What the ranchers are doing is essentially attempting to land lock public land.
Discussion
I've seen a lot of that when trying to explore public land near private land. Ranchers put a locked gate on a county road passing next to their land, or simply threaten me when using it.
It's like they are saying they own the air space. I can't remember exactly what happened, a hunter flew a helicopter onto Elk Mountain and went hunting and got busted for it. But that was a different case then the ongoing g one now.