Clark v. Fuller: CC&Rs promising access to “other surrounding lands” held ambiguous
Clark v. Fuller: CC&Rs promising access to “other surrounding lands” held ambiguous
2026-09-19 · Wyoming · Courts
What happened. The Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed that a developer’s successors held no easement over a subdivision lot to reach land outside the subdivision, because the CC&R language they relied on was ambiguous — and because they had never paid the road-maintenance share the same CC&Rs required.
The case
Bruce H. Clark and Elaine Sullivan, Trustees of the Lenore H. Clark Living Trust dated September 24, 1992 v. Bryce E. Fuller and Alisha M. Fuller, 2025 WY 92, docket S-24-0319, was decided August 13, 2025. Justice Gray wrote for a unanimous Court. The judgment below was affirmed in full (¶ 23).1
Sunrise Subdivision in Lincoln County is four lots. The plat was recorded in 2003 and the CC&Rs in 2005. Buttercup Lane, a private road, runs the length of the subdivision and ends in what the plat calls a “temporary cul-de-sac” where it crosses into Lot 4. The developer reserved a right to extend the road, exercisable on notice to Lot 4’s owner. The developer’s successors claimed an easement across Lot 4 to reach property south of the subdivision.
Why the clause failed
“[¶ 16] While the CC&Rs clearly grant ‘[e]ach lot’ an easement to use Buttercup Lane for ingress, egress, and utilities, they do not state that Mrs. Clark is exercising her reserved right to extend the easement to other lands. The CC&Rs’ statement that Buttercup Lane ‘provides such access to other surrounding lands’ is ambiguous, as ‘other surrounding lands’ is undefined and could refer to the southern property or other adjacent lands. … The terms ‘property’ and ‘property owner’ appear to refer only to subdivision lot owners, with no maintenance responsibility assigned to owners of other lands, further obscuring the easement’s scope and beneficiaries. The CC&Rs are ambiguous.”
Two different drafting features combined to produce the ambiguity: an undefined phrase, and a maintenance clause whose obligations reached only lot owners. The second undercut the first.
The road-maintenance ledger became evidence
Because the covenant was ambiguous, the Court went to extrinsic evidence — and the first fact it reached for was payment history:
“[¶ 17] The Clarks never contributed money or labor to maintain Buttercup Lane.”
The CC&Rs made each property owner responsible for a fair share of road maintenance based on use. A claimant asserting an easement under a document that ties access to a maintenance duty, who has never performed the duty, is producing evidence against their own construction of the document. That is the mechanism worth noting: in an ambiguous-covenant case the maintenance record is not bookkeeping, it is proof of what the parties understood the covenant to mean.
The implied-easement claim, and why necessity was measured at severance
The alternative claim was an easement by implication. It failed for want of necessity:
“[¶ 22] … at least two alternate routes existed at the time of severance.”
Necessity is tested at the moment the parcels were severed, not at the moment the claimant wants the access. The Court applied O’Hare v. Hulme, 2020 WY 31, 458 P.3d 1225. A route that has since become inconvenient, expensive or seasonally impassable does not convert a convenience into a necessity.
What a “temporary cul-de-sac” on a plat did not do
The plat showed the cul-de-sac as temporary and recorded the developer’s reserved right to extend the road on notice. Neither carried the claim. A reserved right is a right to do something; the Court looked for the document in which the developer had actually done it, and did not find one. Reserving the power to extend an easement and exercising that power are two acts, and the second has to appear in the record.
Where this sits in Wyoming covenant law
The interpretive frame is the one the Court set out in Rafter J Ranch Homeowner’s Ass’n v. Stage Stop, Inc., 2024 WY 114, 558 P.3d 562: restrictive covenants “are contractual in nature and we therefore interpret them as we would a contract,” and where there is no ambiguity a court adheres to the plain and ordinary meaning without extrinsic evidence. Clark is the other half of that rule in operation — once a Wyoming court does find indefiniteness of expression, the door to extrinsic evidence opens, and what comes through it is the community’s own conduct.
For a Wyoming subdivision whose roads are private and whose access provisions were drafted when the developer still owned adjoining ground, the two questions the opinion turns on are whether the document names the benefited land, and whether the maintenance obligation runs to whoever claims the benefit.
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