Latest Black Hills Monuments - 1890's.

DW4864 looks nice and shiny around the rim of the cap. It must be a good place to rub one's muzzle, if one is a cow.

I thought the same. Would be fun getting a picture of a cow rubbing the side of its face on it.

Jenny & Jerry-

Great to see you enjoying fresh air !

Thank you for your pics.

The pic of Bench Mark"DW 5743" accessway looks like a scary drive .

Cheers

Derek

Jerry, always enjoy the pics of the monuments you find. Was wondering how you go about picking which monuments to look for? Do you take a quad sheet and look for everything on it?

Experience has taught us well. When Kurt Luebke and I first started doing this we quickly discovered how different things can seem as far as descriptions go 110 years later. There are some monuments that we will go back to sometime later and get a better position after later figuring out where we went wrong.

Now I determine ahead of time a few that I want to go find. I take the digital image of the 1898 USGS quad and cut out the image along the section lines. Likewise I use the same area of an aerial image with a very light transparent image of the current USGS quad overlaying it. Then I overlay all three together. Using PowerPoint works well where you can stretch to the same size and then do a fade-in of one image onto the other. Once I see where the "X" on the old quad is located on the new quad/aerial then I go back into the computer and pick that point for a lat/long position on the aerial. That hopefully gets you close. Then using that position you hope to be within a reasonable search area with the handheld GPS. Then read the old description and start piecing things together.

The thing I like about the Black Hills is that it has changed, but then again it hasn't changed. The main "roads" of 1898 are often no longer there or in different locations as old logging trails. The bench marks in these remote areas are almost always there. People seem to have respected the monuments. The bronze tablets and copper bolts are often hidden so well that you can be right next to them and not see them.

> Now I determine ahead of time a few that I want to go find. I take the digital image of the 1898 USGS quad and cut out the image along the section lines. Likewise I use the same area of an aerial image with a very light transparent image of the current USGS quad overlaying it. Then I overlay all three together.

Have you tried The National Map Viewer?

Radar