mloser

Part 3 (because I am pretty sure of my answer)-The two squares are, I am fairly certain, just large towers. The one on the east side of the river is obvious on Google Earth. You can see the tower itself, the large square base, and the long shadow pointing to one o'clock. The one on the west side is less obvious but I can see it. It is an elongated white triangle pointing at 4 o'clock and the shadow is much shorter (about half the length of the tower) and points to about 10 o'clock. Part 1 I can't be totally sure but I will say that I have found destroyed marks on the box score on numerous occasions. They are just part of the text description of a mark so they will not be updated relationally at all. Part 2 Not all marks appear on topo maps. Some are there just as control for the making of the map. By setting known locations and elevations the map makers can put contour lines on the map and align it to the aerial photos it is created from. The X with 429 beside it may be that sort of control mark and may simply be the elevation of the center of the street. It may be listed on the USGS marker sheet for your map. You can call the USGS and get the descriptions of the markers for your quad (they will fax a single set so you can get instant gratification!).

I bought the Harbor Freight 100 meter model so I could measure longer distances (and directly in meters when I was stuck using only the box score) and the cheap plastic loop snapped the first time I used it. I now have a large nail stuck through the end of the tape. It means my measurements are off by about 1 1/2 inches but in most cases it is enough to get me to the RM. I have a better (not great, but about $15 from Home Depot or Lowe's) 100' tape that I generally keep with me, and the 100 m tape stays in the car. This means that I usually need the longer tape after climbing to the top of some mountain and of course it is in the back seat of the car. The caveat is that you get what you pay for. It makes a great backup tape and is good for meter measurements, but since I don't want to use it as my primary tape I never seem to have it when I need it.

It looks like you found a private marker placed by the development company for the resort. According to the Coastal Systems website construction started in 2009, so the marker was probably placed as part of surveys done to prepare for the project (it has "EST 07" on it, which I take to mean Established 2007). The marker only has a + on it so my first thought would be that it marked elevation only--a horizontal marker would/should have a triangle on it. However I don't think there are any hard and fast rules about what a private company does on their own sites. The other markings, that I can't read, are identification numbers that would allow it to be referenced on plans and in databases. If you are really curious you might email Coastal Systems and ask what kind of marker it was and what purpose it served.

Something odd that I noticed, or actually DIDN'T notice, were the datasheets for the original marks. I even did a search on the NGS site including destroyed marks (which these definitely are not). No F 246 or H 246 to be found--just the resets.

I blame my Blackberry's small screen for some missed recoveries also. I prefer the convenience of a printout and the ability to make notes on it, especially when I start to remeasure for new calls. I have printed all the datasheets for the counties near me, where I hunt the most. But when I go away and think I may have time to grab a few marks along the way it is wasteful to print all the datasheets for that area, and I usually have a slight plan in mind but it often gets changed by chance--I may end up looking along a totally different path than I planned. If I had taken datasheets that fit my plan I would be out of luck. So I count on getting them on my Blackberry and suffer through reading the small, badly formatted text.

If what you found is UNDER the tower it is most likely reference mark 2 The station is 32 feet northeast of the tower It may well be there. Reference mark 1 is about 40 feet north of the tower too and may remain.

I disagree with Paul and kayakbird. I guess it is my IT background, but when something is gone I want it marked as gone and off the "active list". I treat Not Found reports as challenges, not as Not Found, and I look for them all. A Destroyed mark has been proven to be destroyed (yes, I know there are marks that have been brought back from the dead, but they are small fragment of destroyed marks). I am not sure what is so difficult about getting information from the destroyed marks' datasheets--they still exist, you just need to look them up by PID or include destoryed marks on a datasheet extract. Am I missing something?

Sorry! The link to the Google book was broken. Here it is again: HYPSOMETRY PRECISE LEVELING IN THE UNITED STATES 1900 1903 WITH A READJUSTMENT OF THE LEVEL NET AND RESULTING ELEVATIONS. One think I noticed in the CGS note that the mark is 8 feet above the tracks, and it looks like it is more like 4 feet now. I don't think that is typical--although a few people here have remarked that tracks are often raised when they are reballasted I have found the reverse to be true in my area--clearances are so tight that there are marks on the sidewalls of bridges stating not to allow the tracks to be higher than that. Conrail completed a huge clearance project in the 1990s that LOWERED tracks in many places. However, I have no doubt the mark you found is the same, as the milepost is a great reference and it obviously has not changed in the last 100 years (335A to 335 is insignificant). Even when railroads DO change their milepost distances they rarely change the location of the mileposts. Now get out there and look for the other old CGS marks! You might be be the first to find since they were placed.

