Wintertime

I'm not dressed up tonight, but it's fun that you did! Did you go to a party or out trick-or-treating with the grandkids, and if so, did you get a lot of questions about your costume?

I'm a little surprised that CBC blocks "Still Standing," since it isn't a show that would be licensed anywhere except Canada. For example, CBC's news programs aren't geolocked. You might look for VPN software that has a server in Canada.

Joe, how about posting a comment on YouTube? If you feel like it, you could run your comment through Google Translate and post it in German, or just post in English. Hopefully the person who posted the video will see the comment!

Yes, Jonny Harris has a bit of fun with the town's claims.

Jonny Harris's warmhearted show "Still Standing" will feature geocaching in the town of Wilberforce, ON tonight, Oct. 30th. I'm posting this information in the Geocaching Topics forum instead of the Canada forum because many parts of the northern U.S. (including Seattle?) have CBC TV on cable systems. Here's a page on the CBC TV website about tonight's episode: Still Standing--Wilberforce It says: "Geocaching is a big deal in this area. The town's official GeoTour is the No. 1 geocaching tour in Canada and No. 3 in the world, taking you on an exploration of pristine lakes, scenic locations and historical sites." Those of you in Canada will probably be able to watch the episode on CBC's website later if you miss it tonight.

MonkeyCat, thank you for keeping that resource available. I don't do much benchmark hunting any more, but I was just curious about one area and your site is so helpful. I like how you have links both to official NGS datasheets and also informal recovery reports on Geocaching.com, which often have more recent postings. (Although probably not very recent since Groundspeak has made the benchmark search feature basically impossible to find on their site.)

Thanks for finding that page, Darin. Yes, a prominent pointer to that part of the site would be a good idea. It has helpful text information plus a number of videos.

Hi, everyone. In no way was I suggesting "unfettered access" to the site! Certainly an unregistered user wouldn't be able to log finds, maybe not even to do their own searches. As MartyBartfast noted, I was referring to being able to view a simple, automatically generated (from an estimated IP address location) map of nearby caches and read a little bit about them. And primarily, for the home page to point towards more introductory material than is in that 75-second video, without newcomers having to hunt for the tiny "Help Center" link at the bottom of the page.

Sorry if this has been discussed before; I searched for a few keyword phrases and didn't find any relevant threads. Although I'm not active in geocaching myself these days, I sometimes recommend it (enthusiastically!) to other people, such as a homeschool parent I was talking with recently. But when I happened to go to the Geocaching.com site today, I noticed that it's no longer possible to do anything except watch an introductory video unless you have an account on the site. You can find a few other things through the Help Center link, but it's a hassle and doesn't get you very much anyway. For example, there's a link from the Start Here help page to the cache search page, but then you need to log in to actually run a search. You used to at least be able to see where there were caches in your area. I realize that accounts on Geocaching.com are free, but I don't want to direct people to a website that they can't even browse without setting up an account. That seems almost spammy to me; Groundspeak wants your contact information before you've had a chance to see what they offer and decide whether you're interested in it. I don't know whether the Groundspeak folks even monitor this forum, but I thought I'd post here anyway. I think that requiring a login to view the site is a bad marketing decision, but I guess they've decided that it works well for their goals.

The data sheets have been claimed!

Some years ago, a nice person at USGS made printouts of old USGS survey mark reports for the Yosemite area to help me find them. I think the lists even include some marks that aren't in the NGS database. Some of the original reports are from 1905; most are from the 1930s and '40s. All of those were retyped up in 1969. Then there's a second set from the mid-'80s where USGS surveyors went back looking for those old marks. The printouts are marked up with my handwritten comments, where I correlated the original and 1980s reports, and then noted whether I had found the mark. So they aren't pristine, but could still be very interesting to someone or other on this board. I'd be happy to send them to you for just the cost of postage. Let me know if you'd like them. A few sample photos are attached below.

I just ran across this page about subsidence on the USGS website: https://ca.water.usgs.gov/land_subsidence/ I found W 990 CADWR; its PID is HS1953: https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=HS1953

Okay, thanks, Bill. I was hoping that the "VERT ORDER - FIRST" might mean that they had been keeping detailed elevation records on this one, but maybe not.

Yes, that's the photo that was in the CIR article I cited and was part of Mr. Suchanek's talk the other night.

