Cache County UT - Public Access Fight

[Irrelevant]

A battle over public use of paths into a northern Utah mountain escalates

A legal battle simmers in northern Utah as a private landowner, recreation advocacy groups and Cache County clash over access to trails leading into Clarkston Mountain.

www.sltrib.com

“There’s a state statute that says if the public has used a road for 10 continuous years, it’s dedicated as a highway,” Baird said. “There’s no evidence that the public has used these trails as a road, basically at all.”

Baird said that while residents may have used the routes for hiking, horseback riding and dirt biking, that kind of use doesn’t qualify the paths as public “highways” under Utah law.

He said the statute applies to roads used for standard vehicle travel, not narrow trails used primarily for recreation.

Residents and advocacy groups counter that the routes have long been mapped and labeled by the county as public roads, which Burr said is reflected in the warranty deed noting the sale excluded county roads.

Decades of continuous use, he said, have created public rights-of-way under Utah law.