Cyclometh

I haven't had any joints replaced per se, but I did have surgery a few years back to remove three bones from my left wrist to correct a really rare bone disease called Kienbock's. So my left arm is about half an inch shorter than my right. Doesn't make much difference for caching unless I have to do some serious bushwhacking, as climbing is a bit more difficult, but certainly not impossible. My wrist won't bend as far as a normal one and it's sensitive to shock, so I have to take care, but other than that, no worries. In another 5 or 10 years, I'll have to have it fused and a plate put in it, but at least I'll have gotten 15 extra years out of it!

Actually, would it be fair to call it a "geocache"? Isn't the term "geo" specific to Earth? I would imagine a Moon cache would be called a "lunacache" and a Mars cache would be called an "arecache".

I wonder how hard it would be to get NASA to include a micro with a logbook to be dropped off by the next rover. I'm serious. It's not much weight, and could just be dropped anywhere. I imagine it could be sold as a publicity stunt. Imagine the props for whoever's FTF on that one.

So what map datum do they use for Mars maps, anyway?

The guy indicated a certain fondness for the rock and called it "old blondie" for some reason. He was showing a few signs of impatience and I didn't want to wear out my welcome. Maybe I just don't handle things the same way you do, but I'm comfortable with how I handled things. And no, I didn't see the station disk. In fact, I'm not sure there actually IS a station disk, as the desccription isn't clear on that point. It mentions both a disk and a hole. That's why I submitted a "poor", because the rock was there, but the actual mark was not visible. Since the station was actually a pin in a hole in the rock, that made the rock in my mind the most important feature of the station (it had been reset from the original drill hole 3 times since 1872).

It seemed like he felt he was indulging me by letting me come onto the land and that I was being just a bit of an inconvenience. Maybe I just misread him. I didn't have tools to scrape barnacles with, though.

When hunting Redcap (GCJ05Y), after finding the cache, my son and I were on the way out when I noticed some flowers (fresh, no less) sitting on a hump of dirt about 75 feet from the cache. There were two cigarettes arranged around the flowers, making a strange little shrine. Here's the log with a photo of it: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/log.aspx?LU...4b-5a0720a9347a Anyone found things like this before? I was a bit perplexed by it.

Some of you remember my earlier thread about finding a mark on private property. Well, I contacted the person who owned the property and went out there today. He seemed a bit bemused by the fact that someone would want to hunt survey marks, but wsa good enough to give me access to his beach. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to recover the mark proper; it was on a rock covered in barnacles, but I was able to find one reference mark and the pin for another mark and learn a bit about local history. Here's my report on GC.com: http://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?Pid=SY3256 I'm starting to find all kinds of interesting information about local history just on the survey marks, both existing and gone, around Budd Inlet. You can follow them in a pattern through time to see how development occured around here. It's a fascinating backdoor into history, and the mention of various persons in datasheets gives great jumpoff points for other research.

I like BDT's ideas. You could also have some sort of contest or maybe a drawing where the entry "fee" is five recovery reports or something. The drawing would be for your name to be used as a station name. You could also make some "survey mark geocoins" for the centennial, make them trackable and release them into caches or turn them over to folks here in various areas to release them into caches. You'd get a lot of people who'd never heard of benchmarking before interested.

Even if the quality of those reports coul be verified in every isntance (and if it could, you might as well use the verification to do the report), I think the NGS relies on the fact that individuals make the reports and the process is set up that way. If I were the NGS, I wouldn't accept reports from people on behalf of other individuals, as the person who actually did the recovery isn't the person making the report. Now, maybe you can find a way to do a search of all the marks recovered or destroyed on geocaching and cross-reference that to the NGS datasheets so you can get a list of marks not recovered in the last two years on NGS but recovered on geocaching.com. Then you could contact those persons and ask if they would be willing to submit a recovery report to the NGS. You can date the report in the past, so even if it's a couple of years old that's not a problem. You'd just have to be sure they could recall all the details of it and were willing to do it. Destroyed marks might be another matter. You could ask those folks to submit NOT FOUNDs or simply leave them out. The net result would be an improvement to the NGS data set, with real reports from the people who did the recovery. You'd also have a few annoyed folks on gc.com who don't like being contacted, but they should be very few. And there'll be some who don't have accounts any longer, or simply don't respond.

I generally use the term "benchmarker" and call what I do "benchmarking". Sometimes I'll say "benchmark hunter" and the activity "benchmark hunting". That's for informal types of discussions or descriptions. When I describe it to other people who aren't familiar with the concepts, I explain it by saying I'm a mapping enthusiast and "amateur survey mark hunter", and that I enjoy hunting survey marks for the challenge, the history, and the fun. When discussions of what I do regards the NGS or USGS (I joined TNMC, waiting on my final assignment), I may use different terminology. That also gets away from the fact that while we have a general term- benchmarking- not all, and in fact, the minority of survey marks are actually "bench marks".

