11 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Featured Article continues here at the S Qtr Cor of Sec 32 because there was not enough sky visible. For the purposes of this township retracement, which is obviously not “3rd order,” I have been rounding all the coordinates to the nearest foot, since we’re not “building a piano.” Tony then volunteered to lead the way, continuing the line east through the tag alder, but I felt that without a chainsaw, it would take several hours, which we didn’t have to spare. I suggested that we just go back up the hill about 400 feet and start chaining south (to avoid the tag alder) from one of the stationed points I had ribboned on the way down from the ridgetop. After some “cussin’ and discussin,’” we agreed to go with plan B. We jogged south a few hundred feet but hit the tag alder so we had to retreat west another 130 feet. We turned south again for another 100 feet and then started east, parallel with the “Parallel” and kept bouncing off the tag alder several more times until we were finally past it, 564 feet south of the Parallel. We now had clear sailing and jogged back to the north every chance we got till finally regaining the Parallel. Campbell’s notes called for a “Top of Point” about 1,100 feet east of the quarter corner we just left. That seemed strange since there was no indication of such a feature on the topog map. When we got close to that “easting,” Tony called out that he could see the point! Sure enough, on that hillside, there was a rocky protrusion rising up that Campbell had hit dead center with his section line. It was a good reminder that most of the modern USGS quads were made from aerial photos that are really just pictures of the treetops. The resulting contours are actually modeling the treetops and then adjusted vertically for a guess at how tall the trees are. Several months later I found some lidar coverage of this area and the actual ground amazingly shows the point. Continuing our chaining east, when we neared the area for Bushey’s closing corner, it was becoming obvious that his BTs had burned up. The present timber stand looked to be only about 80 years old (should have been about 130 years of age). Consequently, we found no trace of his BTs for the closing corner between sections 4 and 5, T 11 S, R7E, as set in 1894. We continued east another 1,000 feet or so and finally spotted a sign on one of the BTs for the southeast corner of Section 32. From this point on, we kept stumbling down the hill following the path of least resistance till we at last stepped out on the logging road at about 7:30 and then arrived back in Battle Ground three hours later. In September 2021, I recruited my son Jeff, a civil engineer and also a veteran of many survey expeditions over the past 10 years, to accompany me. My mission now was to make survey ties to the two line trees that Tony and I had found two years earlier. I was curious to see how far off line they actually were and also look for a few more line trees near the ridgetop. On September 9, we pulled up to the ridgetop, and to my surprise found that everything north of the top of the hill had been burned by the Lionshead Forest Fire in September 2020. That fire, of about 100,000 acres, was started by lightning in mid-August on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, near the crest of the Cascades, and nine miles fromwhere we were now standing. It had languished there for several weeks while it crawled westerly into the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area. Several days later, the east winds, not uncommon later in the fall, rapidly developed into an 80- to 90-mph sustained blowtorch. The small fire blew up and raced west the afternoon of Labor Day weekend. About three days later, the winds finally eased and the fire stalled, but not until it had joined with another lightning-caused fire, the Beachie Creek Fire. Together, they burned more than 200,000 acres of fine timber, 1,300 structures, and resulted in five deaths, as well as destroying homes and businesses in the towns of Idanha, Detroit, Gates, Mill City, and Mehama, all along the North Santiam River. Bruno
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Nzc3ODM=