.
Hunters can help tip that balance. Public land users who respect gates, stay on designated routes and treat neighboring ranches well make it easier for a field office to convince the next landowner that an easement will not turn into a headache. The opposite is also true: trespass complaints and cut fences give every hesitant landowner a reason to say no.
For sportsmen who have spent seasons staring at an unreachable section of BLM ground from a county road, the BLM's call is a real opening. It will reward people who show up with specific parcels, local knowledge and, ideally, a willing neighbor. The place to start is the nearest BLM field office.
