Can't navigate to ui-router state with URL

I'm working on a simple angular application using ui-router. I have a couple states for selecting and then editing information about a publisher. The relevant config:

 .state('select-publisher', { url: '/select-publisher', templateUrl: '/Content/superadmin/src/templates/publishers/publishers.html' }) .state('publisher', { abstract: true, url: 'publisher/{id:int}', templateUrl: '/Content/superadmin/src/templates/publishers/publisher.html' }) .state('publisher.details', { url: '/details', templateUrl: '/Content/superadmin/src/templates/publishers/details.html' }) .state('publisher.ad-tags', { url: '/ad-tags', templateUrl: '/Content/superadmin/src/templates/publishers/ad-tags.html' }) .state('publisher.native-ads', { url: '/native-ads', templateUrl: '/Content/superadmin/src/templates/publishers/native-ads.html' }) 

Inside the select-publisher state I have a big list of available publishers. Each one of them is bound to an ng-click event that triggers the following function in my controller:

 $scope.selectPublisher = function(publisher) { publisherService.setSelectedPublisher(publisher); $state.go('publisher.details', {id: publisher.Id}); }; 

This works just fine and takes me to the publisher.details state and renders the proper view. At this point the URL in my browser points to localhost:1337/superadmin#/publisher/39/details where 39 is the ID of the publisher that I selected.

The problem is, if I refresh this page or attempt to navigate directly to it by pasting the URL into the browser from another area of the application, I am ALWAYS taken back to the select-publisher state. I would like to be able to configure my states such that I am able to navigate to the details state (or any other state) based on URL.

Worth noting is that I do have a catch all route defined after all of my states:

$urlRouterProvider.otherwise('/select-publisher'); 

I'm assuming that for some reason this is being triggered but I can't reason as to why navigation works in my app using either $state.go as I have indicated in my controller as well as using ui-sref directive in my HTML templates but not through navigating directly to the URL.