Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning said she directed her state offices to “implement” corner crossing, the Billings Gazette reported Thursday, even though a high-profile Wyoming dispute over the act is headed for appeals court.

On Friday, the BLM walked it back.

“The BLM is reviewing the court’s decision and has not issued any new guidance regarding corner crossing,” the agency’s press secretary said in an email to WyoFile.

The about-face leaves the legality of corner crossing in limbo, especially on the nearly 6 million acres of “corner-locked” land that the mapping app OnX has determined is managed by the BLM.

Corner crossing is the act of stepping from one parcel of public property kitty-corner to another without touching adjacent private land. It’s theoretically the only practical way to access millions of acres of public land in the West where the land ownership occurs in a checkerboard pattern of alternating public and private property.

That’s the case for 2.44 million acres of Wyoming land, including some sections on the slopes of Elk Mountain. There, Missouri hunters Bradly Cape, Zach Smith and Phillip Yeomans unwittingly put corner-crossing’s legality to the test in 2020 and ‘21 when they stepped through the airspace above pharmaceutical giant Fred Eshelman’s 22,045-acre Carbon County ranch without actually touching it.

Criminal charges against the three Missourians didn’t stick, and they prevailed in a civil case in the U.S. District Court of Wyoming. An appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, however, awaits.

In an interview with the Billings Gazette, Stone-Manning suggested she’d issued a corner-crossing directive ahead of the appeals court’s outcome.

“Our solicitors think it’s pretty clear,” she said. “We’re taking that ruling quite seriously and making sure that our state directors are implementing it.”

Casper attorney Ryan Semerad, who represented the Missouri hunters, told WyoFile on Thursday that he was “happy to hear” BLM was recognizing the district court’s ruling, but admitted there were still legal ambiguities.

“Until we get a declaration from the 10th Circuit yay or nay, we’re still going to do a little bit of head scratching,” Semerad said. “We don’t have a definitive answer. We’re waiting to hear if it holds up.”

Semerad speculated that Eshelman might have seen the writing on the wall when he requested earlier this month for a judge to stall the decision about corner crossing’s legality ahead of the appeals court verdict.

“I do believe that the stay is, in effect, conceding that Judge [Scott] Skavdahl’s ruling required implementation like this,” he said. “That’s just me reading the tea leaves.”

A BLM-Wyoming official told WyoFile that changing policy to explicitly legalize corner crossing won’t be the flip of a switch.

“If this holds up under appeal and becomes the law of the land, there has to be time so we can work with private landowners,” said Brad Purdy, the state office’s deputy state director for communications. “This will be a change.”

Purdy urged public land users to exercise great caution if they’re thinking about corner crossing. He said he wouldn’t personally do it at this time.

“We could easily see some public safety issues here, ‘Get off my property’-type thing,” he said. “I have a GPS, I’m an old Marine and I can navigate with a map and a compass, but for right now I’ll stick to my normal haunts on public land.”

(WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.)