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Forest Service Job
Looking for a job as a Land Surveyor? The Forest Service is hiring! The duty station is at the Regional Office in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is a GS-1373 position. If you are interested comment your email address and I will send you the Outreach Notice.
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27 Replies
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You need to find a town much like Eldorado Springs, Missouri as explained in the following article. I saw the monument to the surveyors in the city park while attending a wedding held there about 20 years ago.
EL DORADO SPRINGS, MISSOURI
by Dennis D. Bland
The Bureau of Land Management’s Cadastral Survey Organization, over the past 90 years, has had nearly 200 employees from one small town in western Missouri. Incredibly, this number of men and women comes from tiny El Dorado Springs, which currently boasts a population of 3800. It appears to have started with a family named Bandy, and a local grocery store owner named Ed Wilson.
Roy Bandy, who grew up on a Vernon County farm in the late 1800s and early 1900s, longed to go “West” because of correspondence received from his older brother, Elmer, then living in Colorado. However, the passing of his father required him to stay at the family farm delaying his adventure to the West until 1905. After planting the spring crops and leaving the farm to younger brothers, he secured employment on a GLO surveying crew in Wyoming. Except for the period of 1907-10, Roy spent his entire career as a surveyor with the GLO and later as Regional Cadastral Engineer with BLM. In the latter capacity, he was responsible for the public land survey program in ten western states until his retirement in 1954. Roy married Inez Estes, a Missouri farm girl, in 1911. Inez was faithful as a helpmate to Roy, serving as camp cook on remote surveying jobs to be near her husband.
In 1931, Roy was assigned to survey the revised east and north boundaries of the Yellowstone National Park, a project which would take three summers to complete. The survey would cross some of the most difficult terrain in the Rocky Mountain Range. A young ambitious man from El Dorado Springs, Eddie Wilson, worked on this survey for a period of time. Later, Eddie returned to El Dorado where he purchased a grocery store business. He married the former Ruby Gayle Estes, a niece of Mrs. Bandy, so he and Roy maintained contact with each other. Once, when Roy needed some new recruits for his survey crew, he made the need known to Eddie. Roy had repeatedly indicated that bright, hardworking farm lads sometimes made the best surveyors. Eddie knew the qualities desired in a person to start a surveying career and was acquainted with many of the lads in the area. As the years went by, Eddie was instrumental in recommending several applicants for employment with the Cadastral Survey. Eddie was serious in this recruitment effort, and in later years commented that he interviewed each candidate and recommended only those he thought was capable of being a desirable employee. As the rank of El Doradoans grew in the Cadastral Survey offices, many more applied directly to each office. Occasionally, a surveyor would depart to the field for a season of surveying with an entire crew of four to six employees, all from El Dorado Springs, Missouri.
Over the decades, several people stayed with the BLM Cadastral Survey and made a career in the surveying profession or are striving toward that goal. Some deciding factors in this choice of career were: outdoor and scenic environments, the different challenges each survey presented, a strong belief in the benefits derived from accurate surveys, and a love for the historical aspects of the original surveys.
Professional surveyors are also history buffs. There is nothing quite like the thrill of searching for and finding an undisturbed original cornerstone, almost covered by silt, with distinct chisel marks and wondering if you are the first person to see it since its placement 100 plus years ago. Many of the early surveys were well executed considering the elements of weather, isolation, mode of travel, inaccuracy of instruments, and yes, sometimes hostility of Indians endured by the surveyors in those bygone days.
Much has changed since Roy Bandy went to Wyoming in 1905. He joined a contract survey crew where the surveyor was paid for miles completed. In 1910, the contract system was abolished and surveys were performed under the “direct system” with GLO employed surveyors. Horses were replaced by trucks as the mode of transportation, and many years later, helicopters were introduced to access the rugged back country. Instrumentation evolved from transit and chain, through advanced technology, to electronic distance measuring devices and theodolites with electronic readouts, and even GPS.
The migration of young people to employment with cadastral survey crews over the past decades is bound to have had beneficial effects on the hometown. It may not be fair to say that surveyors put El Dorado Springs on the map, but more proper to infer that surveyors enhanced the location.
The El Dorado Springs BLM alumni have formed an organization with three goals: to place a granite memorial in the El Dorado Springs City Park, to donate survey memorabilia to the El Dorado Springs museum, and to stay in touch with each other through annual gatherings.
The granite memorial is 14 feet long, six feet high, and twelve inches thick, and has each of the 190 (plus) names inscribed on it. It will be dedicated July 19, 1996 in a ceremony coinciding with the City’s Historical Annual July Picnic Days of Celebration. Among the luminaries in attendance will be author/historian C. Albert White, State Land Surveyor Bob Myers, Bob Stollard of the Colorado Society, Area 6 Director Lawrence A. Boyer, and retired Chief of Surveys Bernard Hostrop. In addition, commemorative paperweights made by Berntsen International will be awarded to the alumni. Best of all, people from all over the country will travel home to see each other, share tales and anecdotes of life in the field, and remember a citizenry that is indeed unique.
