Time in a Bottle

I haven't had the luck of finding a fully intact old bottle, but I keep my eye out. I suppose an old Coke bottle doesn't count (I'm not even sure how old this is - 2 years maybe).
Anyhow, bottle dating can be useful in determining the possible age of an old fenceline or monument when you are working far from civilization - problem is you have to find the bottle first and then be able to date it. Just a possibility I guess, but one worth considering enough that the BLM has their own web page dedicated to the subject. This is an interesting link to the BLM archeology site concerning hisoric bottles.

Find the Property Monument: #2

This one is a bit more difficult. The point is visible though and this is roughly what it looks like from the roadway. Here you have the benefit of the lath being flagged up - heading to the point, there was a standing lath but no flagging. I'd rate this one a 4 out of 10 for difficulty.

Find the Property Monument: 1

I was out in the field yesterday reviewing a topographic map of a house and snapped this photo. The challenge - see if you can spot the property monument in this photo - I'd rank this order of difficulty a 2 - 1 being in your face and 10 being Waldo in a sea of Waldo look alikes in a library of Where's Waldo books. You may have to click on the photo for a full view. More of these to follow in the future...

Searching for Survey Records

Seems that in Bernalillo County, NM, there is a bit of a gap between recording surveys (non-subdivision plats) and how they are indexed and located. We have for years had microfiche of all the plat books, but we've never received the survey book. The survey book is for plats of surveys, boundary surveys, ALTA surveys, etc. They are rarely reported on in Title commitments and I believe the reason why is that they really aren't indexed very well (or indexed at all for that matter). Makes one wonder which surveys are really found during the course of research and which are not. It is poor database management to index something such as S10, T4N, R5E, N.M.PM - if I run a search on S10, T4N, R5E, NMPM, it would probably not come up - depending on the search engine. The county (and area professionals) need to come up with a better solution here and implement it pronto! We're missing out on a lot of good data (I'm assuming) and every day that passes, is another day that legacy data is missed. At least the Clerk's Records Search is online - but I wish we could get to the level of Maricopa County's map locator. Maybe someday....

Nevada LS

Well, I've submitted my paperwork and application to sit for the Nevada LS exam. One of the three remaining states I intend to pursue a license in (the others being Utah and California). Of the states I've been involved with thus far, Nevada seems to be fairly organized. They are also populous enough to have 4 state specific exams each year, so that works well into schedule for a summer license try. BHI's regional effort is expanding nicely - in the past week or so, we had two guys in our Colorado office sit for Kansas and Wyoming and Rob here in the Albuquerque office will be sitting for Utah some time in June. That will bring our license coverage to NM, CO, TX, AZ, NE, and MI with WY, KS, UT, and NV within the next several months.

By the way, the Nevada Department of Transportation has some nice maps for free download (State Maps, Quad Maps, Area Maps and Historic Maps). A nice collection for getting acquainted with NV...

NSR: Busy Week

Not sure why it's been such a busy week. I've been working on several smaller type projects plus trying to get caught up on some administrative tasks. I suppose it all just adds up to a busy week. My dad sent me this old photo. As the caption says "image taken at Camp Dodge in Iowa and used eighteen thousand men." - all before the days of photo shop...

David Rumsey.com

I came across this map site about 7 or 8 years ago - a fantastic collection of historic maps. I haven't visited it recently but then just found this YouTube Video. Looks like David has been up to some cool innovation in the realm of historic maps.


This video is about 10+ minutes, but an interesting history of his map collection and some of the things he has done in a digital sense as of late. I have been doing some similar tasks with Bohannan Huston's plat database and we have also worked with similar geo-referencing of scanned images in conjunction with our GIS projects and Mapping projects. It is quite powerful to be able to pull up all the documents created for a given area - all of which are geo-referenced and layered so that you can at a glance, understand the history of survey and mapping for a given location. Very Cool!

NGS Datasheet "Tab"

Recovery for NGS point "Tab" got published the other day (scroll all the way down to see the last recovery for 2008). It's unfortunate that after the long hike (about 1 hr each way - shown on my post on March 17th) evidence was found. So I know I was in the right place, but after about 30 minutes searching for the actual point - nada. Officially the point is not destroyed unless you have photographic proof or the actual monument.

NSR: F-4 vs. Concrete

Some interesting footage of some tests performed out at Sandia National Labs in years past. I remember watching a rocket sled track test/show at SNL family day back in the 1980's - it's amazing how fast those puppies really go. My dad got to watch this one in person!


This one I'm not certain was done at SNL, but the terrain looks like the Sandia/Manzano mountains in the background.

