Why I get the big bucks

It's so dense you can't sprinkle in some check-in points with the GPS anywhere??ÿ

@bstrand

Short answer is no. Solid old growth forest of birch and spruce. Now if client was willing to wait until the leaves drop that would be another matter. They suggested I have it completed by Friday. I got a good laugh out of that.

I love classic instruments surveying in dense woods surveying.?ÿ

I was up in the Northwest Montana rain forest one year (pre gps) and we were told it was a Grizzly study area.?ÿ Couldn't see more than five or six feet ahead in dense vegetation.?ÿ We were down in a dry drain and heard something big but couldn't figure out what it was, Crew was scared sh*tless figuring it was a Grizz.?ÿ Well one of the braver ones of the crew slipped onto a clearing and saw (or should I say seen) it was a cow elk and a yearling.?ÿ Whew!?ÿ Ready to cash in my chips.

One guy walked into a bear but it was only a blackie and we did catch a glimpse of a mountain lion.?ÿ That was enough fun for a week or two.?ÿ

?ÿ

I am jealous of you guys out there and gotta ask; Do you carry a fishing pole with you??ÿ

You're always going through areas with incredible mountain streams and I would not be able to resist the urge to stop work and fish.

Just reading "devil's club" sent a shiver down my spine..?ÿ?ÿ I agree, I'd hate to be lugging an S6 through that terrain.?ÿ?ÿ?ÿ Do you run it as a "diamond Traverse" like the BLM does??ÿ?ÿ

I just have to ask...In this rural setting is there really a need to "run" the line? I assume you are picking up topo information as you are moving along and that is why.

A project like this is exactly why I keep a lock down gun in the tool box, and I assume there are some firearms with you as well. Stay safe and good luck. It could be far worse....You could be stuck in the Midwest.

Thanks, for illustrating that some of us still have to cut long lines. Some here don't believe it is still done.?ÿ

Posted by: @aliquot

Thanks, for illustrating that some of us still have to cut long lines. Some here don't believe it is still done.?ÿ

Thanks for pointing that out.?ÿ Our utility line clearing crews nowadays have some fantastic equipment that can chip and grind their way through all sorts of growth.?ÿ But even with all this equipment and technology someone still has to hack and mark a walkable path for the operators to follow.?ÿ?ÿ Guess who that "someone" is? 😉

Maybe someday GNSS equipment control will get inexpensive enough for the clearing crews to be so equipped.?ÿ I'll be well retired by then I'm sure.?ÿ

@andy-j

It's not practical to run that type of traverse as with two guys we don't have the time or resources to clear a wide site line. We clear just enough to be able to find a window through the brush and typically need to run the back sight glass up a 1 meter extension  rod to get it over the thickest of the brush. It's an hour and a half drive one way, followed by an hour hike loaded down like mules along ankle twisting knee wrenching slippery slopes, just to get to where we are now. Only leaves so many hours to work before packing it up and repeating in reverse. The upside is its getting me in shape for hunting season, but at the end of a 12 hour day it does cross my mind I may be getting too old for this crap.

@paden-cash

Maybe you'll still be around. About 20 years ago I worked on a seismic job near Victoria TX. My crews were running conventional survey in the woods where the client's RTK crews couldn't work. The client hired a clearing outfit running machines equipped with some sort of early machine control system to clear the grid lines for us. That was the first time I heard of such a thing, and it was nice not to have to cut our way thru that gnarly mess.

@williwaw

good points!   when I was there with the blm, we were basically living on the job, either in a building or tent.  and not on a "budget" really. 

@bstrand

If it is thick devil's club, like he says, you aint walking anywhere you don't cut a line anyway...

@stlsurveyor

I can't tell you how many rural jobs I've cleaned up from surveyors that didn't look along the boundaries of big tracts.

We have about 100 years between GLO and recording, the midwest much longer. I routinely find 1/16th corner stones set by county surveyors that have been occupied to for most of those 100 years but missed by a half dozen surveyors. 'Missed' is being generous as the truth is they never even looked. The same is true for center quarters. All but railroad and school sections were patented in a way that requires them, but most folks blow on through with some mathemagical crap without even looking. I've also done a dozen or so boundary adjustments to fix the socalled 'surveyed' line that the first five guys never walked.

Locating four corners isn't surveying.

@rick-taylor

Not to terribly long ago, we had to do some line clearing, the trees were Russian Olive, not real tall, but pretty dense, and lots of thorns.  The landowner decided to hire a small bulldozer to just push us a line.  Siince the trees weren't tall enough to hit the top pf the bulldozer, we just figured we'd set the GPS dome on top of the dozer, give the operator the data collector, and tell him to follow the line on the screen.  Easy Peasy, right?  Yeah, the dozer guy couldn't understand that when he went into reverse, the screen changed to a reverse kinda view, thinking the dome was moving forward in the other direction, not backwards from where it was....  The dozer guy made several attempts to follow the gps screen, but all he really did was turn a bunch of dirt into loose dust when the wind blew and knock down a circle of trees at the starting point.  It was finally decided He could teach me to drive the "new" style dozer (it had joysticks, I had never seen one without several levers) faster than he could understand the GPS screen.  Personally, I know I was happy to not be crawling through all those thorns!

I ran cross country transmission lines across NE Texas and Arkansas with a Deitzen transit and always came out at the right place by double centering and using a chain rule to get the next point on the line.

What was really fun was bucking in at the intersection with other feed and cross country lines to be able to turn the intersecting angle for the engineers to design the inline pole to keep the wires at the safe distance of separation.

Could you run the line all the way down, and find any sort of clearing at all to get an RTK fix in? If so, then I would run the traverse, make the check, and rotate the whole route traverse to settle on the found bearing. Then on the way out, stake the lines.

That being said, the location might mean that no one will ever argue with where you put the stakes.

The real question here is why in the world is someone putting fiber optic out to the wilderness, and what government agency is footing the bill for that?

@dmyhill

No government agency. It's a backup fiber to a satellite antenna farm for a major sat TV provider. If the fiber feeding the site gets cut it would shutdown a major comm hub so they want a backup. This is the only viable alternate route. They're throwing money at it and I'm more than happy to help them spend it. I've found a couple spots I can sneak in a GPS shot but for the most part I've given up on traversing this and using stobs to line up on and carry line forward until I can reach one of the GPS positions and then go back and tune up the line.   If I'm off a foot nobody is going to care when your clearing 40' straight up and down these steep slopes. It's actually going remarkably well. Carrying a traverse through here wouldn't be as much an issue ... with a 20' wide cleared corridor.