The Federal Bureau of Land Management is hosting a series of focus groups in the Texas Panhandle, hoping to forge a plan for what to do with the thousands of acres of public land just north of Amarillo.
As MyHighPlains.com reports, the Cross Bar Ranch will one day soon be opened to the public — all 12,500 acres of it.
The ranch is located about 30 minutes north of downtown Amarillo, and federal officials are consulting Panhandle residents to learn what locals think the land should look like. Some possibilities include camping, hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding. The City of Amarillo is helping to support grant funding to create road access to the land.
The project may draw a good deal of attention in the Lone Star State, as Texas is the second largest state in the Union, butless than 1.5 percent of that land is owned by the Federal Government. Compare that with the country at large, where the federal government owns about 28 percent of all the land.