14 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 45, No. 6 Member Spotlight By Vanessa Salvia At the time John Lucey and I spoke on the phone, he was doing construction staking on the property where a new home is planned near Bend. Lucey’s office, Axis Mapping and Surveying Company, is in Bend, where he and his family have lived since 2003. Lucey says he loves the profession of surveying and can’t imagine doing any other job now, but he didn’t start out with that career in mind. Lucey earned a Bachelor of Science in geology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and then he worked with the National Science Foundation for two years doing geophysical mapping of a meteorite impact crater under the Chesapeake Bay. “I got out of school and thought I would be a geologist,” he says. “I didn’t even know that surveying was actually a profession.” In 1997, he lived in Mammoth Lakes, California, and while looking for work, happened to stumble on a position for an entry level surveyor. He checked it out, and discovered that he didn’t need to knowmuch more than how to run the equipment, which he already knew from the mapping experience he had. He didn’t know how to use the HP 48 graphing calculator, but he figured it out. “That’s how I became a surveyor and I’ve been doing it ever since,” he says. “My whole reason for wanting to be a geologist was because I wanted a job where I could work outside and have adventures. But once I realized that surveying was a job, I realized it’s actually a lot more interesting to be a surveyor than a field geologist, or a professional geologist, because surveyors get to go to a lot more places and have a lot more adventures.” Lucey is licensed to survey in Oregon, Washington, and California and has had work-related adventures from the Mexican border to the North Slope of Alaska, and across the country from the East Coast to the West Coast. Once Lucey discovered surveying, it quickly became more than a job. He appreciates the history aspect and the puzzle- solving aspect. “You can go out on a 38,000-acre ranch and help them determine the boundary of that ranch that hasn’t been surveyed since 1872, and find the stones that the original surveyors laid out 150 years ago while pulling chains over mountains,” he says. “We go in with our GPS and find stones set within two feet of where I would expect them to be. It’s mind-blowing.” Lucey wants to generate publicity and interest for the surveying profession as a John K. Lucey, PLSO Axis Mapping and Surveying Company www.axismapping.com Most of the surveyors I know became surveyors because their dad or their granddad was a surveyor. This is a great job to have, and it’s a job that a lot of people would be interested in if we got the word out and exposed young people to it.
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