In my third and fourth years of apprenticeship in California, our final exam was a hike to the Washington Monument, sitting atop Mt. San Bernardino. The thread below, "Top of The World", got me thinking about it and thought I would share.
http://johnhickok.com/Arts/MtSB/SanBerd.html
Third picture on the link above: been there, done that. Twice. 🙂
Edit: Ok, it wasn't really our final exam, but we accelerated the pace in the couple of weeks prior to that in order to take that last day of class as our hike day.
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For the non-Californians, can you give us a capsule summary of why there are 3 initial points on that ridge?
Bill,
Here is a link Mt. San Bernardino Inital Points to a paper by a California surveyor who explains the process that took place for this initial point. If you go to the origin of the link for the paper you will find additional information and photos for the initial point.
Kurt
Thanks Kurt. That was a most interesting read.
The link I think Kurt was suggesting is a page listing all the principal meridians and baselines at http://pmproject.org/
and the San Bernardino link from there is http://pmproject.org/SBpm.htm giving more photos.
So as I think I understand the answer to my question, Washington established a very visible monument on the mountain but thought it impractical to chain from there. He went several miles away and wiggled in to a point from which the monument had an azimuth of 45 degrees as measured with a solar compass, then surveyed to a point where the monument was due east. From this data he computed where the section corners should be.
Two surveyors went north and south from his points and laid out a lot of townships. When they closed back to the mountain, they fell hundreds of feet from the initial monument, and those new points were established as the legal initial points for the land north and south of the baseline.
Hope I got that right.
Another good source is Al White's book "Initial Points of the Rectangular Survey System" published by the Colorado Professional Land Surveyors Educational Foundation, Inc.
I understand that Al visited all of the Initial Points and has some excellent commentary on the SB Initial Point. He references a previous expedition of students, which perhaps is the one that Wendell was on.
Jerry
> .... our final exam was a hike to the Washington Monument..
If that really was the final exam (I know you said it was not) I would have gotten a big fat F