This is more about Mt. Zion Demonstration State Forest, nominally 164 acres near Pine Grove, CA. I posted about it earlier. Section 9, T6N, R12E, MDM.
None of this is intended to impugn or bash anyone involved in this, now or in the past. I'm sorry my initial post on this involved a smart aleck title. The County Surveyor (in Gold Country Counties) was generally the authority private property owners consulted regarding their boundary needs whether new or old in to the early 1960s. The County Surveyor did private retracements, mineral surveys and other work for private parties. In 1970 the BLM came into the picture surveying roughly 60 or so acres left in the public domain. This was not a simple problem because it involved the Section itself and multiple mineral surveys.
I have a pile of PDFs but have no way to post them.
I picked up a bunch of plats and field notes from BLM today.
The short story is the County Surveyor (C.E. Bronson) resurveyed Section 9 in 1949 and broke it down. The driving force behind this seems to have been mining (no surprise there). I have a copy of his unrecorded Plat (typical of local survey work everything is on the Plat, there are no Field Notes in GLO and BLM style of things).
In 1954 C.E. Bronson did M.S. 6543 (I have the Plat and Notes) as a US Mineral Surveyor. (Funny aside, he calls a couple of monuments "tubular iron post" and some "iron pipe".) This is a parallelogram that touches (or not depending on the Surveyor's opinion) the southwest boundary corner of the State Forest which is the CE 1/16 corner. The notes and the M.S. Plat indicate Corner 3 (the southeast corner of the MS) is identical to the CE 1/16 Corner and is a pipe in a mound of stone. North nominally 20 chains is a pipe for the NE 1/16 corner and another 20 chains (nominal) to the Section line between 4 and 9 (the east 1/16 corner) which is marked by a pipe and CDF cap. These three monuments are shown and accepted on the State's 1959 Record of Survey map.
In 1970 Dennis Bland of the BLM recovered all 8 original corners around Section 9 all of which were various types of monuments of local control. He set the center quarter by intersection and the CE 1/16 corner (among other things) by mid-point protraction. His plat shows his CE 1/16 0.34 chains east of the mineral corner which is about what it paces out there in the field. He accepts the pipe and CDF cap at the East 1/16 between 4 and 9. He did not visit the NE 1/16 which has C.E. Bronson's pipe with a 1" pipe with CDF cap inside.
We will be out there for the next three days traversing so we'll get a better idea how things fit historic measurements.
Then I'll discuss it with my management and we'll probably arrange a meeting with BLM California and see what course of action they suggest.
Another interesting thing about this is there is a Mineral Claim out there oriented NW and SE. The most easterly corner crosses over onto the State Forest side of the 1/16 line. The State deeded this little triangle to the claim owner in the 1950s. It has stakes (iron pipes in stone mound) so that will be interesting to retrace too. The mineral claim is shown on the C.S.'s 1949 unrecorded Plat and I think he wrote the Deed description we used. Naturally it is not shown on any of the BLM Plats because it never became a Mineral Survey.
This little boundary posting job is getting interesting.
That's for dang sure. Have you gotten to the part of the BLM notes about the CE 1/16 to know whether Bland knew about and rejected Bronson's opinion of that corner. That's the rest of the story that I'm waiting for. It sounds like Bland proportioned it in, but did he think that trumped the Bronson opinion? IMWTK. Maybe you answered that already and I missed it. If so, tell me again.
I know for a fact that Bronson changed his mind about stuff based on where he was working within a section, so that might have something to do with it.
Yes he knew it was there.
Bronson called it the MS Corner and the CE 1/16th corner.
Bland said it is the MS Corner but not acceptable for the CE 1/16th corner. He set his own but both monuments are in the field notes.
One question...
If a U.S. Mineral Surveyor does a Mineral Survey and identifies interior 1/16th corners on the Plat and in the Field Notes which is signed by the Cadastral Engineer, do those positions carry any weight?
I'm asking because I'm not sure.
One question...
Dave,
You may be on to what drove the 1970 decision. It may be appropriate to look at the Special Instruction for the MS, with an eye on the question of "was the Mineral Surveyor authorized to do a Section breakdown, or just the Mineral Survey?" If the Mineral Survey was not required to be configured by the CE-1/16, perhaps the 1970 Survey treated the MS corner only as controlling the MS. It seems a little odd, but there had to be some rational for not accepting the pipe as a faithful establishment of a CE-1/16, particularly if they had the unrecorded survey record. From what I saw of the CS's plat you posted on Friday, it appeared that he used proper procedures. It could be that in 1970, there was less tolerance by the BLM State Office to accept un-recorded surveys, but I am speculating on that for sure. The BLM would have been operating out of guidance for the resurvey from the 1947 Manual for the 1970 Dependent resurvey. It is a bit Before my Time, and out of my region. You may want to have some discussion with Lance at the CA State Office about what policy's may have been in place for CA during that time.
The only glitch I saw on the CS plat is the NE-1/16 was shown to be set on the N-S centerline of the NE-1/4 at mid-point, not at an intersection of the N-S and E-W centerlines of the NE-1/4. However, I did not do the math, it may be that the proper intersection does create a mid-point due to the bearings of the North section line and the center of section centerline.
Good luck, keep digging, it is an interesting case study.
One question...
I think the fact that the MS surveyor accepted it will have some weight, certainly not as much as if it were an approved mineral survey. I'd wait for word from the BLM.
One question...
The Mineral Survey is approved but it never went to patent.
One question...
I think they would if they have some basis in reality. On the MS retracement I was blabbing about in Siskiyou County a few months ago, though, I think the Mineral Surveyor had tied into 1/4 corners and thought they were the section corners so his idea of the interior corners would have been about half a mile off.
