Let's discuss ingress/egress easements

I want the existing road located and shown on the plat. The easement description stops at the boundary line. I am curious to know if there are ramifications for extending it the full length. I can't imagine why. I believe I recall that Wattles doesn't have anything against extending it into the dominant parcel a short piece and seems like I have been told the same, perhaps at a conference some time.

If your creating an ingress/egress easement, you can't create an easement to yourself thus the ingress/egress would end at the property boundary. However, the existing path is evidence of a possible prescriptive easement to any number of parties and your newly created easement may be sharing rights with those who hold the prescriptive rights. 

In this scenario the tract being separated is completely surrounded by the parent tract and the existing path is entirely on the parent tract.  There are no other apparent parties who would use the existing lane.  There are no structures on the tract being created.

@holy-cow In your senario the esmt should stop at the property line because then your client can fence and gate the road at his PL for security if necessary.

As lurker noted, there are no easements against oneself. End the easement description at the new tract boundary line.

You could continue the description into the tract if you intended to later parcel off some of the new lot and grant an easement to the new owner(s), but that's a whole 'nuther circumstance you didn't posit.

Lurker, land butcher and Peter have it.  It's called the Doctrine of Merger, which states that any other land rights you may have had merge into the bundle of title rights when you acquire the fee title of the servient land.  

In the scenario you describe, the easement right any portion of the easement route that falls within the fee parcel, where the easement is for the benefit of that parcel, merges with the rights already included in the fee title.  So in that case, the easement is not, cannot be created within the fee parcel and so ends at the parcel boundary regardless of whether you write the easement description 200' into the fee parcel.

Bottom line, if your client wants the route described to the end of the path or if there is some other useful reason to do so, do it.  On your map, show the centerline path route to its end but show the edges of the easement ending at the new boundary.

I’d delineate the full path/road but break it at the new boundary. The portion intended for the easement would be labeled Area-A (or similar) and the remaining segment as Area-B so each can be unambiguously referenced in a deed. I’d run metes and bounds around the easement's perimeter and, unless it was a major undertaking, the remaining portion of the road. I tend to view roads as monuments, so I view the delineation of the portion of the road that's not an easement as a tie. Easements in general should be given the same respect as a parcel boundary.

If you show the rest of the road, be careful how the document is structured. You may inadvertently create a cross access easement where the other party can use your drive as a turnaround...

Thanks to all of you for your comments.

This is a real word situation.  It appears on a survey I was reviewing generally for conformance to the State Minimum Standards.  It was awkward to tell the surveyor that I had never seen a survey of an ingress/egress easement that did not stop at the boundary line.  Based on my training as a State-licensed Real Estate Salesperson, I knew why that type of easement should stop at the boundary line.  As a reviewer, I have no inherent power to train other surveyors.  Generally, I do not ask questions about "Why?"  It is the surveyor's work product and if he/she wants to record it over my comment I will sign off if the Standards have been met.

The Doctrine of Merger is one of those things that I crammed into my brain for the big test, then forgot all about until reminded of it several years  later - much to my embarrassment.  That is when I truly digested it.  We all have a responsibility to remind our fellow surveyors when they are having similar moments.

We will overwrite an easement. There are a few reasons that trigger it.

In the case of the OP I would terminate the easement at the property line. And, of course, call out the boundary line so any math issues are overridden by the call. 

Most ingress/egress easement descriptions I have read over the decades have used a centerline description and a stated width being so many feet either side thereof.  On occasion, the scrivener will add mention of extending or shortening the sides to match the boundary line of a specified tract at the terminus point.  Technically correct, but, rarely mentioned.

Not long ago I had to advise a fellow surveyor whose survey plat I was reviewing that he should abandon the center line description he had written and replace it with a metes and bounds description.  The reason was that the drawing clearly showed deviations in both sides of the easement.  It definitely did not create a uniform width by any stretch of the imagination.

Easements are incredibly important documents that can also be incredibly difficult to get changed at some later date.  The clients tend to only focus on a current need based on a current situation.  They generally have no interest in envisioning the related hardships that may occur over time.  I can't count the number of times a potential client has called asking to have a different easement location created and only then learn that the existing easement can only be changed by the beneficiary of that easement.

