A fight over whether floaters have the right to use a natural water channel connecting Pine Creek and the New Fork River near Pinedale has apparently hit a stalemate.
At issue is whether landowners there are within their rights to put a fence, rocks or other barriers across the channel.
Floaters and anglers use the channel to move back and forth between Pine Creek and the New Fork River, which are both popular for trout fishing.
The channel is a few miles southeast of Pinedale and about a half mile upstream from where Pine Creek flows into the New Fork River, fishing guide Chris Hayes told Cowboy State Daily.
The sticking point for floaters and anglers is the general principle of a landowner trying to cut off floatable access, Hayes said.
That matter was settled by the Wyoming Supreme Court in 1961, with the court ruling in favor of floaters, he said. The situation along Pine Creek/The New Fork River could be indicative of bigger troubles to come.
More people are taking to the water, and in smaller, lighter watercraft that allow them to float in more places than ever before, Hayes said.
Meanwhile, more people are seeking riverside properties.
That confluence of events could cause tensions to flare between floaters and landowners across Wyoming.
1961 Supreme Court Case
A squabble between a Wyoming landowner and a floater in the late 1950s ended up going all the way to the Wyoming Supreme Court in the 1961 case, Day v. Armstrong.
At the heart of the case was whether landowners have the right to deliberately block passage along floatable waters passing through their property.
The court ruled that landowners can’t do that — because waterways are essentially a public right-of way.
However, landowners can claim ownership of the river or streambed underneath the water.
That means that jumping out of a watercraft to wade, or anchoring a boat to a private streambed amounts to trespassing.
The exception the court made in its Day v. Armstrong decision is when floaters must exit their craft to go through, over or around shallow spots in streams, or barriers across them.
That means “persons so floating in usable craft may, when necessary, disembark and walk, or wade upon submerged lands in order to pull, push, or carry craft over or across shallows, riffles, rapids or obstructions,” according to the court’s ruling.
Who Enforces This?
Hayes said that old-school fishing guides would keep fencing pliers in their boats, to cut through fences that had been illegally strung across waterways.
In the Pinedale area, such drastic measures largely became unnecessary over the years, as landowners and floaters reached an unspoken agreement.
Floaters respected the landowners’ need to contain livestock by putting fences across waterways in some places. Landowners in turn would outfit cross-stream fences with gates, or similar devices that allowed easy passage through, Hayes said.
That started to change when ownership of the land that the Pine Creek/New Fork River channel flows through changed hands a few years ago, he said.
Locals are claiming that the latest owner — officially listed as the Florida-based River Ranch LLC — has been trying to block the channel with rocks and soil on one end, and a wire fence on the other.
Hayes said that what’s frustrating to him and other floaters is an apparent lack of enforcement over what they regard as a blatant violation of the law – as settled by the 1961 Wyoming Supreme Court decision.
He said he’s tried reaching out to relevant agencies, including the Army Corps of Engineers, but has gotten lackluster response.
Is The Ball In The Corps Of Engineers’ Court?
The Army Corps of Engineers has primary jurisdiction over the waterways in question.
The Corps’ Wyoming Regulatory Office on June 2 received a report of work being done on the channel, Nathan Morey, the agency’s South Dakota-Wyoming section chief, previously told Cowboy State Daily.
At the time, he stated that work done in the channel might be subject to the Corps’ authority under Section 404 of the federal Clean Water Act.
He added that the “discharge of fill material” into the channel could be a matter of concern.
In such cases, whether fill is blocking a navigable waterway could be taken into account as a possible effect, he said.
On Monday, Morey could not be reached for comment, regarding any possible changes in the matter.
The Last Best Place
The spat over the channel could be indicative of ongoing changes in the Wyoming floating and angling scene, Hayes said.
Until recently, the fisheries near Pinedale were one of the last best places, he said.
“Ten to 15 years ago, it was the best brown trout fishery in the West,” he said.
That’s changed and waters are getting crowded, Hayes said.
“In the past several years, it has gotten absolutely pummeled. The secret is out,” he said.
Along with an ever-growing number of anglers being drawn to the Pinedale area and other Wyoming waters, pleasure floating is getting more popular, Hayes said.
And watercraft options are evolving to meet demand, he said.
Large “drift boats” are starting to be replaced by smaller, nimbler fishing rigs that have a shallower draft, meaning they require less water to float in, he said.
Paddleboards and lightweight, single-person skiffs and kayaks are also becoming all the rage, Hayes said.
Smaller watercraft means that the boundaries of what’s considered “floatable water” are being stretched, he said.
“As folks are using these smaller vessels to go down these smaller creeks, they’re going to start encountering fences in places where the landowner never even thought of somebody trying to float through,” he said.
That means everything old, in terms of the 1961 Wyoming Supreme Court ruling, might become new again.
“I think we’re seeing this is the revisiting of an old issue that we thought had been settled,” Hayes said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
