Nearly a decade before four Missouri Hunters drove to Wyoming for a now-famous hunting trip that landed them before state and federal judges on trespassing charges, Bozeman-based hunting personality Randy Newburg planned something similar. Like the Missouri hunters, Newburg was going to use a ladder to avoid stepping on private property as he corner-crossed, or climbed over the point where two-square-mile sections of public land meet two-square-mile sections of private land.
Newburg, who stars in a hunting-themed TV show and podcast, said he picked a “high-profile” corner in central Montana’s Crazy Mountains involving a wealthy, access-adverse landowner’s property that, once crossed, opened access to thousands of acres of U.S. Forest Service land with plentiful elk hunting. An accountant by trade, Newburg even worked out a script to guide his interactions with the property’s ranch manager.
“I was going to call the county sheriff [and] the landowner and say, ‘This is what I’m doing opening morning,’” he recalled.