Okay, so here's the story:
Last week I got a call from an old friend and sometimes client (RLS since the early 80s).
He's out in the West Desert about 35 miles from the nearest pavement, which is itself in the middle of nowhere (not the end of the Earth, but you can see it from there). He is retracing a 1967 BLM Resurvey of a couple of Sections, and when he gets to the West å? of one of them, he finds the BLM Brass Cap & Pipe laying loose on the ground on a gently sloping sagebrush flat. No mound of stone, no indication of where it came from, no reason for it to be "on the ground," and unfortunately, no Field Notes or Plat (he grabbed the wrong file @ 4am when he left the office that morning). The BLM pipe/cap showed no signs of being ÛÏhitÛ and appeared to have been ÛÏon the groundÛ for several decades. Hmmmmm.
He and I have been working this project for the last couple of years, so he knew that I had the Plats, Field Notes, and such (and that I would be sitting in front of my computer in my jammies). He had to drive a mile or so to get Cell coverage, but that was better than the 200+ miles back to his office.
Anyway... he called me and gave me the LDP Coordinates of the NW and SW Corners of the Section in question that he had collected earlier in the day, and asked me to compute a better search coordinate than just SOUTH (or NORTH) 2640 (or midpoint) from the extant NW and/or SW Corners.
So I pulled the Field Notes and found that the 1967 Resurvey had recovered all three of the 1876 Original Stones, and had buried them alongside the new Brass Cap Monuments. There was a deflection @ the å? Corner (7 arc-minutes), and it wasn't exactly half-way (0.2 chs. difference in the Half-Miles) no surprise there. I calculated a ÛÏsimilar triangleÛ solution, and called him back with the new coordinates, and read him the 1967 Field Notes concerning the remonumentation, suggesting that the original Stone might still be in the ground (this took maybe 15 minutes between calls).
He called me later that night when he got back in Cellphone range again, and told me that he had dug a hole at the NEW coordinate position, and found the top of the Original Stone about 18 inches below the surface, upside down, well marked, and about 0.5 feet east of the new coordinate! Whoopee!!!
Cellphones, Internet (where I got the BLM data to begin with), RTK, Computers....Technology has really changed things since he and I worked together in the early 70s with a T-16 and a 200 ft. tape. Of course the shovel (and persistence) is STILL the weapon(s) that make the day.
Kudos to the 1967 BLM Surveyor's measurements, which were obviously spot on!
Loyal
Love it! There's more than one way to skin a cat as the big boys used to say back when I was half as tall as they were.