A favorite story of mine involves the case of a couple who were getting divorced after many years of marriage and several children together.  The husband had inherited 80 acres and had built a new home there during their marriage.  The location was roughly one-quarter mile from the county road.  The existing lane twisted and turned for nearly a half mile to get to the house.  An alternate route could have been created that was a very workable straight quarter mile in length.  The judge handling the divorce heard the testimony of the husband stating he wouldn't give a nickel for the house.  The judge immediately ordered that the wife receive the house and two acres of land plus a deeded route to the house following the existing route.  The husband flew into a rage at the judge.  Not smart.  More than 25 years has passed and the wife still owns her spite tract.  Somewhat recently the husband finally sold his remainder tract.  The buyer of that tract and the wife made a deal.  She now has a far shorter route and properly constructed road to her spite tract.

One valuable lesson I've learned, when creating a tract with an easement crossing the parent tract to an otherwise isolated tract, write the easement on the same description as the new parcel. Don't write the parcel and the easement on separate documents. As you say easements are very important and there are many little qualifiers connected to how they are written.  

There are many misunderstandings about easements.  One of the more bizarre cases I ever encountered involved an easement that went through the middle of a convenience store.  Once upon a time, as all fairy tales begin, a fellow had created and sold three tracts on the back side of his property.  He had ingress/egress easements created such that each tract owner had access across the front of his land to get to a US Highway.  Time passed.  The owners of the three tracts worked a deal with an adjacent landowner to have a single new easement to cross each other's land to get to a city street.  AND, the then owner of the frontage by the highway sold it all to a fellow to put in a convenience store.  More time passed.  A fellow who had once been mayor of the City got into a major kerfuffle with the convenience store owner.  He searched for a way to irk the store owner.  He found that the three easements were  on record at the courthouse.  He figured out which one would pass through the store.  He approached the owner of the tract that had benefitted from that easement that no longer was of any need.  He paid the lot owner money  to sign over any rights he held to the old easement then made a mad dash to the courthouse to get his document recorded.  Then he called us to locate and monument the easement and show on our drawing the location of the gas pumps, store building, etc. that were within the boundaries of the easement.  I swear every resident of the city I knew drove by at least three times just to see what we were doing before we finished.

@mightymoe That works great for an easement benefiting the new tract across the parent.  From personal experience, this does not work in the opposite direction.  When our house was built in 1910 it occupied the eastern 210 feet of a block platted in 1873.  At some in 1933 east 90 feet was split off reserving an easement for the parent tract's (my home) sewer, apparently there was no sanitary sewer in the street adjacent to the house.  That 1933 deed was the last place the easement ever showed up.  No trace of it in the title report when we purchased in 1996.  Around 2004 said sewer line failed and need to be replaced.  Given the facts the line runs between our neighbors' house and garage and I was not made aware of the easement, we had to totally re-route our line to the adjacent street.  It was only several years later that I did a boundary line adjustment for another property on block that I began to go through the County records and found the 1933 easement.  If I was a little smarter, I would have sued the title company for the expense of re-routing our sewer, but that is another story.  The moral of the story is, if the easement was recorded separately, chance are it would have shown up in a title report.

@john-putnam 

I do believe you would have a rare case with that one. Title insurance almost never pays off. 

The one I had was like I related above, an isolated tract where I described an easement on a separate description. Gave the tract description and easement description to the seller and sent copies to the title company. Years later the seller came into the office and things had blown up with the buyer. A buyer had purchased the parent tract and declared the isolated tract didn't have an easement. Finger pointing began and of course it was all the surveyors fault. Research discovered a curious item. Seems the isolated tract had a mortgage, and that mortgage included the easement I had given the title company. It was proof the title company simply forgot to file the easement for the landowner. The courts determined that the lender had access but the owner didn't. And the lender couldn't transfer the easement to the owner. So I was told.

It got messy, but the title company was completely on the hook for all the costs. One of the few times I've seen that happen.  

So I suppose it can go both ways, however, I would guess you have a case. But with title insurance it gets iffy when a claim is filed. We had a similar case with a water line easement and they refused to fix anything or admit they were liable. 

@mightymoe Yeah, I figured it would be an uphill battle getting the Title company to pay up.  That is the main reason I just let it go.

Posted by: @john-putnam

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@mightymoe Yeah, I figured it would be an uphill battle getting the Title company to pay up.  That is the main reason I just let it go.

They have their ways of protecting themselves. 🤔 

I'm a big fan of writing strip descriptions in the form of a centerline.  I think it's the simplest and least ambiguous way to write them.