Which side?
The 1881 Manual says at a 1/4 corner on a north-south line the mound of earth will be on the west side.
Diagram seems to indicate the same for stone mounds:
In 1956 Charles Walker found a stone mound and 2 bearing trees. He set his pipe and California Division of Forestry cap in the center of the mound. Today one BT is a barely discernible bit of burned up charcoal but it at least it can be determined where it is, the other is too disturbed earth to tell. The 20 foot diameter Sequoia nearby is in good shape but the GLO didn??t mark those.
The stone mound is really just a pile of rocks. There is a set stone (maybe) on the west side sticking up 5 tenths and another large stone east side leaning about 30?ø easterly out of plumb such that its base could coincide with the bottom of the pipe. The stones are about 1 foot from the pipe each way.
We have Walker??s voluminous field notes but I haven??t had a chance to dig through them yet.
Retracing an area with 1881-1882 originals. The notes called for pits north and south of a 1/4 on an east-west sec. line and I found two shallow pits 11' apart with a covered unset stone in-between the pits but the pits were east-west of the stone. One township south found pits lying north-south at a 1/4 along the east line of sec22. The notes said the pits should be east-west.
I'm assuming the notes for your survey didn't say where the pile is and only said a stone mound alongside? If the notes said in a mound then Walker's pipe makes sense. Also if Walker spent a lot of time in the area and found other corners with the corner stone in the mound then I would go with his experience. My experience is the stone mound would be west. But what's in the book is often not in the field.
I dunno Dave, there was a time when the GLO policy was to set Brass Caps (on pipes) alongside the extant stones, it could be that Mr. Walker did something similar. GLO Notes (generally) are pretty specific about such things, but I have seen MANY Private Surveyors simply drive a ReBar (with or without) a cap alongside of stones (groan). I have also seen modern County Surveyors pull the stone, set a Pipe Cap in the hole, and reset the stone alongside (which is okay I guess, when there is a formal Corner Record filed that details what was done).
Loyal
This is 1882. It says set stone with mound of stone alongside??
Walker was a good Surveyor, I hit his distances with very small differences in rough terrain.
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No bearing trees.
Wow. Those were ancient trees. Pre anything nearly. 60 in?ÿ Fir. 50in Sugar pine.
Wow.
Thank for sharing.?ÿ?ÿ
I got the chance to work a boundary and blaze trees in Colorado for a USFS job and realized that I was getting the experience of a lifetime.
Old school survey work is still the coolest thing ever to introduce newbies with.
Even if you can't figure out which side, you are still doing better than a proportion. Unless you are surveying very small lots,, once you have narrowed down the corner location to one side of a mound you are usually considering differences that no one but a surveyor would care about.?ÿ
@aliquot right, it??s maybe a link or 2.
in the Forest it is de minimus.
but I have seen MANY Private Surveyors simply drive a ReBar (with or without) a cap alongside of stones (groan).?ÿ
Why the groan? I've scattered a few mounds of stone in my day, and set a capped rebar on the called for edge in the couple of cases where the original was not found? I also have no problem leaving a found original in place and setting a capped rebar, marked R.M. just below the level of the most obvious marks. That's the common practice in my geographic area.?ÿ I lt helps keep the record intact. No questions when you find the actual original and some fly by night out of state hack says they found the stone and buried it alongside the cap they set 25 feet away from the actual corner.?ÿ?ÿ
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but I have seen MANY Private Surveyors simply drive a ReBar (with or without) a cap alongside of stones (groan).?ÿ
Why the groan? I've scattered a few mounds of stone in my day, and set a capped rebar on the called for edge in the couple of cases where the original was not found? I also have no problem leaving a found original in place and setting a capped rebar, marked R.M. just below the level of the most obvious marks. That's the common practice in my geographic area.?ÿ I lt helps keep the record intact. No questions when you find the actual original and some fly by night out of state hack says they found the stone and buried it alongside the cap they set 25 feet away from the actual corner.?ÿ?ÿ
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It all gets back to DOCUMENTATION. If (big IF in most cases around here), the retracement surveyor clearly states exactly what he/she DID (found, set, whatever), then there is no problem in my opinion. However, when you find TWO monuments side by side, without any documentation as to the reason why, it creates a certain ambiguity as to which is THE Corner.
In the final analysis, "footsteps" is the key (physical, written, recorded).
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@jpb?ÿ
Two short stories.
Just licensed I used a GLO monument for a well stakeout and drove three rebar as reference monuments. A couple of weeks later I get a call from a surveyor a couple hundred miles away and he tells me they used my section corner but he wondered how I established the location as it didn't fit other corners by about 20 feet. I explained I found the original brass cap and set 20' reference marks with rebar and blue plastic caps. I resolved to find a better way.
Second story: there was an original stone corner in a subdivision at Battlement Mesa, the Exxon oil shale project. Another company had driven a rebar next to the stone mound about 2 feet from the actual stone. Exxon and the BLM got into it over island ownership and the BLM performed a resurvey. The lot having been developed by then and the stone graded out the BLM accepted as best evidence a bent over rebar. There are over a hundred nearby pins in platted subdivisions that could have been used to reestablish the correct location but the bent reference marker made it too easy to screw up.?ÿ
I prefer to use t-posts or trees for reference marks.
BUT WAIT! There's more!
I found a 1956 Memo in the files that explains what Walker actually did.?ÿ It changes some of my previous understanding of what he did.
At the west 1/4S of S25 he found a stone mound and a faced and scribed BT dating to 1883 but not mentioned in the official field notes.?ÿ Not knowing which side of the stone mound (could not identify the set stone), he determined the SW corner and the NW corner of S25 and connected them with a line.?ÿ He set his monument on line at the latitude of the found stone mound.?ÿ The set pipe is 3.5' west of the stone mound he found.
Another note indicates 4 men searched a 500 foot area looking for the W.C. 30.08 chains to the north (a 40" sugar pine with multiple blazes and notches).?ÿ They did not find it.?ÿ Darrell Fullerton did find it in 2001 and set an RM south of it.?ÿ It fits record distance north of the W1/4S similarly to other distances in the area.
Walker also did not find the N1/4S of S25 so now we have to go look again.
My theory is the W.C. tree was living in 1956 and the blazes were so healed they didn't recognize it for what it is.?ÿ Fullerton found it a dead snag with one readable scribed blaze and the other 3 blazes healed over and rotted out underneath, so it was more recognizable.?ÿ If last year's fire burned hot through there I expect to find the RM and a hole in the ground.