North Arrow

Learned something new today (or at least re-learned it in the case that I knew it once and forgot). In older maps, a full North Arrow is intended to mean true North while a half North Arrow may indicate magnetic north with a east or west declination depending on which side the arrow is on. Everything we do here at work is true North / Geodetic North / Grid North so I guess I haven't thought about the north arrow in light of indicating declination. Luckily we our typical north arrow looks like this...

so it shouldn't matter much.

Daylight Savings x 2

I thought about it several weeks ago when daylight savings time sprung forward and then it happened Sunday morning. We have a clock radio that automatically adjusts for DLST each spring and fall - problem is that it was purchased before the federal government fiddled with things a couple of years ago. Since the spring forward/fall back day has now been legislated to something different, we have to manually change the clock on the actual date. The problem is that the clock adjusted forward another hour on Sunday (the old date) without us knowing and we got up an extra hour earlier. By we, I mean my wife did - at 6:30am but it was really 5:30am - I was too out of it to get up (now we know why). When I finally rolled out of bed at 7:12am, I looked out the window and noticed it was still dark. That's when it dawned on me what was going on. Needless to say, we were quite bummed about loosing our hour of sleep. Not only did we hit the early service, we hit it really hard. I tried to point out to my wife that not only did we loose an hour on Sunday, but we also gained an hour on Sunday as well when I reset the clock, but that didn't seem to help much. I think I'm going to have to use our clock radio as sledge hammer practice and get a new one - there's no way I'm going to be able to remember Daylight savings time every 6 months on the actual date and the old date as well.

Book Down: Profit With Honor

Finished up Profit With Honor. A fairly quick read advocating Stewardship Ethics as the path the future economy must take to regain trust lost in the recent scandals of the past several years. Of interest was a quote stating that then Eliot Spitzer was prosecuting relentlessly those companies and individuals with a lapsed sense of ethics - times they are a changin'. He also foresaw the bursting of the housing bubble created by the baking and financial industry and lamented the potential buyout that would be required similar to the S&L of the 80's. RE. the last week's sale of Bear Stearns.
One of Yankelovich's examples of stewardship ethics is the Hybrid vs. the Hummer.

vs.

Toyota's Prius being an example of the company's stewardship ethics in their willingness to realize long term profits with short term losses because the hybrid was the right thing to do - environmentally and economically. Contrast that GM's Hummer - a gas guzzling SUV that has shown short term profits, but is not necessarily the right thing to do environmentally or in light of current gas prices, may not show the long term profits that the Prius will because of the Hummer's MPG inefficiency.

A worthwhile read in the field of business ethics - I'd say about 3 professional development hours of literature review / ethics (although it took me longer to read because I'm a slow reader...)

Earthquake

Purple dots - places you might want to watch out for. They might be a good place to be from.

Drought Monitor

This is interesting to check in to from time to time. I don't think I have ever seen New Mexico not have some level of dryness - we are a desert though. The title link shows a 12 week animation (it would be nice to have it play a bit faster, but the trends are clear.

Cave LiDAR Mapping

This would be a great survey project. I'd like to figure out how to get some funding in place with the NPS to map Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. This would be fun!!

To Accept or Not to Accept

I'm working on a boundary survey in the east Sandia Mountains - being the NW 1/4NW 1/4NW1/4, S34 (Approximately 10 acres). The terrain is quite rough and very wooded. Turns out the county road isn't along the section line like it is supposed to be.

That's not too much of an issue (from a survey standpoint) - it is clearly not along the section line - Oops.

The preceding plat corner monuments are waayyyy out.

These will simply be rejected - they're just plain bad.

The fences (lines of occupation) in some places are right on, others are way off...

The terrain is so rough here that I really can rely on the fence/occupation as decent evidence. The fences predate the BLM survey in 1976, but the BLM apparently didn't put much weight on the fence line/occupation line.

There are some other monuments that are fairly close on.

These pose a bit of a problem. Are they acceptable? In terms of the terrain - probably so, but the section line is the section line. I really can't introduce an angle point in that line where it does not exist. The monument pictured here is not called for anywhere. In NM it's against the law to remove a property corner, so my option is to reject the point and set a new one (about 0.7' away) or to accept the old monument which is reasonable for when it was set, but not so hot for today's day and age. Thus the dilemma....

Mile High Tower

I don't know about you, but I don't think I could live or work in something like the Mile High Tower

let alone this building.


Structural engineering at it's greatest, but I think this is a waste of excess. Your (our) gasoline and oil dollars at work...