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I talked to a Forrest Service Surveyor earlier this week. He has been on the job for a few months now. He has no equipment and is battling an Overreaching IT Department that claims GNSS receivers are IT. So he has been unable to buy equipment. He is the only Forrest Service PLS in his state. Meanwhile other Forrest Service Districts have multiple PLSs with multiple crews. If you are interested in this position, make sure you ask a lot of questions about current equipment, software, ability to purchase/upgrade, personnel, and ability to hire.
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Dang that sounds like a nightmare of a job. That is great advice though ???
Cameron Allan Smith -
We had that problem when I started at my current position. I had to politely tell the IT people that if they didnt take our data controllers and the tablets off of the IT secure network protocols, we would just let them sit there, all 75K dollars of them and then tell the Director of Public works we can’t survey because the IT department wont let us.
Fixed the next day. Sometimes you have to push hard to get past the stupid Ideas of people that dont care to ask more questions, its generally due to lack of scope, poor training and lack of mentorship/guidance.
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It was about 1981 when I had a similar problem with purchasing a TI progammable handheld calculator. The Director of Finance and Administration had one Radio Shack Trash-80 for his department and that was the only computer, at that time, for a 1400-employee company. He did not want to allow me to purchase the calculator because it would not link up to his overgrown toy. I demonstrated what it would and would not do by using my own calculator. He begrudgingly relented.
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Bureaucracies have come a long way in the digital age. At the highway department in the early 90’s all the computers were owned by the data processing department. And all of their computers used the OS/2 operating system. It wasn’t compatible with any DOS based programs. At the time we were using old UNIX Clipper stations to run Bentley Intergraph for our CAD. We bought 60 copies of Microstation only to find out we couldn’t run it on our computers. Within six months (before we had any resolve) we purchased about 200K worth of GPS receivers. But none of the Trimble or Ashtech software would run correctly with OS/2 either.
We spent a year staring at a pile of boxes while the gears turned slowly. One of my crew chiefs in Western OK had configured his PC to be a dual boot with either DOS or OS/2 and loaded the DOS based programs. The folks at DP wanted him fired for messing with the computer. I convinced the Chief of Parties to got to bat for us. IT worked. Soon we all had dual boot machines and could run our software…on old 386 machines.
I remember processing static files that took 12 or 15 hours to finish (if they didn’t crash). I would hit “enter” and then go home. IF I was lucky the files processed over night and was there when I got back to the office the next morning.
Oh, the good old days…not!
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Remember slide rules and typewriters that weren’t in museums, but everywhere you went. Remember drafting with a T-square, triangles and a “snake”? These young’uns have no concept of how unbelievably easy their workday has become. Remember when you had your secretary put in a call to Bob at Duffer’s Print Shop, then wait for his secretary to get him on the phone, then your secretary would tell you to get on the phone to tell him exactly how you wanted the final prints to appear. Remember when you carried around dimes with you every day in order to be able to use a pay phone booth? Remember when you carried a small bucket of dimes and quarters with you when driving on those &$^# toll roads with a toll booth about every three miles? Remember going to the car rental agency and you got a better rate if you took one of their cars that did not have an air conditioner installed? Remember using traveler’s checks on a regular basis? Remember talking with the cabbie and he spoke English and he knew exactly how to get you to where you were going even if you didn’t? Remember the big smile the doorman would give you when you dropped a quarter or two into his open palm? Remember taxis that could put half of your household belongings in the trunk? Remember matching your shoes and belt to the provide the proper accent to the color of your clothes, whether the shoes were black, brown, blue, white or two-tone? Remember when men’s dress shirts came in white, white or white? Remember when one of your brief cases for a trip might be loaded with punch cards held together with REAL rubber bands? Remember driving on a six to eight-lane urban highway at 85 MPH wedged between three semi-trailers and a car that might just have Firestone 500 tires that could disintegrate at any moment? http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2018/07/ever-hear-of-firestone-500-tire-recall.html
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@dougie
That is precisely what it means, Sonny Boy, precisely.
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Remember slide rules and typewriters that weren’t in museums, but everywhere you went..
I cleaned the garage out a few weeks ago and found typewriter I had purchased at a government surplus sale years ago. It has a 24″ carriage so you can put 11×17 paper in it. I used it the first time I went into business for myself (1985) to put the text on my hand-drafted surveys. It was the cat’s meow.
My wife asked me what I was going to do with it. I told her I was keeping it so I could still survey after the apocalypse….sometimes she doesn’t think I’m very sane. 😉
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@bushaxe, Job security by the IT Department.
