11 Header Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org Member Spotlight me with a new plat, I knew it was going to be a doozy!” she says with a laugh. Edith is a surveyor with the BLM in the North Bend area, but she grew up in Salem, Oregon, where she got her first survey tech job with the Salem BLM. Coos Bay happened to have a job opening as a full surveyor, and Edith got that job in 2001 and has been there ever since. Much as she knew right away she enjoyed surveying, she also knew early on that she wanted to work for the BLM. “I knew I wanted to work in the woods, not in the city, and the class I had on the PLSS about the long history of the GLO (eventually becoming BLM) as well as the PLSS itself really appealed to me,” she says. “The weirdest coincidences involving an OIT professor and a member of the cross-country ski club I belonged to got me a 5:00 a.m. call from the Salem Lead Cadastral Surveyor to go apply as a survey tech for the coming summer.” Twenty-five years later, here she is. Work in the Coos Bay District is primarily timber surveys, which Edith worked on as a field surveyor for 15 years. She says that when she first arrived in North Bend, she would joke to her cousin that she didn’t know if she was doing surveying to get in shape for hiking and cross country skiing on the weekends or if she was hiking and cross country skiing to get in shape for working out in the field. In 2016, they took her out of the field and she became an “office jockey,” mostly doing research and writing reports. At first, she says she wasn’t too happy about it but has settled in and accepted it, and actually appreciates being able to write reports which are intended for a non-surveyor audience. “I seem to have a knack for explaining survey stuff to non surveyors in a way they can understand and being able to figure out how much they need to know and how much is too much information,” she says. Edith loves the work for its emphasis on researching and history. She likes the problem-solving aspect, such as when there are two corners and you have to make a choice about which corner to use and why. “Or should I throw them both out and do something else?” she remarks. “I like the discussion behind coming up with reasons for the decisions you make.” She says she reads court cases for fun even though she is not a protest and appeal specialist. But she does enjoy going through court cases and looking at the questions and answers behind them and looking at the additional pieces of information that they may come up with and if that changes the outcomes. “When you first start, you have a fairly simplistic idea of, well, if we’ve got situation X then obviously the answer is Y,” she says. “Then a more experienced surveyor says, ‘Well, actually, the answer is Q because of something you didn’t even consider.’ I love that learning piece.” One of Edith’s most memorable surveys was Coos Head, in which the Navy had a withdrawal back in the 1800s and decided that they didn’t need the property. Most of it was reverting back to the BLM. As a timber surveyor, Edith was accustomed to having four or five adjoiners and maybe at the most a dozen surveys from the county if she needed to subdivide two sections. “Along with maybe one metes and bounds line. What made Coos Head interesting was that I had over 100 surveys to analyze starting way back with the 1800s, just from the county, not the BLM ones,” she says. “I had another dozen or so from the Navy from when they had disposed of parts of it.” Ownership was not just BLM and a small parcel the Navy was keeping. Some of the Navy land was going to the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians. The Army Corps of Engineers had a jetty. The Coast Guard was leasing a small parcel on the tip of Coos Head. The county owned part of the accretions to the beach. The City of Charleston was in one of the two sections they had to subdivide, and the Port of Charleston owned some property around one of her controlling corners. The University of Oregon acquired some property from the Navy. “And then of course, there were a zillion private owners who were adjoining either the property that the BLM was getting, or the controlling corners,” she says. “Juggling all that was really, really interesting. And I’m glad I only had to do it the one time, to tell you the truth!” She says she’s grateful that the project commenced over winter so that she was able to do the research and analysis in the slow season. “There’s no way I could have waded through all those surveys if I was also doing field work,” she says. “It didn’t help that some of This photo of Edith was used for the cover of the BLM publication Specifications for Descriptions of Land in 2017. That’s the corner of secs. 1, 2, 11, and 12, T. 21 S., R. 9 W., down at the bottom of the hole. There’s an overgrown road about 100 feet uphill. Edith says if you use your imagination, you can see it in the background running from about the backpack through her vest pocket. When the team was in there the first time, clearing the road and doing general reconnaissance, they hopped off the ATV and found four obvious BTs and a lot of fill. When they went in to survey they made sure to throw a metal detector, shovel, and range rod into the ATV. Thank goodness for the BTs! Edith notes also, if anyone’s wondering, the Nomad isn’t plugged in because she’s still turning in the BTs (the southwest one, at the time the picture was taken). Turning in the northerly BTs meant standing on her tiptoes and trying not to fall over without leaning on the tripod. Not the most challenging setup she’s ever had, but up in the top 20 or so. Interestingly, it is also a public domain photo that shows up on the Wikipedia entry for surveying, and Edith says It’s not hard to figure out how Wikipedia got the photo, but she doesn’t know how the government printing office got it. continues
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