It's not so much the private property owners that bother me (if I owned river frontage I would be extremely selective when it came to letting people have access to it). It's when landowners and timber companies "landlock" the stretches of river that otherwise would be open to the public. Also, if you can get away with accessing some stretch of river by means of using some type of loophole, ie, floating the river or simply wading it so as to stay below the high water mark, then more power to you! I do it all the time, I always stay within the limits of the law so as not to give said land owner any reason to shoot me. Some times it makes them mad, but this is a tough old world we live in, and if a land owner has to get mad simply because I was smart enough to find a loophole in the system, well then that's just too bad. That being said, I always make every effort to get the permission of the land owner first. Even when I have to use the "Back door" approach, I alway take a hefty sack with me and I always take more trash out with me then I went in with (as a way of trying to show these land owners that we are not all a bunch of slobs). I even will go as far as to bring some of the land owners an occasional fish for the grill. As a result, I have acess to some of the most exclusive stretches of river in the state of Washington. I guess what I'm trying to say is that whereas you can use the loopholes in the system when you have to, it is often times much easier to try to befriend the land owners whenever possible. As for the timber companies, they can try to throw all the gates in the world up, but as long as those gates are blocking access to public land, I'll continue to find ways of getting around them, even if it means riding my mountain bike down five miles of dirt road to get to where I wnat to go. And there is always somewhere to drop a mini-drifter in... They can't stop you from floating through their land.