PLSO The Oregon Surveyor November December 2020

17 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon |  www.plso.org books and correspondence courses. Af- ter about three years of study he took the LSIT (today called Fundamentals of Surveying). In 1984, he passed that and two years later took the LS exam. Being told his position was being cut encouraged him to look for other work, which he found in a full-time forest ser- vice job in John Day, Oregon in 1987. In 1989 he took theOregon Reciprocity exam, passed it, and then moved to Bend for a land surveying position. “I thought I would only be here for 3 to 5 years and would then move on to ad- vance my career, but things worked out and I am still here,” he says. “One of the nice aspects of the job is that we still get to search for a lot of the original GLO corners. I added it up once a few years ago and figured I had searched for over 3,000 corners. I still find that as the best part of the job.” Ham got into fire work because many for - est service employees would get asked if they wanted to fill in on a fire crew either on wildfires or on prescribed burns. One short job post-college was in a state park. “We took a day of fire training and that summer there were three fires caused by campers,” Ham recalls. “I learned that it can take a lot of water to put out a burn- ing, hollowed out cedar tree.” In John Day, he worked up to the posi- tion of firefighting Crew Boss, in charge of a 20-person hand crew and fill-in per - son on an engine. After moving to Bend, he continued gaining experience and in 1996 was on the Redmond Interagency Hotshot Crew. The training and experi- ence helps him understand the dangers of working in a burned-over forest. There are many hazards in a burnt area. For instance, broken trees and limbs that are snagged or hung up in tree branch- es can drop silently and quickly. Power or telephone lines may be hanging down low. Walking through piles of ash can be uncertain or slippery. Footing can be precarious, Ham says, like walking through a few inches of snow. Ground can be slick, especially after a rain, and it’s easy to twist an ankle or worse if you fall into a sinkhole where underground roots or stumps burned out. Sharp root material can even punc- ture a boot. All that remains of a BT sign. Aluminummelts at 1221°. Close up of the washer. The burnt sign used to be a L.S.M sign on the back of this BT. continues on page 18 T Member Spotlight