[1] Shared-access advocates claim that neither the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service nor other federal agencies, nor even private landowners have the authority to close RS 2477 roads.
According to Section 2 (c) 3, any area to be considered for wilderness status must contain "a least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition."
[2] Thus an RS 2477 "highway" which qualifies as a "road" could disqualify the land it traverses from being recognized by the federal government as a "wilderness" if it reduced the area under consideration beneath the 5,000 acre limit.
Conflicts among these groups came to a head when President Bill Clinton declared the Grand Staircase–Escalante, in southern Utah, to be a National Monument.
Several Utah counties have been fighting in court to assert RS 2477 claims to roads that cross federal and private property,[5] including across the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.
Because some disputed roads were never recorded by counties, shared-access groups claim that private landowners hold property with an unrecorded public right-of-way.
There is little common ground between these interpretation, so lawsuits are being fought in the western United States, and it has fallen to the courts to determine which routes are public and which are not.