Billing, Mont. • Acting U.S. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt ordered federal land managers on Thursday to give greater priority to access for hunting, fishing and other kinds of recreation when the government considers selling or trading public land.
The secretarial order comes amid longstanding complaints that millions of acres of state and federal land in the American West can be reached only by traveling across private property or small slivers of public land.
Bernhardt's order requires the Bureau of Land Management to come up with alternatives to access routes that could be lost during land sales or exchanges.