The bolt (it is probably a round headed brass bolt and not a spike) and "USBM" most likely date from the turn of the 20th century, possibly as early as the 1880s by my guess. I searched Google Books and came up with the following: HYPSOMETRY PRECISE LEVELING IN THE UNITED STATES 1900 1903 WITH A READJUSTMENT OF THE LEVEL NET AND RESULTING ELEVATIONS. It appears to be part of a level line that is named x2, with the first letter indicating the position in the line, e.g. A2 through Z2, if all letters are used. This mark is R2 and in Huntsville is Q2 on the city hall. If you scroll up and down in the book you can see the other x2 marks in the line. A quick check the NGS site showed that quite a few of them (I found L2, M2, N2, O2 and P2) are in the database but weren't found at some point. S2 also appears to be in the NGS database but is listed incorrectly as a disk and is actually a carved square. If you want to do some more research you can search the CGS's Annual Reports. I doubt those X's are anything at all. They look to be folds in the rock rather than chiseled marks. First, they aren't mentioned in the 1903 description, second, they don't point to the mark, and third, bench marks (elevation marks) don't usually have reference marks. Edited to fix broken link

Planet Eldorado is an excellent place to view datasheets--you can choose from the NGS site or Geocaching. I haven't found a good map application that likes my BlackBerry, and I am actually holding off on a new phone until I can hopefully find something that works with either iPhone or Android phones. I tried Google Earth and Foxtrots excellent kml add-in, but I don't think GE mobile will access an offline file through Javascript, which is how Foxtrot's app works. I tried it on an iPad and it doesn't blow up or anything,it just doesn't show any benchmarks. So I generally use my GPSr with the Planet Eldorado site. To be honest, I still prefer paper datasheets though. They are easier to read and I can make notations on them.

Chiknlips45, you can move the icons to your Garmin with XImage. Once they are in the unit they stay in the unit. Atwell Family, adjusted and scaled don't relate to the coins in GSAK at all. They refer to how the coordinates of various benchmarks were determined-- I will refer you to the introduction to benchmarking to read more about that. The four statuses of the coins on GSAK are the status of the mark. Three of them reflect the status of the mark--is it found, not found, etc. I haven't ever used GSAK so I don't know how those statuses relate to what is downloaded, but I suspect it is the mark's status as of the last recovery. I have always downloaded my data directly from the NGS and set my starting status for ALL MARKS as "Not Searched For" as soon as I import them into Mapsource. I use the datasheets to tell the NGS's status for that mark.

In general, my thinking is that there was a station set in 1864, then Sullivan showed up and set one in 1865, perhaps not knowing about the 1864 one. In 1892 the 1864 one was found and the chiseled arrow RMs set. In 1927 the disks were set in the 1864/1892 hole. Somewhere one or more errors seem to have crept into the datasheets. It could be that one of the marks isn't the one we think it is and there is a third hole out there somewhere (we did a pretty good job of looking but we could have missed something for sure), or it could be that a description is off--it seems "S" is described as being in two different directions and two separate distances from Sugar Loaf 1892. Is it the same mark or is there another? I would be happy to take another trip up the hill. It isn't an arduous hike and the more minds the better. This time I could even remember my regular compass--the one on my GPSr was just not behaving well. Edited for grammatical issues.

It has been so long since I loaded the images that I am pretty much guessing at this. To get the images into Mapsource you put them in your user folder, e.g. C:\Users\Matthew\Documents\My Garmin\Custom Waypoint Symbols. They have to be bitmaps and have to be named xxx where xxx is a number from 000 to 023 (there are 24 spots right?). You should find a directory with that name already created, and blue dot images in it. The part I don't remember well is how to get them to your Garmin, but I am pretty sure XImage does that for you. I will send the images directly to you. Here is how I use the images: 000 = not searched for. 001 = found 002 = not found 003 = unlisted mark--the ones don't have enough data for a datasheet. They are listed at the bottom of the datasheets when you retrieve a county and select Browse mode. At one point I thought I might look for them but I haven't really gotten around to it. 004 = unlisted mark found (so far I only have ONE of these) 005 = unlisted mark not found 006 = destroyed mark The categories to the right parallel the images to a point, but not directly. I hope you get the idea. As for getting the gpx file to load correctly into Mapsource, I have had issues with that before and I can't recall my solution. Foxtrot, do we need to download the files from the DATASHEETS link or the ARCHIVED DATASHEETS link to use with your program? I can never remember!

Blackdog Trackers posted pics of Sugar Loaf S in 2004 so I doubt that the hole held a bar. I suspect he saw the Sugar Loaf Reset and thought it was a triangle. He mentioned that it was near a removed disk, and that had to be one of the Sugar Loaf Reset RMs. Maybe we SHOULD have dug more!

