@mike-marks It wasn't me, but one of our crew chiefs found a gold Krugerand in the gutter on one of our surveys. He had it made into a NICE ring for his wife. Smart man (grin).
Andy
While searching for a buried property marker pipe the survey crew got a very strong signal on the metal detector.?ÿ They dug down and when the shovel hit metal they were excited.?ÿ After hand digging, the metal object was not a pipe, but a hood ornament for some kind of car.?ÿ Further digging exposed the hood it was attached to.?ÿ Without wasting anymore time or effort they assumed the whole car was buried and it would be futile to continue.
Months later I was digging for a metal pipe of record and got a strong signal too.?ÿ We dug down and found a muffler.?ÿ My helper said, "We found a car but it's upside-down!"
Same idea.?ÿ Found a hub cap from the days when that's what they really were.?ÿ Stopped digging but joked that the rest of the car was there but laying on its side.
My crew spotted an arm sticking out of the ice in Newark back in the early 90's, it was a body that had been dumped into the river.
Over the years I have found three different crashed planes, one on the VA/WV border near Mt Weather, one in PA, and one in Puerto Rico.?ÿ
@dave-karoly- that doesn’t sound very Roubillardesque....
When I went there we were going to survey the state border (which goes right through the complex), back in the late 80's. There was a guy from NGS, a guy from each state, and me. None of us knew at the time about Mt Weather. We were questioned when we got close to the main gate, but having a federal employee with us helped. We wandered all over the mountain looking for places we could get GPS to locate boundary monuments.
I had a photo control point at one of the closed off gates last year, outside the gate, no one bothered me.
Haven't found anything odd while surveying but while exploring a tucked away wooded area I stumbled across about 6 adult cows that got hit by a train and knocked into a river.?ÿ They must have been there a couple days because they had filled up like balloons and were bobbing in the water.
Once on a cold day, hacking a one-mile line through the woods, I saw a huge hornet's nest up in a tree.?ÿ It was at least 30 inches tall.?ÿ It was cold, and they were not buzzing.?ÿ Surveyed all day, and was walking back down the line to the truck shortly before sunset, and it was about 30 degrees.?ÿ In the middle of nowhere.?ÿ As I got closer to the place where the hornet's nest was, I heard some unusual sounds in a tree.?ÿ I walked up a little closer, and it was a man climbing in the same tree right next to the hornet's nest with intent of taking it down while they couldn't fly.?ÿ Seemed like strange coincidence.?ÿ No other people within at least a half mile.
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I hope he didn't take it down and put it in his living room, but I'm sure he didn't.
Haven't found anything odd while surveying but while exploring a tucked away wooded area I stumbled across about 6 adult cows that got hit by a train and knocked into a river.?ÿ They must have been there a couple days because they had filled up like balloons and were bobbing in the water.
We call them "Maypops" around here...for obvious reasons.?ÿ 😉
Twenty or more years ago I had a cow get out on the railroad track and get hit by the train. She popped right then. The back half was in one ditch and the front half stayed on the track but several hundred feet from where she was hit. That portion kept moving southward as all trains run to the south until there wasn't enough left to be sucked up by the draft and hit. Gross! The only good thing is the railroad paid me for the approximate value of the cow.
Oh, I forgot about plane crashes.?ÿ When surveying into willows after a long stretch of sandbank on?ÿ the Resurrection River (helicopter insertion) found a fresh bent up propellor cast aside. Asked around when back in Seward and it turned out a taildragger bush STOL plane had landed there and endoed a bit, ruining the prop.?ÿ They 'coptered in a new prop and mechanic and it flew out a week later.?ÿ Seen lots of old crash sites in the mountains,?ÿ helicopters that lost power below autorotation altitude or light planes that CFIT or were box canyoned so crashed.?ÿ That's how Steve Fossett died, CFIT in a Bellanca in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
I was there, summiting White Mountain 14,000+' on the other side of the basin the Day Fossett died.?ÿ Weather was clear but a lot of turbulent winds which buffeted our party and I clearly remember I was glad I wasn't in a light plane at such altitudes. GA light planes figures from the National Transportation Safety Board indicate that a staggering 97 percent of?ÿaviation fatalities?ÿoccur in general aviation.?ÿ I wuz a fan of helicopter & STOL surveying access 'till I lost a few friends; I quit participating decades ago.?ÿ Risk-reward, it's just not there.?ÿ
Come up on an active still (with smoke coming out) in the North Alabama mountains in 1965, when I was the Forest Engineer for Georgia Kraft Company (paper company) land. The paper company had a policy of moving away quickly, and keeping quite about the still. The paper company believed they would be less likely to suffer wild fires by not turning the moon shiners in.
My youngest son walked up on a body (murdered) in North Florida in 1981. Then, in 1990's an F18A Navy jet slammed into the Santa Fe River when he was only a few hundred feet away. It wasn't long before a Navy helicopter hovered above while Navy Frogmen were hoisted down from the sky.
@i-ben-havin I wasn't surveying but I had to "push" some FAA investigators into a plane crash in the cypress swamps in southwest Georgia. The pilot had been spraying for mosquitoes when he went down. The water was anywhere from knee to waist deep but here was so much moss and weeds that a motor was out and paddling was too much effort. I just got behind and pushed the john boat out for them to pull the engine and whatever parts they needed. Luckily they had already removed the pilot, he had been lying in water surrounded by diesel fuel and DDT all day in the south Georgia August heat. It was not a pretty sight. I got paid $50 for that trip, a fortune for a high school boy in the '60s. I did have to remove a few leeches though.
Andy
