PLSO Oregon Surveyor July/August 2020

12 The Oregon Surveyor  | Vol. 43, No. 4 Featured Article Fun Times Looking For Public Land Survey Corners By Dick Bryant, LS 920 (ret) M y wife and I have been going through our old files and throw - ing out stuff that is no longer of use. I happened to come across the July/ August 2014 issue of The Oregon Surveyor . In it there is a humorous article by Robert Taylor describing various experiences he had while working on a BLM survey crew with the late Al White. The article got me thinking of a couple of interesting encounters I hadwhile recover- ing old public land survey corners. The stone was buried where? Early in my surveying career we were hired to do a boundary survey at Camp Cooper, a Boy Scouts camp west of Mc- Minnville. The Scouts had logged some timber along their west property line, which was adjacent to BLM land. The BLM thought there might have been a trespass, so the Scouts asked our firm to run in the boundary so the issue could be resolved. I don’t recall the section or township, but I believe the camp was in one of the north tier of sections in the township. The southwest corner of the Scout prop- erty was a section corner. The township had been originally surveyed by one of the Meldrums back in the late 1800s. The area had burned shortly before the time Meldrum broke down the township. There were no living trees, hence no bear- ing trees were scribed. He set stones at each of his corners with the appropriate markings. We found the closing corner to the north, but had no luck with the stone described at the southwest corner of the property. Many others had looked for the corner in prior years, as there were over- turned stones everywhere. We expanded our search in order to find and tie controlling corners so we could narrowdown the search area for themiss- ing stone or to re-proportion the corner if necessary. I believe we found the quar- ter corner one half mile to the west and tied that, then we started south. We had to go at least two miles before we found another section corner, which we tied. A search point was computed for the sec- tion corner between the Scout corner and the one we tied. Again, we found many overturned stones in the vicinity. We knew it had to be there, and within a short ra- dius of the position we had calculated. Our search turned up nothing. One thing we discovered was that if Meldrum went through a snag on line, he would blaze it even though it was on dead wood. The area at the time of the burn was heavy to old growth, and in the interceding years it had grown up to a stand of 100-year- old second-growth Douglas fir. Old, decayed snags were all that remained from the original fire. The bark, most but not all of the sapwood, and tops had over time sloughed to the ground. We thought perhaps if we could find some line blazes we could back our way into the corner. Sure enough we found line blazes out a short distance, both north and west of the corner position. With a hand compass, we backed our way into the corner location, at which point was a large rotted snag, with de- bris piled several feet high around its base. Out came the shovels, and after a short time, there was the stone bigger’n Dallas, as they would say in Texas. It was tucked up snug against the base of the snag. The stone probably hadn’t seen the light of day since shortly after it was set. We tied that corner, which gave us three solid legs of our proportion, and hence a much narrower search pattern for the sought-after corner of the Scout prop- erty. We finally found our stone within a few feet of where we had positioned it. The Scouts had indeed trespassed, so we did a stump cruise, and they settled up with the BLM. Close but no cigar Once we took a contract with the Forest Service (FS) to search for corners in the Siuslaw National Forest. If a corner was found, we were to re-monument it un- der their prescribed rules. In prior years, various FS employees had visited many possible corner locations and compiled corner cards on which they recorded what they had found, if anything. Some of the searchers were quite proficient and some didn’t seem to have a clue as to what they were looking for in the way of evidence.