With Garmins you can create your own custom symbols. A long time ago I created a set to help me remember what marks I had searched for/found/not found, etc and after each benchmarking trip I modify the waypoints to show the appropriate symbol. I also use the Garmin categories in the same way so I can filter the various marks in Mapsource. If anyone wants the custom symbols I can send them to you. This was discussed a long time ago also, at Forum link. I can't recall if anyone asked for the images at that time.

Since I was the one with Foxtrot I guess I should be the first to comment, but he pretty much summed up our day on the mountain. He and I spent about 3 hours up there, or at least it FELT like 3 hours. It was at least 2. We measured and measured. I even carried a 1 inch PVC pipe with me so we could get a level measurement from the suspected "S" mark to the 1892 mark, which came up as 25.3 feet, as he mentions. On my previous visit to Sugar Loaf I had a 10 year old hold the dumb end of the tape for me at the hole in the boulder while I tried to eyeball the distance to the 1892 mark--the difference in elevations is about 5 feet. I came up with 25(ish) feet at that time and was pretty happy with the result. Like he said, we searched at the location indicated by our GPS units for the "S" mark and found nothing at all, and not even anything suitable for the placement of a mark. The whole area was small boulders with no real flat area to carve a hole. I won't say it couldn't be done, as Ernmark and I were also stumped by the supposed location of another Sullivan mark at Maryland Heights, which, if it was where the coordinates indicated, was in a very unlikely location in the crotch of a ledge. I have seen stranger locations (three visits to Port Clinton 1880 have turned up nothing but a lot of head scratching that the mark would have been set in a crack in the boulder that is 6 inches wide and 2 feet deep, or HOW it could have been set--there is no room to manipulate a drill and hammer at all). The suspected "S" mark, on top of a large boulder, is definitely a man-made thing. Someone took the time to flatten out a spot on the boulder and then to drill a hole into that flat spot. The hole appears to have been chiseled instead of drilled because it is very irregular in shape and is even a bit undercut at spots. It is also HUGE for a tri-station drill hole, probably 1 1/2 inches in "diameter", if I can use that word. It is located at the back of the boulder (back being the place away from the 1892 mark) and to the side of the boulder, not centered or even at a place that could be considered on top. I searched the top of the boulder for small chisel marks where a tripod could have been located but didn't see anything obvious. My thinking was based on this image of the setup at Topton. You can clearly see where they made a chisel mark for the near tripod leg to sit in, and I found the indentation in the rock. I stood over the mark and tried to imagine how they would have set up on top of it and came up empty. I just couldn't see how a tripod could have been put over the hole without a lot of extra work. Is it possible that the hole would have only been used for a flag/signal/heliotrope? The other marks we found up there confuse me as much as they did Foxtrot. We found all but one reference mark for Sugar Loaf reset--the mysterious SUGAR LOAF RM with an angle but no distance. It almost made me wonder if Sugar Loaf Reset is in the same location as the original Sugar Loaf (1865?). Without the original description we may never know, but is it possible that Sugar Loaf is the chiseled triangle we all found, and Sugar Loaf Reset is in one of the reference marks (a drill hole)? So now, while I used to be positive that the oddly shaped hole in the big boulder was Sugar Loaf S, I now have a bit of doubt about everything on top of that mountain.

They have a map of survey markers. If you are interested in recovering them you might want to contact their GIS or engineering department and see if they have any interest. I recently completed the recovery of 240 markers in a nearby county with the blessing of their GIS department. I didn't find any online datasheets, but then again I didn't give it my best effort.

I'll bite... Your statement that geocaching would be a "boost" to the AT is without any factual basis at all and the statements you use to back it up are also anecdotal at best. We have no idea how many geocachers would "use" the AT, what percentage of them would "keep an eye out for trouble". On the reverse side, you didn't mention how many would "abuse" the trail or "cause trouble", but I would think there would be some of that. I have read enough of the geocaching forums to read of actual damage done by geocachers, so it is not hard to understand why a business or government might not see it as the wonderful thing it is within your mind. It takes just one bad incident to discolor a reputation (ever hear that one "aw sh*t is worth 10 attaboys?). Although I am in no way opposed to geocaching I admit that my picture of how it would occur on the AT is that people would traipse up and down the first mile of trail from a parking area, their kids running off the trail and making general nuisances of themselves, to grab the easiest caches. That last one is just my opinion and not anyone else's. I am a benchmarker, and only a benchmarker. I have used the AT a number of times to look for triangulation stations in my area and have been grateful it existed, or my 3 mile walk through the woods would have been pretty tough. (I have even searched along the "old" AT, which was moved at some point to avoid the Indiantown Gap Military Reservation and now runs along the top of a different mountain ridge.) I have also nearly missed the blue blaze on a few occasions, so maybe I will volunteer to help mark the trail in my area.

