Easements, Explained
Private land can help you access what’s public and keep bigger ecosystems whole.
Updated:
Mar 18, 2025Table of contents
What are Easements and Why Do We Need Them?
Easements connect and protect landscapes, and they come in many forms—from easements on individual trails to huge landscape-scale initiatives. In general, they’re formal legal agreements that allow the use of someone else’s land. With more than 60 percent of land in the U.S. privately owned, easements can play a crucial role in connecting landscapes fragmented by private parcels. Individual easements are often tailored to specific properties, and work in multiple ways, protecting public access to a river or trail system, for instance, or conserving entire ecosystems by creating linkages for wildlife migrations or even protecting enormous private parcels from future development.
What we today consider “easements” have been around in one form or another for thousands of years. In ancient Rome, for example, property easements gave citizens the right to, say, walk along a private road. Millennia later, easements are a well-established means of both accessing and conserving land. Below, we break down two types of easements—trail easements and conservation easements. These aren’t the only types of easement out there, but they’re the most relevant for both access to, and the health of, the places where we recreate.
Who Creates Easements?
Conservancies and land trusts generally run the show when it comes to creating conservation easements, and range. These organizations range from small, local groups to large national organizations that operate across the country. Land trusts, which usually operate locally, number more than 1,000—from the Black Canyon Regional Land Trust in Colorado to the Prickly Pear Land Trust in Montana, to the Pacific Forest Trust in California and Oregon. According to The Land Trust Alliance, roughly 80 percent of land trusts provide public access to land under their protection. Bigger environmental non-profit groups hold easements, too. The Nature Conservancy, for example, protects more than 3 million acres in 49 states through conservation easements. State governments and even federal government agencies, like the Forest Service and the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, also establish easements.
Types of Easements
Trail easements are one of the most basic and intuitive varieties of this legal agreement in which a landowner agrees to let the public through their property on a very specific right-of-way—usually a trail with a small accompanying corridor on either side. If you’re a hiker or mountain biker, you’ve probably crossed this sort of easement without even knowing it. Very often, this form of easement allows recreationists to access larger swathes of public land, or they connect larger trail networks that would otherwise be severed by private property. Trail easements are both literally and figuratively narrow. In a literal sense, they might be only 30 feet wide. And figuratively, they don’t usually dictate what the landowner does with the rest of his or her land. If a landowner wanted, for example, they could develop a luxury resort directly adjacent to the trail, in all likelihood changing the character of an area recreationists have hiked through for decades. That said, they still provide a useful remedy for the millions of acres of public land locked in by private property, rendering it inaccessible to the public.
Not all trail easements are formal legal documents agreed to by both parties. Prescriptive easements offer the same luxury as trail easements—a right-of-way through private land, but instead of a formal legal document in which the property owner agrees to let users pass through their land, prescriptive easements are established by years of continued use by the public. Imagine the following: A landowner looks the other way as climbers hike through the landowner’s property en route to a favorite crag, backpackers access an alpine lake, or hunters head to a prized elk feeding ground. If this practice keeps going on, year after year, even with nothing in writing, this access could eventually become legally binding.
The length of time that users must have been passing through private land to establish a prescriptive easement varies from state to state. In Montana and California, for example, five years is enough. In Colorado, it’s 18 years. Prescriptive easements are especially crucial when land ownership changes. If, say, a large ranch where hikers have been passing through for decades changes owners—there’s a solid chance that a prescriptive easement could protect hikers’ right to continue passing through, even if the new landowner isn’t a fan of letting the public on their property. To make a prescriptive easement legally binding, an individual or group (like a land trust mentioned above) still needs to make their claim legally binding. The key difference between a more traditional easement is that, by proving continued use over the years, the claimant generally won’t need the consent of the landowner to establish their access in law.
Case Study: Thru-Hiking and Easements
Many of the country’s most iconic thru-hikes rely on easements to connect the routes. Case in point: The Appalachian Trail. The vast majority of public land in the U.S. lies in the West, but the roughly 2,000-mile AT travels the length of the eastern half of the country, from Maine to Georgia, about 60% of which crosses private land. That means easements play a crucial role in preserving public access to the length of the trail. Many of the easements along the AT are formal legal agreements, held by groups like the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, while others are little more than handshake acknowledgments from landowners letting hikers pass through their property. In many cases, easements are as small as 30 feet wide as they help hikers connect back to public land through a private parcel. There’s also no guarantee future development won’t occur in the area. Imagine, for a second, how a golf course or a luxury condo complex in the middle of the AT would change the character of the trail (suffice it to say it would be less than ideal). Luckily, there’s another tool in the easement toolbox that can offer landscape-scale protection against development and other economic pressures.
Unlike trail easements, conservation easements aren’t focused on access at all. Rather, their primary focus is protecting the ecological integrity of landscapes and ecosystems. Conservation easements are typically formal legal agreements that limit how a landowner can use his or her land in order to preserve the ecosystem. Importantly, these sorts of easements generally still allow activities like sustainable ranching and forestry. What they don’t allow is building vacation homes, dumping waste, or dredging and paving streams on the property. In short, the goal of conservation easements is to prevent environmentally harmful activities and development. The most powerful conservation easements last “in perpetuity,” meaning they protect ecosystems forever, even as land ownership changes. In general, conservation easements do not require landowners to allow public access, but depending on the landowner and the negotiation process, some easements include that benefit, particularly for private property with trails that have been in use for a long time.
