PLSO May June 2019

10 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 42, No. 3 Featured Article F or this chapter, I’m going to focus on one particular project that had oc- curred in 1972. On the south side of Reservoir One and Two in the Bull Run, it was decided that a new road should be put in to access prime timber and im- prove fire protection accessibility. A preliminary tagline was established through the woods for us to follow. I think we may have actually started this project in the Fall of 1971, though it could have been early Spring ‘72, but there was an incident that I want to relate that to me was amazing. The plan was to work our way in from Forest Road #12 as far as we could go and still hike out every day. When we reached that point then we would start camping out and working both ways from the camp. We had quite a group with us, consisting of a traverse crew, level crew and cross-section crew, bringing in three rigs every day. Driving in one day, the first rig got to see a cougar chase a deer across the road. We caught up with them as they had stopped to look at the tracks. On the last day we were going to go in and try to get our theoretical hike out station, the weather was turn- ing bad, the temperature was dropping and the wind was picking up. I can’t re- call if we made it to the point we wanted to get to, but the party chief finally said we had to get out of there or we would be spending the night in the woods. By the time we got back to the rigs, the wind was blowing fiercely and it was below freezing. Two of the vehicles would not run as water in the fuel filter had frozen. We tried various ways to get the rig to run long enough to melt the ice but to no avail. We had parked in the trees at the end of the road and the way things were blowing, the chief decided that we should push/tow the other two vehicles into the open so no trees could fall on them. We got that done and it was al- most dark. We piled nine men into one six-pack pickup and made our way out of the woods. We met our supervisor in Sandy. He was worried that we were so late, and he was on his way to look for us. Why we didn’t radio our predicament is lost in time. The next day was sunny and bright but very cold. We loaded everything up and headed back to see what the storm had delivered to us. The vehicles that we had moved into the open were just fine. We spent the day cutting trees out of the way so we could retrieve them. I remem- ber thinking that I could winch this one log out of the way, so we put the cable around it and turned on the winch. The pickup was sitting on bare pavement and to show you how strong a “Warn” winch is, it pulled the vehicle ahead. Needless to say, we had to cut the log into small- er pieces. Sometime in August or September we finally resumed work on the campout portion of the project. I don’t remember who selected the site for the camp, but it wasn’t too bad—next to a creek, so we had access to water. I cannot remember if we took the precaution of boiling water before drinking or not. The stream was small and somehow it was known that it came out of the ground just uphill from where we were camped, so I think we just called it good. We accessed the job fromHickman Butte Road which was further south, and the hike in was easy as it was all downhill. A Survey Remembered Part IV By Paul Landau, PLS Ret.