ArtMan

Not responding officially here, but it seems benchmarks can be recovered/logged by as many people as care to do it. I don't view this is a competitive activity, and I often add additional locational information that may help the next person find the benchmark, e.g. distance to a nearby intersection, street address, etc.

Not responding officially here, but it seems benchmarks can be recovered/logged by as many people as care to do it. I don't view this is a competitive activity, and I often add additional locational information that may help the next person find the benchmark, e.g. distance to a nearby intersection, street address, etc.

Excellent plan! I've never gone on an organized geocache outing - though I have dragged unsuspecting friends along - and would be interested in meeting fellow geocachers. Is there any interest in this area in benchmarking (if that's the term) as well as conventional geocaching? I have found it particularly interesting and I wonder if others have, too?

Excellent plan! I've never gone on an organized geocache outing - though I have dragged unsuspecting friends along - and would be interested in meeting fellow geocachers. Is there any interest in this area in benchmarking (if that's the term) as well as conventional geocaching? I have found it particularly interesting and I wonder if others have, too?

Why bring a tape measure (or a rangefinder)? Maybe you have a $20,000 surveyor-quality GPS, but my $100 etrex normally gives me accuracy of 20' at best. Sometimes the easiest way of finding these things, which may be obscured by lawn or foliage, is to measure the distance to particular landmarks mentioned in the benchmark report. But if your GPS is good enough for you, who am I to argue? :-)

I'm starting to realize that identifying and photographing benchmarks requires some extra tools. I'm just starting out to formulate my kit, and your needs may be different depending on the kind of station you are recovering and the part of the country you're in. That said, here's my list: (a) GPS - actually, not really required. Most descriptions are adequate without reference to GPS, but it might help you navigate to the general area. ( Tape measure - often descriptions include distance from nearby landmarks. 50-100 feet would probably be idea, but even a normal household 12' model will be of help. (When all else fails, remember that for many people a good stride is about 3' or one meter. You can pace it off.) © Long bladed screwdriver - preferably an old one, to poke the ground to discover benchmarks that have been grown over by vegetation (d) Compass - locations are often given in terms of distance and direction (e.g., 12.5 feet south of the culvert) (e) Pruning shears - to cut back vegetation grown over your benchmark. (f) Gardener's gloves - for cleaning up the benchmark (g) Small brush or wisk broom - to remove debris from benchmark area (h) Water and rag - I wouldn't use anything stronger, but these things are meant to be out in the rain, so surely plain water can't hurt. Sometimes taking a photo when the water has only partly evaporated will make the stamping more visible. That's my list with less than a week's experience in the Benchmark recovery business. I'd be happy for other suggestions to add to the kit.

There are many, many benchmarks that are not in this site's db. Probably all states and many localities have their own stations that are not included in the national NGS database. If the disc has - as it should - information about what agency placed it, you can contact that agency. If not, try your county engineering or survey office, or the state GIS agency. My county (Arlington, VA) has datasheets that can be downloaded from the web that include maps - far more user-friendly than many dscriptions in the NGS database. Good luck!

Excellent suggestion, Rogbarn. Unfortunately, existing titles and captions can not be edited (unless I've somehow missed it). Narrative logs can be edited, but it seems that the only way to edit the text relating to an picture is to delete the image entirely, then re-upload with new caption/title. Perhaps someday soon, Jeremy? :-)

Excellent suggestion, Rogbarn. Unfortunately, existing titles and captions can not be edited (unless I've somehow missed it). Narrative logs can be edited, but it seems that the only way to edit the text relating to an picture is to delete the image entirely, then re-upload with new caption/title. Perhaps someday soon, Jeremy? :-)

I'm glad it's not just my imagination again! I suspect the problem may be on the NGS side since their own system is sometimes very slow. Possibly the requests from geocaching.com are timing out?

Over the last couple of days I've been getting repeated failures in attempts to access the benchmark db. Typical error message below. Anyone else having problems of this nature? Is a solution in sight? Error Type: Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers (0x80040E31) [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired /mark/nearest.asp, line 231 Browser Type: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; T312461) Page: GET /mark/nearest.asp

I see the National Geodetic Survey has provided for submitting recovery information, and they seem to welcome submissions from individuals (http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/FORMS_PROCESSING-cgi-bin/recvy_entry_www.prl). Have any benchmark cachers submitted their info to NGS? It seems this would be a worthy enterprise.