As cities and suburbs continue to push outward and human populations continue to grow, large, intact ecosystems where animals have enough habitat to roam, migrate, and flourish are more important than ever. But the open space that wildlife depends on isn’t just on federal public land. About two-thirds of endangered and threatened species depend on private land to survive. Conservation easements are one tool for bringing private land into the conservation space, by connecting habitat and migration corridors fragmented by development and private property. Currently, there are more than 220,000 conservation easements in the U.S., protecting more than 37 million acres of land coast to coast, according to the National Conservation Easement Database (NCED).
Case Study: Railroads and Rights-of-Way
As rail travel has declined in the U.S., more than 100,000 miles of railroad tracks have been abandoned, opening up huge possibilities for public access to otherwise inaccessible areas. That said, the legal basis for establishing trails on abandoned railroad corridors is complicated. In 1983, Congress amended the National Trails System Act of 1968, which allowed so-called “railbanking,” a process through which a rail company can transfer ownership of the railroad easement to a public or private agency for use as a trail.
One organization, Rails to Trails, has embarked on an ambitious mission to link up abandoned railroad tracks and existing trails in one massive trail network extending across the U.S.. When it’s complete, The Great American Rail-Trail will connect 3,700 miles of trail in 12 states, passing near urban areas with more than 50 million people. Already, the organization has converted more than 25,000 miles of abandoned railways to public trails across the country. For the Great American Rail-Trail, they’ve conducted an 18-month assessment study laying out what’s ahead: There are 125 existing trails open for use on their planned route, but connecting the whole thing will require filling in more than 80 gaps in the trail network. Easements will be a crucial tool for making it all happen in the years to come.
Barriers to Easements
If easements benefit the public’s ability to recreate and increase ecosystem health, why aren’t there more of them? First off, conservation easements in particular can substantially decrease the value of a piece of property. Of course, there’s lots of nuance here, depending on the property’s commercial viability in the first place, the size and limitations of the easement, and more. In short, easements might mean a relatively small property value reduction, or a large one—up to about 60 percent. That said, establishing easements also comes with financial incentives: federal tax deductions, income tax reductions in some states, and lower estate taxes, making it more economically advantageous for a landowners to pass down ownership of their property to family members.
Other barriers to establishing easements are less tangible. In much of rural America, and in the West particularly, private property rights reign supreme, and a current of suspicion towards government and others telling landowners what to do runs deep. Many folks simply don’t want to give up the right to dictate what happens on their own property. What’s more, the length of conservation easements—though designed to benefit future generations—can make some folks uncomfortable.
Case Study: The Right to Roam in the UK
Across the pond, debates over public access to private land have animated the United Kingdom for decades. The “right to roam,” or the long sought-after ability for a hiker to trek over any land they like, in the UK, is one fascinating example—and it started with civil disobedience. For decades, so-called “ramblers,” or distance walkers, hiked illegally across private land en masse as an act of protest. The protests ebbed and flowed over time, but they seized the attention of the media and politicians. In 2000, the UK parliament passed a law making trespassing on certain undeveloped land officially legal. In 2003, Scotland took things even further by letting hikers access nearly all land, owned by anyone, anywhere in the country.
However, the “right to roam” in the UK (outside of Scotland) is in fact a fairly limited right and one that’s still under threat. The public only has access to about eight percent of the total land area in the UK. To broaden that access, activists began organizing a new round of mass trespasses in 2020. Polling in England suggests about two-thirds of citizens want to see a more expansive Scottish-style right-to-roam applied in the UK, and the debate over how to handle this demand remains contentious.
Other Access to Private Land
Easements aren’t the only way in which the public can secure access to private land. In many Western states, including Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, state governments have also compensated landowners in exchange for providing hunting access to the public on their property. These programs open a huge amount of acreage to public access, relieving pressure on public lands and helping reduce elk and deer populations on private land where they’re depleting the grass that livestock need to graze. Colorado also signed a bill into law in 2024 that ensures public access to all 14ers, and relieves private landowners of liability should someone get injured while climbing a peak. However, this isn’t a total solution: access to Culebra Peak (14,053’) costs hikers a whopping $150. The above solutions aren’t technically easements, but they are means of securing additional public access in an increasingly privatized landscape.
The Future
According to The Land Trust Alliance, the U.S. is losing open space at a staggering pace: Every 30 seconds, a football field’s worth of land is lost to development. Added up, that means the country loses open land at a rate that’s equivalent to the size of Shenandoah National Park every single year. And when that land is developed, there’s generally no way to make up for the habitat it once provided. Meanwhile, as the number of outdoor recreationists soars, the need for accessible places for people to hike, bike, and trail run will only grow. Easements will have a big role to play in all of this, but it won’t be easy. They’ll have to reconcile multiple (and sometimes competing) interests: conservation goals with recreation access, and the intrinsic value of an intact ecosystem versus the economic incentives to develop it. Hardest of all, perhaps, will be balancing individual needs (a landowner’s livelihood, for instance) with our collective need for healthy and abundant open space.
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