PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Mar/Apr 2019

Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org 5 From the PLSO Chairman squaremiles and the only landlocked cap- ital city in the Unites States. Juneau was also the largest active gold mining area in the world in the early 1900’s after the Klondike gold fields dried up. Themassive Alaska/Juneau Mining Co. and the Tread- well Mine complex across the channel on Douglas Island ran 960 stamps until 1917 when a massive cave-in under the fiord flooded the workings. We had a project requiring a survey of the Snoqualmie Lode of the Wadleigh Claim, Mineral Survey No. 369, signed by the U.S. Surveyor General’s Office on Decem- ber 16, 1899, located on Douglas Island a mile from U.S Land Monument No. 4, be- ing a lead plug drilled in a large exposed grey rock calledMayflower Island guarding Douglas Harbor. Ask me how long it takes to find a quarter inch diameter lead plug on a slippery smooth rock, the same color as lead, which spends over 12 hours a day underwater in the tidal zone that ranges up to 25 vertical feet of rise and fall every six hours. Even with U.S.C. &G.S. referenc- es from the U.S. Bureau of Mines building 450 feet away, the answer is never, unless you are extremely lucky, which we were after a few hours crawling on hands and knees. This exercise would prove only to be a warm-up for later. The reason why finding this lead plug was so critical to our survey is that the only tie to all eight lodes of M.S. 369 was from U.S.L.M. #4, a mile away over rugged, mountainous, rain for- est terrain with no line of sight. A call into Tempsco helicopters brought our ex-Vietnam veteran pilot, Doc, with his venerable Hughes 400-D, the Porsche of rotary bladed transportation, to deliver us to an open muskeg bog about a quar- ter mile from the project site. Fortunately, the GPS era had recently arrived and we utilized three Ashtech Dimension single- frequency receivers for multiple static ses- sions between the lead plug in the Harbor and survey control around the peat bog. Then a trip back to the office to manually process the GPS data files (yes, you heard that right) then fly back out the next day to begin our field traverse through thewoods in the snow to our calculated position for Corner No. One of the Snoqualmie Lode. With the calculated position fromU.S.L.M. #4 based on the 1899 M.S. Plat and its in- herent built-in error because of the remote location, our realistic search locus was probably 50 feet if we were feeling lucky. Of course, as luck would have it, the cal- culated position for Corner 1 was right off the edge of the Ready Bullion Creek bank, covered with what we call in southeast Alaska as “impenetrable” brush, made up of salmonberries, huckleberries, Devils Club, and every other vegetative species containing some form of evil spirit, along with thickets of Sitka alder. So, with razor sharp Sandviks in hand, we begin whack- ing our way into the tangled thickets with absolutely no evidence of hundred-year- oldman-made anything. No sign of blazes on any of the few Sitka Spruce or Alaska Yellow Cedars, and the two other crew members were shrugging their shoulders as if they were saying “what the hell are we even doing here” hopelessly crawling on our hands and knees for hours in the pouring rain on snow. Temporarily de- feated, we scratched this site off the list and traversed 1500 feet to Corner 2 which fell in a major flooded slide area that was definitely not 100 years old. At this point despair set in and we could only wish that we were searching for a needle in a hay- stack, because that would have given us much better odds! So we hiked back and retired to our spike camp, waking up the next morning to a foot of fresh, wet snow. Well, at least it’s not freezing rain, so life is good! We spent another day of traversing to corner search positions, and again no luck. The muskeg is so boggy, we have to cut four-foot sections of spruce limbs and drive them in the peat for each leg of the tripod so the total station would stay level long enough to take each shot before re- quiring re-leveling. On the third day, our motto was “cold, wet and miserable.” It was official now, psy- chosis was setting in. I try to rally the crew for one last attempt, since we must wait a fewmore hours anyway for the helicop- ter pickup at the LZ, so back down on our knees at Corner 1 we go. Delirium, or is it hypothermia, is upon us, as we spread out and resume the position, crawling in the brush, randomly killing time seeking enlightenment. Suddenly, amongst the green, blurry vegetative haze, I notice a lime green circular fuzz a couple inches above ground level, that is just a slightly continues on page 7 T