I have always figured that these are marks where the descriptive text was created during the more recent recovery--1952 in your case--not because the recovery was really a Found, but because the description was in a different location (file folder perhaps?) and was used for the 1952 recovery, then entered as part of the Not Found portion of the recovery. Maybe it was a different agency. Your example has the CGS setting the mark and the USGS recovering the mark (although I would expect the reverse of this to happen).

I don't take it personally. I blame it on being inexperienced. If it happened now I don't know what I would blame it on though. I think we knocked at the door and nobody answered so we just looked at the mark and continued our quest without much measuring. We may have measured from the rail quickly. I didn't post a pic so I am not sure we took the time to get one. Are you living in the York area now? Or just working with the M&P for a bit?

As one of the previous "finders" of this disk, I can see your point! I recall the find, but not in any detail. I am pretty sure gnbrotz and I didn't measure anything, since it was a house. I don't think there was nobody home so we probably just moseyed up to the step, saw a disk and claimed it. Neither of us looked at the date on it (I am going to give the excuse that I was new then!). Based on the information you provided I have changed my log to Not Found.

Based on the disk stampings you MAY have enough evidence to say that MS0004 is destroyed. Reset disks are typically stamped differently--for instance I would expect this disk to say "K 331 RESET" at the top and "1950" at the bottom. With the 1937 stamping it would appear you have the original disk in a different location, with new stamping, and you might convince Deb Brown to mark it destroyed.

Papa -Bear is right (as usual). There are aluminum disks. I have seen reference to them in descriptions as being aluminum and have seen them with my very own eyes. They seem to be circa 1900 as PB mentioned. I have searched for some of my local marks based on Primary Leveling books that I found on Google Books and some mention aluminum markers. I just looked at one book and it lists both bronze and aluminum markers from what appears to be the same level line and date in 1900. I am not sure what this means. Maybe they were switching from aluminum to bronze and had old disks left to use.

1. I looked at other pics of the disk and agree... the datum point is visible and in good shape. I am not even sure I would report this as poor condition. It is completely usable. 2. The mark probably IS bronze, no matter what it seems to be. I don't think they ever used any other metal. The patina on disks can make them look like everything from gold to steel. Some even get a green patina like copper roofs. 3. There are some threads here about flat vs rounded disks. If I recall correctly there were only a few years of flat disks around the turn of the 20th century--1899-1905ish. Someone who retains this sort of thing will chime in soon I bet!

It's real: National Map Corps They give you a USGS topo quad as an area and you take GPS readings at marked locations on the map (churches, schools, etc. They call them "features". Survey marks are not among them.). I was going to do it but they didn't have my closest quad, and then I started benchmarking, where I feel I am doing more good. I would hesitate to present the map corps ID in a way that makes me an official representative of anything at all. If I had one I would probably only show it to say I had a relationship with the USGS as a volunteer. I would NEVER use it to get an escort to a benchmark (for one thing I am pretty sure the Map Corps doesn't do anything with survey marks). To me that is misrepresentation. In fact, presenting it while benchmarking is misrepresentation. It implies that you are doing an activity for the Map Corps when you are not. They don't collect data on survey marks. I always ask permission of private landowners, but rarely of public/government (non-military. I'm not crazy!) property. Like Bill93 said, the government is simply NOT going to give permission to do something that you can get into danger doing and current society considers pretty much everything to be dangerous. I once asked a city government agency for permission to visit a mark on their property and was granted it, but I didn't ask for official permission--I just asked the county engineer. This gave me the confidence to be on the property and answer that I "had permission", but I really knew if push came to shove I was there pretty much on my own. The engineer certainly didn't write me a pass to be there. Another time I asked the state government for permission to walk across 300 feet of semi-protected land to find a mark near a dam. I was denied by the wildlife protection manager, I suspect either because he wanted to feel his power, or that the mark was destroyed and he didn't want me to find that out. This is on the same property where they allow goose hunting, but I couldn't walk into an empty field and look at the ground. (I am still working on a way around this one. I suspect a Map Corps ID would have helped. The manager wanted to know my official status and I might have been able to present that ID and get out to the mark. Too bad I won't do that.) My thought process on the highway mark would be to do it at a quiet time, hope for no police presence, plan for police presence, stop my car at the north end of the overpass, in the median if I could fit, leap out, run back, see that the mark did or didn't exist, take a pic if possible, and then bolt. If a cop stopped I would simply tell him what I was doing and hope for the best. From what I know they rarely shoot benchmarkers, so the worst end result would be a ticket of some sort. That said, this one wouldn't be on my "hot list"--it is fairly new and unexciting, and finding it would only be rewarding in that I didn't get run over by a truck.