Are you a zig zag surveyor?

Yep.?ÿ Always was.?ÿ If you get too far off line you can, and probably will eventually, miss some evidence.?ÿ Just locating corner monuments is only part of the job.

Andy

One of the benefits of the zig zag method is you can usually be more precise at determining where the midpoint of a certain line falls and other specific distances, then go there and begin the true search for evidence.?ÿ It is frequently a radius in feet or tens of feet from that "ideal" point, but,?ÿ you will have a better "guess" to start from.

I started as a zig-zag, did not know better.
a couple decades later I started doing recon with a compass, walking the entire lines... wow! I had been missing so much.

now, I am mostly retired and I don't even own any modern equipment.
When I need it, I sub out all of the precise measuring... but I DO walk the lines with my compass First.

Zig-Zag Surveyor, that's a new one for me

It became rather impossible to "run on line" in forest land without it all being guesswork because there are too many trees on the boundary.

That is probably why there are so many straight boundaries on paper that are not straight lines on the ground after we can find evidence of the original boundary markings from the original surveyors.

To run along the boundary line or on a close offset to that boundary to avoid trees and other objects can be tiresome and get confusing to the crew and require constant reminders that we are marking line over there and measuring over here.

I started work for a surveyor that used transits with a compass and would run along the boundary and turn slight deflection angles or pull out the crosscut saw and take trees down as we run line. Most days we spent sawing valuable trees that usually rotted away in place and were followed by complaints from clients that not only had to pay for the surveying and on top of that had many truckloads of timber lying scattered around their property they could not get to apart from snaking them out with a team of mules.

I can remember the 1st day when I presented my random traverse notes to the tech in the office and the next morning being met at the door by him and the surveyor wanting to know WTF was this and how is this supposed to be figured out, so I showed them how.

We did not have a fancy electronic computer, so it was done on DMD sheets and even though it took more paper to "get r done", it took less time on the ground to do it and that amounted to more production.

That meant we could afford one of those Olevietti jumping machines.

BTW, I never liked turning deflection angles, I always turn angles to the right and write down the corresponding deflection angle the boss liked working with. After getting the Olevietti, he let me write down the angle to the right that I was reading because that machine was carded to work with angles to the right.

We zig zag less than our predecessors from the 1960s. They had to have a line that could be chained and a setup that the I-man could be able to turn angles. Now that the instrument can automatically turn angles we have setups where I can't physically look through the telescope.

Part of my daily grind is to find both ends with GPS, and then make my way between those ends to see what might be in between.?ÿ I have found some interesting things that way.?ÿ Made some creek ties, fence ties, canyon ties, found the actual corners, that sort of thing.

Monte,

That is SOP for us.

N

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I agree with Monte, GPS has made it easier to run lines. It is basic surveying to look for evidence along a line, old fences, tie downs in draws, line points, ect.?ÿ

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And here I was thinking this thread was making reference to a "roll your own" cigarette, LDP or, errrr, whatever.?ÿ

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@a-harris

I find those Olivetti P101 tapes in old files from time to time. I don't miss it, but it was a time saver. 

@a-harris

That was one of the advantages of the BLM Red Book and using the traverse tables. Everything was figured for you.