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PLSO Issue 2, 2016 March/April

Why Become a Surveyor? „ Greg Crites, PLS The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 39, No. 2 2 FROM THE EDITOR We oen look for ways to encourage students to choose land surveying as a career path. I’ve heard many ideas, but the fundamental answer always seems to involve looking into our past for the specic instances that triggered our own interest. I’ve heard folks say repeatedly that this profession wasn’t part of any conscious decision to become a Land Surveyor; instead, the choice presented itself through circuitous means. Oen the decision resulted from running across a practicing professional while working in some allied industry. In my own case (as with many others among us), it happened while working in the timber industry. I started working in the woods when I was about eleven years old. My next-door neighbor owned about 2,500 acres of second-growth timberland in Columbia County. He was well into retirement when I came along so his “logging” activities didn’t seem to be much more than a hobby. I quickly realized how true this was aer I graduated from college with a degree in Forest Engineering and learned rst-hand how much dierent this early immersion in the timber industry was from the “industrial” operations which were the central gure of my chosen career. Nevertheless, the exposure to Forestry in my youth set the course for my career path, at least until I entered it and realized I’d made a mistake. I lasted in the industry for a little more than twelve years, all the time looking for avenues to opt out of it gracefully. During this time, I was asked to take over the contract administration of the land surveyors this rm used to mark and/or maintain the property boundaries. is was primarily due to my coursework in land surveying while in college. us began my exposure to the profession. For nearly 70 percent of my forest engineering career, I hovered around the fringes of the surveying profession, asking questions, reviewing boundary surveys, visiting the eld to check on contract compliance, witness evidence uncovered by our contractors when they claimed to have recovered original bearing trees or even original monuments and even doing some of my own research. Both of my supervisors at the time were licensed land surveyors. I was able to work under their “responsible charge” on several surveys, visit the eld with them to evaluate evidence and go over in detail the contents of records of surveys I prepared under their direction for the underlying justications behind showing some details and overlooking others. is experience helped me to understand the value of mentorship and I owe it to them and a few others for the strong foundation they laid beneath my own licensure. In the end, my industrial forestry employer made it easy for me to change careers. It wasn’t dicult to see that contract loggers (we called them gyppo’s) were the future of the industry, so along the way I gured I might as well formalize the experience I’d acquired overseeing contractors and attempt to obtain my license as a professional land surveyor, at least in Oregon. at occurred back in 1980. Prophetically, my industrial forestry employer closed down their “company” operations in 1985, reducing their sta to a handful of folks who would oversee those self-same contract loggers. I was given 15-months’ severance and told to seek employment elsewhere. us began my “full employment” in the profession of land surveying. Along the path, I was also blessed with several opportunities to teach land surveying classes at the community college and private college level, incredibly enriching experiences at the very least. To say that my route to this point in my career was circuitous is probably an understatement. ere was an abundant amount of serendipity, a bit of luck and decisions that were made that proved to be well reasoned, though I may not have realized it at the time. My point in telling this tale is to get you, the reader, to look within your own career path and candidly assess how you got to where you are today, why you so much enjoy what you do and how you might use that wealth of experience to attract others into our midst. In this issue, there are several examples of why I enjoy the profession of land surveying so much. Pat Gaylord’s article on e Lost Surveyor is just one. How many times in your own career have you been out searching for a “lost or obliterated” corner only to stop and think that you may just be the only person that has been to this exact spot in over 100 years? How many times has that thought culminated in the discovery of original evidence, one of those “aha” moments that you never forget? Pat had the enviable experience of accompanying the Oregon Public Broadcasting lm crew on the adventure into the slot canyon now referred to as “Valhalla,” a slot canyon that, at least in northern European history of the settlement of the United States, represents a singular “discovery” that gures to be as signicant as the discoveries of many of the » continues on page 3 »


PLSO Issue 2, 2016 March/April
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