I'm glad someone finally brought up two bit. Things seem to work pretty good up there but I could understand that closing up if what happened to Koenig's friend up on the Sauk ever happened to the friendly Skykomish farmer.

I grew up fishing small rural rivers for smallmouth in southern Indiana and Kentucky. Most of the land around these rivers was farmed for corn, soybeans and tobacco. Very few of the landowners where we fished had any problem with fishermen crossing their fields to get to the river as long as you kept your vehicle out of the field and didn't block access for them to work the land.

This is a little like comparing apples to oranges because the places we fished were never crowded and it was rare to run into other fishermen. Most folks would rather take the johnboat out to the lake for largemouth or catfish.

Anyway, I think two-bit is a good example of how granting some public access can work. Having said that, if I owned some riverfront property that bordered a good steelhead run I'd have a hard time opening it up to general walk-in access for purely selfish reasons that have nothing to do with liability or trash pickup.

Bruce

btw - those farmers back in Indiana and Kentucky didn't have many laws that I know of regarding cutting close to rivers but most left big borders of hardwoods buffering their fields from the water.