The Oregon Surveyor Sept/Oct 2018

12 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 41, No. 5 A Survey Remembered A ccording to my notes, I was in- volved in quite a few interesting projects in 1971. Almost all of them were in the Bull Run Watershed, which made for pretty good working conditions as we were usually within close proximity of the Water Bureau building that was right next to the dam that formed Reservoir Number Two. Having a real bathroom and a fire going in the woodstove made things a lot easi- er working in the “woods.” An additional bonus was having no tourists to get in the way, as the Bull Run was closed to the public. First project of the year was slope stak- ing the road that ran along Reservoir Number Two for widening and straight- ening. We had a pretty knowledgeable crew as I am remembering it, so tasks rotated. Sometimes I was at the end of the tape holding the rod, trying to find the catch points. I also got to use the EZ arc, again, to calculate the horizontal dis- tance and the vertical rise or fall. It was a little tricky to get the hang of this, as we had slope ratios that, depending on the terrain and if we were on a tangent or in a curve, varied from 3/4:1 to 2:1. Every- one would figure the horizontal catch distance in their heads and yell it out, if everyone didn’t come up with the same distance, the note keeper would call out the horizontal distance and the cut or fill again, and we would try it again. A couple of guys on the crew never missed, as I am remembering this, I struggled at times to do the math. You also must remember we were trying to do this as fast as pos- sible because we needed to get so many hundreds of feet done in a day. We are talking 30 to 40 feet (or more) of cut or fill and at times we would have two 100- foot tapes tied together so we could reach the distance. I got to know the bulldozer operator and he had what I thought was an interest- ing story. His stake hop would set stakes on the slope so they knew how far down they had come from the slopestake. The cat skinner told me that using his P gun/ hand level he knew his vertical difference from his eye sitting on a D-8, down to the ground, I was impressed at how close he got to grade using this massive machine. One morning after a tremendous rain- storm we drove to the project and saw that the reservoir was completely full of logs. Overnight the North Fork of the Bull Run River had a landslide on it, creating a temporary damwhich blewout and totally scoured the river down to the reservoir. I don’t remember how far it was upstream from the reservoir but I’m thinking it was more than a mile of streambed. At the mouth of the river, the scour marks were a good 30 to 40 feet above the water. The Forest Service didn’t waste any time finding the slide, and a very steep road was pioneered in to clear the debris and start hauling logs out. The road was so steep that loaded log trucks could not pull the grade—they had to be towed out with a bulldozer. Once things got cleaned up, we were as- signed the task of settingmonitoring points on the slide to see if it was still moving. We set up a baseline on what we hoped was solid ground. This was just before EDM’s came on the scene, so we cranked angles to the points and someone did some trian- gulation calculations to see if things were moving. On subsequent trips it was dis- covered that we could no longer see one of our points as a tree had shifted and a branch was blocking our view. It was de- cided that the best course of action was to bring in a high caliber hunting rifle to shoot the branch off the tree. I can’t re- member who came up with this idea, but it was a big deal because no hunting was allowed in the Bull Run, and I’d bet good money there were rules about not car- rying firearms in government vehicles. Anyway, it worked, and we continued cranking our angles. Shortly after that, another project start- ed up on the Walker Prairie Road, just north of the reservoir road we had been working on. The Forest Service had ac- quired a Wild T-1 Theodolite and a DI-10 A Survey Remembered Part III By Paul Landau, PLS Ret.