A Connecticut Couple Is Fighting for the Right To Let People Hike on Their Land

One of the most enduring principles of liberty is owning property. “America’s Founders understood clearly that private property is the foundation not only of prosperity but of freedom itself,” Roger Pilon, founder of the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, wrote in 2017.

And yet all too often, bureaucrats put unnecessary rules and regulations on how we can use our property. One couple is fighting with their town over the right to just let people go for a walk on their land.*

Charles Copley met his wife, Elizabeth, at Oxford University, while they were each pursuing a Ph.D. After living a few years in his native South Africa, they moved with their children to Connecticut to be closer to Elizabeth’s family.

Wanting to make the area their permanent home, they purchased two plots of rural land in Roxbury totaling 50 acres in 2022. They hoped not only to live on the land but to really make it their own: farming, planting, and otherwise tailoring the property to their family while protecting and preserving its natural beauty.

They hired a forester to draw up a 10-year forest management plan, which the town approved, and then began removing invasive species and cutting miles of walking trails throughout all 50 acres.

The trails would keep the invasive plants at bay, but they would also need to be maintained. To help accomplish that, the Copleys started using Sniffspot, an app like Airbnb that lets property owners rent out land by the hour for hikes or dog walks. They only charged $10 per hour, while the app handled scheduling and processed the payments. In return, the steady foot traffic would keep the trails from being overrun.

That worked well for several months—until April 2025, when the Copleys suddenly received a letter from the city. A zoning enforcement officer wrote that the Copleys were “operating a ‘dog park,'” and he warned, “this business cease operation unless the home enterprise requirements are met.”

As it happened, the town had adopted an ordinance one week earlier that regulated short-term rentals, like Airbnb. But as Charles tells Reason, “one of the things that that short-term rental ordinance did was to prohibit any kind of hourly rentals.” (Elizabeth says that when they raised an objection at an earlier town meeting, they were told—inaccurately, it turned out—that the ordinance would not affect them.)

Confused but hoping not to run afoul of the law, the Copleys applied for a home enterprise license. But their property consisted of two plots, and the trails covered both; town officials said they couldn’t cover two plots with the same business license. They could apply to join the plots together, but that would involve an expensive surveying process, potentially decrease the value of the property, and prevent them from being able to freely build on it in the future.

This set off several months of conversations in which officials gave conflicting answers on how the Copleys could legally let people hike on their property, and when pressed, they could not point to a specific town ordinance that forbade it.

To reiterate, the conduct at issue is charging $10 per hour to hike on their land.

This was only meant to be a very minor part of the Copleys’ overall yearslong plan for their property. “I am running a farm here, I need to be able to make a plan,” Charles says. “I’ve got nut trees I want to plant. I’ve got invasives I need to remove.” And yet the hiking trails have taken up an inordinate amount of the family’s time.

On Thursday, the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm, sent a letter to the town of Roxbury on the Copleys’ behalf.

“We’d like the town to tell us what ordinance prohibits the Copleys from inviting people onto their property for a small fee, to walk on their trails in the same way that…any other private landowner would be allowed to invite people onto their property,” I.J. senior attorney Ari Bargil tells Reason. “And if there is no such ordinance that they can point to, we’d like the town to confirm that they could resume their operation as they were before, peacefully and harmlessly allowing people onto their property.”

While the town’s ordinances don’t explicitly address by-the-hour trail rentals, the letter notes, “all agricultural uses—and all attendant ‘accessory uses’—are permitted by-right,” meaning they conform to existing zoning codes and are inherently allowed. The letter notes that Roxbury already approved the Copleys’ forest management plan, which “identifies recreational uses like hunting, hiking, wildlife watching, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing as consistent with the broader goals of ‘[e]xpand[ing] and improv[ing] the trail system for forest fire suppression, forest management,'” and “‘property maintenance.'”

The case is particularly galling because it involves prohibiting the use of one’s property in whatever way they see fit, even just using an app to let people hike. “The government’s stance seems to be that because something isn’t expressly permitted, it must therefore be prohibited,” Bargil adds.

But if anything, the app actually introduces a level of security that would be missing in a previous era, when by-the-hour trail rentals would just be conducted by word of mouth and cash under the table.

“One of the things that was really important to us was to know who the person was that was on our property and when,” Charles says. “I actually think that this is a more regulated use than a lot of public parks: I know who the person is, I meet them, I explain how everything works. So it’s even more bizarre to me that this would be a problem.”

The letter demands an answer by September 30, otherwise, the Copleys will resume hosting hikers on October 1.

*CORRECTION: This article originally misstated the Copleys’ demands.