domiller

Thanks for the encouragement and helpful hints. EJ1877 has now been completely recovered (station, both reference marks, *and* azimuth mark). If I have time after work tomorrow, EJ1878 is next on my list.

Yes it can -- once you figure out how to work the interface. I just spent *far* too much time reproducing the map you made, but now I understand how to do it. I suppose I'm going to have to go searching for more triangulation stations. I've spent the rest of my evening writing two Perl programs. The first pulls all the benchmark data sheets for central Arkansas from NGS and stores each in a separate file. The second pulls out the lat/lon coordinates to load into MapPoint. There may already be something out there to do that, but I didn't find it (maybe another case of not looking closely enough). Having all the relevant datasheets on my laptop, and a map showing where they all are will make hunting them down just that much easier.

There's just nothing like answering my own question. I really should have done a bit more research first. For future forum searchers, the answer is to go to the NGS website and look at the original data sheet. The directions/distances to the reference marks are listed there. The azimuth mark will (apparently) have a direction but no distance (at least for my two examples). Now I need to take another couple of trips into the woods.

I'm fairly new to this, and having a great time. However, since I live in the middle of nowhere, and like to find marks that are also in the middle of nowhere, I have a couple of problems. In two cases I have found triangulation stations (Holliday (EJ1878) and Wye (EJ1877)) by coordinates alone, as all the referenced trees, roads, witness posts, etc. were gone or moved. My question is, having found the station, is there an easy way to find the reference marks and/or azimuth marks? Are they a specific direction from the station? A specific distance? I managed to find RM1 for Wye by literally walking into it., but the woods around Holliday don't lend themselves to casual strolls. Is there a document somewhere describing the layout of triangulation stations? Thanks for any help. Dale