I went to a talk at USGS the other night in which the topic of subsidence came up. The presenter (USGS ecologist Tom Suchanek) showed the photo of Joseph Poland that was in the CIR article I linked to in my original posting. I got to wondering whether there's any record of the elevation changes in the NGS database. Here again is the datasheet for GU0103, S 661, which we believe to be the benchmark Mr. Poland was referring to: GU0103 Mr. Poland didn't file a found report in 1977, but there was one in 1975. An NGS team reported it not found in 1988. I've looked at the datasheet, but I can't tell whether the "SUPERSEDED SURVEY CONTROL" height was superseded because the ground around the benchmark sank and the new height is from a later date, or because the height from a given year was recalculated to a new geoid. I admit to never having gotten around to learning about geoids. There are quite a few other survey marks in the vicinity, but the closest ones were monumented decades after this one so wouldn't show as much evidence of subsidence even if that information is on the datasheets. Still, they might offer some clues to those who know how to read them properly. Is there anything in the datasheet for GU0103 that demonstrates the land subsidence where it was?

That's a cool idea, offering a way to provide up-to-date information about benchmarks without having to file a formal report. Having photos is very helpful too!

Skintigh, the other folks on this forum have done a terrific job of helping you with the complexities of figuring out which benchmark might be relevant to Kryptos, and why the coordinates in NGS's records are probably not accurate enough for your needs. So I'll just say that I had no idea that segments of the Kryptos text had been decoded, so that's very interesting. Of course, as you have discovered, getting pieces of plain English is only the beginning! Best of luck with your quest!

Casamig, I was about to say what Holtie did: next time you see people surveying in your area, grab one of them and ask where they read about the mark in your front yard. Obviously they found it in some database or other, else they wouldn't know to look for it under your lawn.

Aha, that must have been my problem on the NGS site. And when I tried "661" on Gc.com, I got caught on this limitation: "If you use keywords of 3 letters or less, the query will look for an exact match." Sigh... I must not have tried "S 661" on the correct site. Thanks for finding it!

Thanks, Bill, that could well be the one; it isn't far from Mendota, which is mentioned in the CIR article. May I ask how you found it? I had tried "661," which only turned up one mark in Ventura County.

The Center for Investigative Reporting just did a report about ground-level subsidence in California's Central Valley, which I first heard about from KQED Radio in San Francisco. The stories are based on benchmark height information gathered by USGS scientists. Here are links to both the original report and KQED's story: CIR story KQED story I'm giving you both links because the KQED page has a larger version of a recent photo taken between Los Baños and Chowchilla of a USGS hydrologist showing how far a certain area dropped between 1988 and 2013. The benchmark she's near is H1235 RESET, PID HS1427: HS1427 The other photo, taken in 1977, mentions BM5661 (or possibly S661). I can't find its datasheet anywhere in the NGS database, either under active or destroyed marks. But yikes, look at the subsidence in 50 years!

As Kayakbird noted, there are lots of USGS marks in the NGS database, along with marks from hundreds (thousands?) of other agencies. Most of the several dozen survey marks I've found in Yosemite were installed by the USGS. I never realized, though, that this might be more common in the Western U.S.

It obviously refers to this forum, although it doesn't give the URL. I assume that some of the folks here were interviewed? Forget Geocaching, Bench-Mark Hunting Is the New Nerdy Hobby Love the license plate on Mr. Macomber's car! I'm not a WSJ subscriber, so I can't post any follow-up comments--such as telling the person who said, "How hard can this be?" how inaccurate the BM locations on topo maps often are. :-( Patty

Moun10Bike, I have version 2.4.1 of the Intro app on my iPad, which according to the iTunes Store is the latest app. Yesterday, I tried finding a geocache with it for the first time. After I found the cache, I chose "Found It," typed in some comments, and tapped "Post." The log page disappeared, but this morning, I saw no sign of the log on the Geocaching.com website. I started looking for help to figure out what happened, and found this thread. Well, guess what--after I opened the app again and tried to find the sent log (which I couldn't, because apparently the Intro app doesn't let you display those), I just looked at my profile on Gc.com again, and the cache is there. I had only a weak cellular data connection when I was at the cache site. Is it possible that if the log can't be sent at the time you post it, it doesn't try again until you re-open the app? My iPad has had a solid Wi-Fi connection since I got home last night, but apparently I had to open the app in order for the log to be sent to Gc.com?

From: A century of change in maps Earlier this week, the U.S. Geological Survey released a fantastic Web site, built with the mapping company Esri, digitizing some 178,000 of the government's topographic maps dating going back to the 1800s. These old paper products have all been georectified, so you can layer maps from different eras on top of each other The Washington Post article focuses on the D.C. area, but as the article says, there are maps available across the country. I found some from as far back as 1897 for the Palo Alto area. Once you've loaded a map, you can download it. BTW, I may have mentioned this a couple of months ago when I was taking that mapping course on Coursera, but the ArcGIS platform on which this USGS project is hosted is available free to anyone to play around with. You can create a public account on the ArcGIS Online site and play around with a number of very spiffy features, including online apps for various types of story maps. Sure, it doesn't have the features of the desktop version of ArcGIS, but like I said: free!