An update- thanks to the sage advice I got in this thread, I was able to locate the property owner, who has agreed to meet at his place on Sunday afternoon when there's a low tide to try and locate the mark and its reference markers. Seems like a nice gentleman, and I look forward to meeting him. I'll post what I find, if anything. Oh- it turns out that the guy is a civil engineer (or retired, I'm not clear on that) and knows a bit about marks himself! Also, his family, or the one he married into, has been in that area since around 1880 or so. The original station monumented at that location was called DENNIS, so I'll ask him if his wife's family had anyone named Dennis living there back then.

another over reaction, Maybe, but this is important stuff we're dealing with and my mistake could cost someone thousands of dollars. Not in this case, because if you had seen the mark, you'd know it's impossible to miss- you can see it from the street and the building's freakin' huge. I could give you to reach instructions that said "go to legion and 7th, look at the southeast corner and walk across the lawn. Now look down about knee height. Enjoy" and you wouldn't have any trouble. But if I'd done something like that on a mark that's not so simple... not cool.

Actually, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I was in the area of the bad coordinates that same day, looking for another mark that's long gone. I may have taken a waypoint and accidentally used the wrong coordinates in my report to NGS. That seems the most likely scenario. Rest assured I'll never include coordinates on any report ever again, and I sincerely doubt I'll submit any more recovery reports to NGS, outside of something truly exceptional. The last thing the database needs is more cruft with poor quailty reports. I'm truly sorry for the problem. In this case, I really doubt it's caused anyone any trouble, but it's still very disconcerting to find out I did this.

I emailed Deb to ask that the coordinates be removed and the recovery date updated.

That was my recovery report. I didn't realize I'd gotten the coordinates wrong. I was simply trying to be helpful. I submitted the report on February 4, 2006. Several of my reports have gotten the date wrong. Here's the coordinates in my GC.com report, which I recall I used to get the values in the NGS report. N 47° 02.584 W 122° 53.991 As you can see, those are exactly correct. So either I made a mistake in converting the coordinates, or an error occured in entering that data in the datasheet. I won't submit any more recovery reports to NGS for any marks that aren't exceptional (haven't been found in a long time, etc) from now on. And I'll certainly never include handheld coordinates again. Sorry for the trouble. Edited to add: And no, it's not suitable for sattellite observation. There's tall buildings all over the place and trees to well above the horizon in every direction from that location.

See my profile for some caches in Olympia that are fun- or at least, I was able to find them. Ronald's Secret Park Lacey Civic Plaza Poor Man's Pool The Ghost Railroad (this is a nice walk) I live in Oly, so feel free to give me a shout when you come down.

LOL! Now you are "armed and dangerous"! :-) -Paul- You're not kidding. This will also be extremely helpful if I got the quad I wanted from the USGS for the National Map.

I don't think they have to get permission, but they prefer to. In the State of Washington, a registered surveyor has the right to enter private property in order to conduct survey operations, and it's a crime to interfere with them. That said, it's also in the law that the surveyor must do their best to not be a jackass and work with the property owner and minimize issues. Keep in mind that many of these marks were monumented before these areas were sold for private property, or have since changed hands.

Well, I've learned a lot today. First, that the shorelines in Washington are largely at the border of the navigable water depth. Buffer zones and the areas under the state Shoreline Management Act are described as being around those areas, up to two miles in either direction (!), but remain private property. It turns out that the path I was on the first time actually belongs to the Thurston County Parks and Recreation Department. So does the parcel next to it. Most of the rest are privately owned. I've identified the owner of the parcel that the mark supposedly is on, if it still exists, and it is well within the borders of that parcel, so I'll contact that person and see if I can go down to the beach there via their property. Thanks for all the help, folks!

Holy moly- the mother lode, Batman! Nicely done! http://www.geodata.org I had no idea this was there. Who knew my county was so on top of this kind of thing?

You can get DESTROYED datasheets from NGS by simply checking the box that says "Include destroyed PIDS" or some such.

Thanks! Good question. I think they do, at least there. For some reason, there's a few private beaches on Budd and Eld Inlets. Priest Point Park, for example, across Budd Inlet to the east has a public beach, but you can't go very far south before you run into a big sign warning you off. As far as this particular beach, the section I want access to doesn't seem to have any "don't enter" signs on it, and other people apparently use it. Near as I can tell, there's nobody living there- unless there's a house at the top of the bluff, which I didn't see. However, it looks like the mark is much closer to Leavelle Street, or the houses thereabouts. Given that it may actually be hard to get to the mark location from 46th or may involve crossing other property lines along the way, I'll probably go down there first and ask if someone's willing to let me walk through their backyard or whatnot to get access to the mark at low tide. It's covered by water at high tide. I believe that largely the same rules apply- if it's not posted, you're probably OK, assuming you're not being a jerk or whatever. As I said, there's what seems to be 3 parcels there, according to the lot numbers, which I assume are addresses. The north and eastern ones seemed to be "marked off", but the southern one had a path going down and to the south of the gate. On the whole, the southern parcel seemed to be a bit less "development friendly", as the bluff goes right out to the beach and you'd have to do a lot of work, not to mention shoreline mitigation, in order to build anything there. I'll definitely post what, if anything, I find down there if I can access it. Quite an interesting mark historically.

I love Windows Live Local: http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=...Access%20Point_

Actually, looking at Google Earth, maybe I can get to the site via a different road. I'll check that first next time I'm out that way.