10 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 45, No. 4 Featured Article TWICE TOLD TALES By Chuck Whitten, PLS Initially, I had intended to write a tale of a survey trip that I made in July 2019 about the retracement of a portion of the Second Standard Parallel South, W.M., east of Detroit, Oregon. The original survey of this segment of the Parallel had been first completed by U.S. Deputy Surveyor William E. Campbell in August and September 1891 under Contract Number 563. He had a penchant for calling line trees in his notes, and marked 20 of them in the first mile and a half between the SW corner of Section 31 and the South Quarter Corner of Section 32, starting his work on September 11, 1891. I had found and tied a lot of these line trees on the south line of Section 31 previously and wanted to search the next half mile to the east for several more and then look for the south quarter corner of Section 32 that I believed probably had not been visited since Campbell set it in 1891. I knew from the topog map that once Campbell crossed the ridge at 27.50 chains (1815 feet from the SW corner of Section 32) the line became "steeper than a cows face.” In the bigger picture, I wanted to also look for the closing corner for Sections 4 and 5, T11S, R7E, set three years later by William Bushey in 1894 and then the SE corner of Section 32, set by Campbell. Knowing that there was a logging road on the west side of the North Santiam River, my plan was to begin at the ridgetop and continue easterly (down the steep hillside) to end up on the logging road. On June 11, 2019, a fellow surveyor (and avid mountain climber) Tony Chenier, who lives in Kelso, Washington, met me in Battle Ground, Washington, where I live. We then headed south to Stayton, Oregon (about 12 miles southeast of Salem) to meet Tony’s dad Jim, who was going to accompany us on the “walk.” We then headed east on Highway 22 for another 18 miles to Mill City where we met my friend Alice Bickett, whom I had recruited to leave my pickup on the logging road at the bottom of the hill. She then followed us in her car for 33 miles to the bottom of the hill where she left her rig and got in with us. Then it was another 18 miles to finally get to the ridgetop. It was east, only 1 1/2 miles in a straight line to the logging road, but about a half mile in elevation above it. Alice then circled back to the logging road, left my rig, got in hers, and went back home. I had run a compass line east from the SW corner of Section 32 the month before, looking for line trees and stopped on the ridgetop (at 27.50 chains in the notes), leaving a ribbon where we now stood. I put Tony on line with my hand compass and we started chaining east, down the hill, with a 200-foot rag tape, correcting for slope with a clinometer. (The slope was from 40 to 45 degrees+!) We found the first line tree (a “White Fir, 10" dia.,” now actually a 26-foot hemlock with notches on the west side only) at 36.09 chains (567 feet) and the next one, “a Hemlock 20" diam.,” now a 36-inch hemlock with overgrown notches on both the east and west sides), at 36.62 chains, 35 feet past the previous one. I painted a big red circle around the two notches, being careful not to paint the notches themselves. This 36-inch hemlock was odd in that it was growing on a ledge about 7 feet high. The ground on the west (upper) side was about 7 feet higher than the ground on the east (lower) side. It was also interesting in that there was a limb on the lower side that would have prevented Campbell from chopping the two notches into the east face of the tree. We could see the slanted axe tracks on that now-dead limb that were obviously made in September 1891. We then continued to chain down the hill and within 5 feet of the record distance (3.38 chains, 223 feet) we found ourselves beside the original BT, now a 56-inch alpine fir (Campbell called it a 28" Larch, the common name for noble fir.) Traces of the upper and lower blazes were still faintly visible in the bark on the north side. Campbell’s record call to this BT was S 20° W, 10 links (6.6 feet). We backed off N 20° E, 6.6 ft from the center of the now 56" BT and stuck a nail in the ground. The northern BT (Campbell called it a Larch, 20") was “N 12° W, 28 links” (18.5 feet). This tree was now a 54-inch diameter alpine fir, also with faint axe marks in the bark. There seemed to be about 5 degrees of local attraction alongside the big talus slope, now covered with 10-foot-high “tag alder,” sometimes called white alder (Alnus Rhombifolia, as I recall). We chose to arc the record distances from the center of both BTs and moved the nail about a foot. Then we started to dig through the duff and cleared a 3-foot diameter area in search of Campbell’s monument which he described as “Set Basalt Stone, 16 x 10 x 6, 10 3/4 ins in the ground, for Standard 1/4 Sec. Cor., marked S. C. 1/4 on N. face.” We found a couple big rocks, both with scratches, but not what I would accept as the actual “stone.” I had seen several of Campbell’s “Standard 1/4 Section stones” further east and they were plainly marked as he described. I felt that we were within a foot or so of where the 1891 stone was originally set, but concluded that it had probably rolled or slid down the hill on the 100 percent slope, like so many other stones I had found in the township. We then replaced the nail with a rock, 7x9x20-inch, found nearby, and put up USFS 54-3 and 54-9 signs, chopped a base blaze and nailed a plastic washer to it, and painted blue bands on the two BTs. I could not get a sub-meter GPS position
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