Twenty-three acres is a modest piece of country in Idaho. Yet near Carey, a parcel that size held the route into more than 13,000 acres of public land. Eric Siegfried understood its peculiar value. The founder of onX had spent years putting property boundaries on screens. Here was a chance to change what happened on the other side of one.
A local community member spotted the property for sale and contacted onX and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. A public road touched it. Beyond lay a much larger landscape. The catch was the price: the owner wanted more than the appraised value that agencies and conservation organizations could pay. Siegfried negotiated a purchase himself, allowing the slower work of a public transfer to follow.
That sequence makes a useful introduction to him. There is an engineer’s attention to the small part that makes the whole arrangement work, a hunter’s interest in the country beyond it, and a willingness to get involved before the paperwork has found its resting place. In this corner of the outdoors, the difference between possibility and permission can be a very small property.
A GPS could locate him. Ownership was another matter.
Siegfried grew up in rural Montana, hunting in the open country of the east. His route took him from Miles City to Bozeman and then Missoula. He graduated from Montana State University in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. Before outdoor maps became his business, his engineering work included plumbing and HVAC design. Buildings had their complications; the woods supplied a different set.
Western Montana brought steep terrain, timber and property boundaries that were difficult to read on the ground. He could study paper maps at home, then struggle to reconcile them with what he encountered outside. A hillside offered no handy legend. Elk were equally unhelpful about identifying the owner of the land beneath their hooves.
After moving to Missoula in 2007, he collected maps from Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management offices. The available technology solved only part of his problem. “You had Garmin GPS information but not landowner information,” he recalled. Position and ownership lived in separate places. Bringing them together would let a person make a more informed decision while actually standing in the field.
He began organizing recreation information in 2007: rural roads, trails, topography and land ownership. The ambition gradually became a complete picture of ownership across the United States. That meant assembling information held by different public agencies, rather than simply drawing a pleasing map. The outdoor experience depended on an indoor undertaking: reconciling records until the layers could work together.
The business fitted on a memory card
The early breakthrough was physical and small. Siegfried worked out how to load statewide landownership information onto a microSD card for a Garmin GPS. A customer could plug it in and use it outdoors. Earlier downloads had been more cumbersome. A memory card spared buyers the pleasure of becoming technical support for their own weekend.
In summer 2009, he tested the Montana product on a scouting trip. That September, he showed it to a Scheels buyer in Billings and remembered the buyer’s immediate enthusiasm. Here was someone who understood the problem without requiring an elaborate explanation. The company he founded that year had a practical route to customers: sell a useful answer to people already asking the question.
The screen eventually changed. The Hunt smartphone app arrived in 2013, carrying the mapping idea beyond the dedicated handheld device. Later came products for off-road travel and backcountry recreation. The progression widened the audience while keeping the underlying proposition recognizable: information about a place becomes more useful when it travels with the person exploring it.
Siegfried bootstrapped the business before Summit Partners announced a minority growth investment in February 2018. The investors had been introduced by Susan Carstensen, Jason Mittelstaedt and David Vap, former RightNow Technologies colleagues associated with Yellowstone Growth Partners. His company belonged to a network of Montana technology businesses, with connections running through Missoula and Bozeman.
Summit’s account emphasized a team that used the product itself and a company that had learned to operate through customer revenue. That history matters to the shape of Siegfried’s work. The first audience supplied both a market and an ongoing test: a map had to earn its place in someone’s pack. A persuasive presentation could secure attention; useful information had to survive the trip.
Public land with no public way in
Siegfried served as CEO until 2018. He now offers strategic guidance on the board rather than running onX day to day. Alongside that change, access work became an increasingly visible part of his story. A historic access point near Missoula had passed into private ownership, helping prompt support for RMEF’s access programs and a more deliberate effort to protect routes into public country.
Mapping ownership exposed an awkward condition: land could belong to the public and still lack a legal public route. In 2018, onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership began working together to measure that problem. Giving it an acreage made it harder to treat as a collection of isolated disappointments.
“Why not start with the public lands that we rightfully own?”
Eric Siegfried, on public access
In March that year, Siegfried and TRCP’s Joel Webster went to Washington to discuss access with officials at Interior, the BLM and the White House Office of Management and Budget. They argued that apparently isolated parcels could have considerable recreational value. Modern mapping could reveal routes and connections that a conventional view might miss.
In 2019, Secretarial Order 3373 required the BLM to consider public access when evaluating land disposals and exchanges. A map could now contribute to a consequential discussion about what government should retain. The change from consumer tool to policy instrument was substantial, even if both uses began with close attention to a boundary.
The acreage describes land identified as inaccessible, rather than acreage opened. That distinction is central to understanding the work. Measurement establishes the size of a problem; access requires additional agreements, purchases, public decisions and local effort. A number can direct attention toward a landscape. Getting there still takes another kind of persistence.
The patience of a property line
Elk Mountain supplied a concrete example. Siegfried purchased the connecting parcel and conveyed it to RMEF. Community members, officials and other partners worked through the steps needed for public access and eventual BLM ownership. onX’s April 2025 account described the resulting opportunity as access to more than 13,000 acres. The small purchase mattered because of where it sat.
ROAD
A small connecting property can change access to the country beyond it. Diagram is conceptual; areas are not to scale.
At Stanley Creek, the beginning was less tidy. While researching elk country around 2016 or 2017, Siegfried noticed an apparent route toward 2,712 acres of public land. He suspected a utility easement might explain a gap in the ownership information. Calls to state and county officials established that the apparent opening was a data error. There was no legal access there.
He returned to the possibilities in 2018, considering three properties that might provide a connection. Early attempts went nowhere. One parcel changed hands off-market. In 2021, a real estate agent told him its new owner might sell. Negotiation and diligence took another year. RMEF then undertook the site visits, mapping and transfer preparations.
His account describes removal of housing structures in spring 2025, trailhead planning and delays in the intended government transfer. RMEF offered to accept the land donation in 2025 and complete the BLM transfer. The project’s stated aim is public access to those 2,712 acres. Its history has the pacing of land work: years pass between noticing a possibility and arranging a durable route.
Still looking closely at the ground
There are less administrative ways to encounter Siegfried. He joined MeatEater’s Ryan Callaghan for a canoe trip into difficult-to-reach public land to hunt mule deer. Their route depended on a river, the available public right of way. In that setting, the access question became an itinerary, equipment in a canoe and a place to camp.
He also oversees his family’s cattle ranch, where his interests include wildlife management and finding dinosaur fossils. His outdoor activities extend to trail running, snowboarding, surfing and soccer. The fossil hunting is an appealing footnote for someone associated with digital maps: the ground can hold useful information that predates the database by a considerable margin.
Recognition has followed the access work. RMEF named him its 2021 Conservationist of the Year. In April 2026, he and onX CEO Laura Orvidas received TRCP’s Conservation Leadership Award at its Washington awards dinner. The recognition connected their company’s mapping with a broader effort involving conservation partners, public policy and the people who use public lands.
In his own account of that award, Siegfried gives credit to the onX team’s years of assembling geospatial information and to Webster and TRCP’s advocacy. His earlier ambition was to organize outdoor recreation information in one platform and help more people explore. The parcel projects add something tangible to that ambition: a route someone else can use. Twenty-three acres, in the right place, leaves a great deal of room for a walk.