PLSO Oregon Surveyor July/August 2020

Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon |  www.plso.org 13 Featured Article We settled on a negotiated price for each corner found and re-monumented. After taking the contract, I was designated to be the guy that went out to do the cor- ner evaluations. I perused each card and had to make a decision as to whether the searcher had found enough evidence to warrant going to the location for further verification. If I felt the card didn’t give us enough information, it was discarded. Inmany cases, there was no way of know- ing whether the person really found solid evidence or if he just thought he had. That contract was a real crap shoot, as I could hike some distance to a possible corner and find that the information given had no value. We were only paid for cor- ners re-set and not for corners searched for but not found. If I spent several hours going and looking at a corner described on the card and found nothing, then the time spent had to be written off. Here is a case in point: I selected a quar- ter corner for further scrutiny, the location of which escapes me. The FS searcher de- scribed the evidence as two rotted snags that fit the position of the two original bear - ing trees. No scribing was mentioned, so normally this would have been a discard. It was close to a road, though, so I thought what the heck, I would give it a shot. He had flagged up the two snags and flagged where he thought the corner should fall. I believe the original corner may have been marked by a stake rather than a stone, so chances of recovery of the corner, as set, was nil. I went to the two snags and looked diligently, hoping I would find scribing the searcher may havemissed, but alas nothing. I had about given up, when I decided to give the area one more scan. The quarter corner in question lay on a north south line, so the two bearing trees would lie east and west of the line. I hap- pened to walk around the backside of the east (?) BT and, lo and behold, there was a face on the east side of the snag with scribing perfectly preserved. The search- ers’ east bearing tree was really the BT that was west of the corner. Its position was high on a steep bank above a creek, so apparently the bank had sloughed off at some time, taking the east BT with it. That discovery made my day! It was those times when it felt good to be in the pro- fession. There is no better feeling than to uncover corners that had not been found since they were set by the original surveyor. I don’t think we made any money on that contract. I spent a lot of non-productive time going to corner lo- cations and not finding anything, but it sure was funwhen I turned up something. It would be interesting to hear from any- one out there that might have had similar experiences in finding original corners, and methods used.  x