Mines grad’s app helps solve access question for some of Colorado’s 704,000 acres of inaccessible public lands

As a student at the Colorado School of Mines, Sam Seeton juggled his role as running back for the school’s football team with his pursuit of a petroleum engineering degree, all while managing hunting and fishing access to his family’s ranch outside Buena Vista.

Then, some friends with land in eastern Colorado asked if he could help them manage access to their land for pheasant hunters. Soon, some neighbors asked, too.

“Then from there, it just snowballed,” he said.

After graduating, Seeton decided to take a leap. In 2020, while working for Anheuser-Busch, he and some friends launched an app — called Infinite Outdoors — to help work out access to private land for hunting and fishing. Their aim was for the app to serve as the “Airbnb for outdoorsmen,” and also to forge the way for free access to the millions of acres of inaccessible public lands across the West.

Nearly 16 million acres of Western public land are landlocked, including 704,000 acres in Colorado — an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

“Along this whole journey, I wanted our app to be an overall access app,” said Seeton, a lifelong hunter, angler and outdoorsman. “Everything we do is to expand access.”

Public land in the West can become inaccessible when it is surrounded by private property, lacks a public road to the area or is blocked off due to a parceling system from the railroad era that divvied up the land into squares that sometimes touch only on the corners.

The longstanding problem has prompted yearslong lawsuits and changes in the law. Earlier this year, the federal appeals court based in Denver ruled that it was legal to cross from one corner of a parcel of public land to another — the most recent decision in a winding legal case about corner crossing. Last year, Colorado lawmakers passed a bill that released landowners from liability if they allowed free recreational use of their land.

Historically, federal and state agencies have worked to broker agreements with landowners whose properties border public lands to ensure public access, but those processes can take years.

Seeton’s team is pursuing a faster and more nimble option: paying landowners.

“We have the relationships, we have the technology and nobody else is poised to do it,” said Seeton, who now lives in Casper, Wyoming.

Infinite Outdoors and its sponsors — including the Mule Deer Foundation and the hunting gear company Primos — pay landowners to allow a limited number of people each day to pass for free through their property to enter public land. Users create a free account on the app and reserve their spot.

Through its Access Granted program, the company has so far negotiated free passage to more than 7,600 acres of public land in Colorado and more than 60,000 acres across the West that were previously inaccessible.

In Colorado, the company has made access possible to 162 acres of state trust land and nearly a mile of the Arkansas River near Cotopaxi, southeast of Salida. North of Fort Collins, a 1,280-acre parcel of U.S. Forest Service land along the North Fork of the Poudre River is now available for hiking, fishing, climbing and kayaking.

Farther south, near Beulah, members can now enter 5,292 acres of the San Isabel National Forest that were previously inaccessible. In southeastern Colorado, hunters can seek out game on three new parcels of state trust land.

It was important that access to public lands be provided free to users, Seeton said. The land is already owned by the public, so why should they pay to access it?

“It’s frankly a pretty easy pitch for these landowners,” Seeton said. “They want the public to have access to their public lands, they make some money and get to feel good.”