Deepest Corner Recovery

That just looks bad. But I have done it too. I have more problems with surveyors that simply tie the magnetic ZING, than those that actually dig. I went and bought cones, and extra safety stuff for the job, but I wonder how much is enough. Sure would hate to lose a good surveyor that actually digs for the monument!

N

From memory, my deepest digs for monuments by hand in roads were for an iron pipe 7.0' deep and for the top of a GLO stone 8.2' deep.

After you located it, did you set another monument on the surface?

I give thanks to two surveyors who helped with a deep recovery.

One was on a plat, with the note that "The iron rod is inside the corner of the wall and about three feet deep." Without that note I would never have known that the monument was there.

The other was the crew that left an inverted plastic bucket two feet deep in the hole, with a magic marker note saying "You're almost there. Another foot or so."

Now those are helpful notes for those who are trying to follow in the footsteps.

Probably somewhere between 3' and 4'. We were in a scrap yard located adjacent to a railroad right-of-way and parcel looking for a vertically planted rail... so there was nary a dip in the Schoney with all the iron around. Luckily there was a yard worker near by and he fired up his small tractor with a small bucket and dug were we had staked out. He took about 3 or 4 minutes what would have taken us several hours. If I'm not mistaken, the center of the rail was within about 0.3' of where we were staking to. Not bad around here for stuff from the 1800's ~ 1910's (I can't remember when it was supposedly placed).

Love the plastic bucket story.

Only twice have I needed to go after a DEEP corner monument. Both times it was because of a county road having fill added to lessen the steepness of the grade going up to cross a railroad track. Just like in the picture above, I was flat out on the ground reaching as far as I could with the final digging/scratching tool to get that last millimeter of dirt off the top of the bar. In one case we widened the top of the hole to be about three feet in diameter to allow the shoulders to drop into the hole somewhat so as to extend our reach. Hauling out the excess dirt is not easy. Since those two holes I have always brought in a county backhoe to help with the digging. You just have to be VERY SLOW and VERY CAREFUL with regular use of the metal detector and shallow exploratory holes.

I've heard stories from Southwest Kansas about going down 20 feet or more. The Dirty 30's was responsible. All that dust had to come from one place and end up in another. The topography was changed radically in some areas. Sort of like looking for monuments in an area with sand dunes.

Similar dust events have occurred for many thousands of years taking material from the Southwest and dropping it elsewhere. Parts of extreme Northwest Kansas have some incredibly deep soils, but they can't hold a candle to certain places in Northern Missouri and Iowa where the soil may be well over 100 feet deep. It's basically all the same dirt, whether it's on top or on the bottom.

I-35 from Braman, Ok. to the Kansas Line has all the original 5/8" rebar PI's and POT's from the 1957 construction on centerline. They're still there in the median. Overlays and healthy ground cover has put them at a depth of about 5 to 6 ft.

We looked just like the pic...except it was January and the centerline was right down the middle of the ditch. Frozen on top and muddy down the hole. It was a mess...my arm still hurts.

The BLM has photos of GLO retracement surveyors in Kansas/Nebraska/Oklahoma using horse-drawn plows to excavate during mound & pit corner searches.

I think we set a cotton spike in the asphalt above it. I was only 17 at the time and was only concerned with getting my sleep on the ride home.

This monument was set in marsh country and the county built the road over it, so it was all road fill that I had to dig through. The marsh has been drained and now it's fertile Ag. lands.

Nate, I'm sure we had 2 "Survey Party" signs and a single traffic cone.

Definitely not enough for today's standards, but I think the sight of me laying in the middle of the road would be enough to stop anybody. It sure had the neighbor's yellow Lab curious.

Here is the deepest one that I recovered a few years ago. The water was still a bit cold the first part of June.

I have heard stories from Party Chiefs for the New Orleans District Corps of Engineers about 12 to 14 foot deep excavations to recover iron pins used for Wire Wheel surveys of the Mississippi River after several years of floods. Never seen it myself, though.

If you have to recover a monument you know is there, but at the bottom of a 300 ft deep canyon count as deep.

Dug up lots in the 2 ft range, and hated every stinking one of them. If deeper I fill the hole back up, with flagging all the way to surface. Then do what else I can do on the job, go back and get on the phone to various agencies for further research. Generally works, or at least is helpful. Had a couple 6 footers in MI and the county road crew was more than willing to bring a backhoe.

Then after it's all backfilled and completed, re-set something at grade. All that is noted on the survey which gets recorded.

Sometimes the client balks at the additional expense. Check that, the client always balks at it. I always just blame the county road guys because they filled the road when they should have notified either a staff survey guy, or some local guy. Calms them down.

In my early days as an assistant, 6 ft in industrial backfill. I still remember very clearly. We dug for a long while with a digging bar and shovel, built little benches along the way so that we can dig deeper.

The PLS was a strong man not afraid of hard work. We dug together. Then he gave me the flash light, hold my feet and I dropped myself to the bottom of the hole to read the markings. He was kind enough to pull me back up.

Then I thought my ordeal was over...not quite...had to setup over that faraway pin, a bit of a challenge when you are green 🙂

I recovered the proverbial rusty iron pipe 4' under the toe of a sand dune down in SLO County. Easy digging but of course the sand keeps sloughing into the hole.

I've had more trouble on shallower monuments, mainly chiseling down through multiple overlays. Found one set in the 1950s flush to the old pavement, it had 8" worth of overlays on top of it. The brass tag was still as shiny as a new penny.

About 10 years ago one of our crews was working on a State Freeway with a large dirt median when an ambulance with lights and sirens pulls up to the site.

Apparently someone had seen one of them on the ground on his face and called 911.

The centerline monuments they were recovering (brass caps in 1' concrete footings) were about 2.5 feet sub. So, I am sure they looked just like that picture.

At least 6 feet. twice. boths times I could not see out of the hole.
deepest we had to dig was to remove a spoil heap that was placed on a corner marker that we were using as a control point.