I had the same issue when I hired into the Federal Government as a surveyor years ago. It was never resolved. Everybody in the Government is paranoid about not having enough duties, so there’s endless turf wars. Shoulda woulda coulda left about 10 years earlier than i did.
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I worked for the Forest Service for 30 years and 0 days. Every new endeavor was a challenge created by the Bureaucracy. Fortunately I had a Purchasing Agent who would help me find loopholes. We couldn’t buy computers, but there was no restrictions on computer components. We built two computers from scratch. You couldn’t buy computer software. A University student who worked summers sent us software on 5 inch floppy discs. We were doing CAD work on $500 computers while the Regional Office was purchasing $20,000 CAD stations that nobody could figure out how to use.
A renegade Trimble dealer who posts on here often, figured out how to sell us a three unit 4600 GPS system that passed the IT Department’s scrutiny. Our Eastside Forest Land Surveying group, which consisted of two people was the most technically advanced group in the Forest Service. We bought a plotter by calling it a digitizer verifier.
If I worked for them today, I’d probably be heading for prison.
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I worked for the Forest Service for 30 years and 0 days.
I hope you got a great retirement package after that length of time!
I tested for a federal position once. Passed with high marks but decided that the bureaucracy would drive me crazy and ultimately passed on the offer. I’m glad I did.
Jeff D. -
@notsomuch Yes, I’ve got the old CSRS retirement plan. They screwed the newer employees out of it with the FERS retirement plan. Those guys are still working.
You made a good decision. All they do now days is sit in the office and read emails.
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I worked for a large State agency for a while and after a few weeks observed more than a few coworkers were pretty much worthless, away from their desks often, phones set to “leave a message”, sleeping in their cubicles, surfin’ the Web, etc. More than once I’d request some work from a slacker and be told they’d get right on it and after a few weeks realize they’d never git her done, just keep responding “Yah, I’m working on it” forever. Quicker just to do it myself.
I finally talked with my boss about my problems with some of my coworkers and he said he was well aware but crippling union policy dictated “rehabilitate, don’t terminate.” His said his practical solution was to shuffle them around to where they did the least damage and when the opportunity arose promote them to a different department. He said the only way to quickly fire somebody was if they killed a coworker or stole something.
The only exception I witnessed was a few months after 9/11 when the FBI hauled off a Middle Eastern employee, his computer and all his cubicle paper records, never to be seen again. Rumor was that he was a member of a US based terrorist organization; and please Wendell, I’m just reporting my observations, not denigrating any ethnic group.
An unpleasant memory of those long ago days just popped into my head. There was a gal in charge of supplies and she ran a tight ship. If you wanted a pen, magic marker or pencil you had to turn in the empty pen/pencil stub to get a new one. If, perish the thought, you needed a CD/DVD you had to fill out a form describing the reason and billable project number and in a few days she’d get back to you after checking with the project manager. I finally bought a spindle’s worth with my own money to avoid the aggravation. She was also in charge of ordering business cards and somehow we got off on the wrong foot so I never got business cards during my entire stay.
Oh, and the chair situation. If your chair broke it was a mound of paperwork to request a new one and it could take months or even be denied if your chair was still “serviceable”, i.e., only missing one wheel. So everybody would dump their broken chair in an unused cubicle or in the back of a storage room and scrounge up a better chair from somewhere. I had a fresh nice captain’s chair (I’m 6’4″) and behold, I show up one morning and my chair is gone, replaced by a cripple scrounged from junk chair storage. I went ballistic and spent over an hour searching the entire building (600 employees) and found it in an upper level supervisor’s luxurious corner office as a seat at his conference table. I told him “that’s my chair!” and he said “I don’t know what you’re talking about” so I grabbed the chair and told him to “talk about this” and wheeled my chair back to my cube and dumped the junker behind a gap in the cube walls.
A few days later my supervisor called me in and told me not to mess with that guy as he’s an axxhole and could make trouble for our department, but technically I did not steal so my supervisor refused to write me up. He advised me to respond to any inquiries concerning the incident with “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He then stood up, shook my hand, winked and said we’d never speak of this matter again. I have several other chair stories including the “flying chair” and the 450 pound employee’s battle for a medical chair but I’m trying to be brief.
So if you win an interview for a government job on the second face to face meeting meekly ask for a tour of the facility, be observant and if it’s a beehive of activity that’s a +1, but if it’s as quiet as a morgue with junky equipment that’s a -10.
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If you are interested in this position, make sure you ask a lot of questions about current equipment, software, ability to purchase/upgrade, personnel, and ability to hire.
You will have no ability to purchase/upgrade, personnel and ability to hire. As a new hire Party Chief, PLS, etc., those tasks are way above your pay grade.
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@bushaxeWhen I retired the Regional Office Land Surveyor showed up at the Forest Office, collected all the RTK GPS equipment and hauled it away. Nobody used it since.
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