I remember well about 40 yrs ago driving nearly 80 miles of highway past "No Trespassing" signage.
This really baffled the hell out me and finally stopping and asking at the next stop I was informed it belonged to the Hunt family.
So just seeing the arial mapping in and around your query it seems the oil companies own a good portion of the lands. The other landowners are big ranches that have a big issue with the oil companies. Every white dot is a well site.
So the hopes of ever exploring the lands in and around the area might be a tad hard to access permission.
Interesting article in the link about one rancher (20,000 acre) and the fight with big oil.
Solution for big oil is to buy out the ranchers tallied up now to over 370,395 acres—larger than several Texas counties.
After an abandoned well began spewing toxic, salty water onto her Permian Basin land, Ashley Watt would stop at nothing to determine the cause—and to hold Chevron accountable.
www.texasmonthly.com
In the past couple of decades, oil companies have quietly become significant landowners in West Texas. Chevron owns 12,647 acres of ranchland in Crane County, home to Antina Ranch, and 34,411 acres next door in Upton County. Most of that is the former McElroy Ranch, which Chevron bought in 1990 and closed to quail hunters. “We could make our operations more efficient by buying the surface
and making sure there were no trespassers on the ranch,” a Chevron spokesperson told the Odessa American a few days after the sale.
Also in Upton County, SM Energy, Pioneer Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, and Apache Oil each own more than 7,000 acres apiece. In Crane, ExxonMobil owns 14,410 acres. Late last year, a company with the generic name US Land Guild bought the 13,600-acre Doodle Bug Ranch, in Crane. The company’s address is the same as that of Blackbeard Operating, a private Fort Worth oil company that already owns 8,368 acres in the county.
