Metro Benchmarking®

[+Ernmark]

..first, let me say that I by no means live in a true 'rural' area...but close enough that I can get to marks that are in the 'wilds'.. Anyway, I was cajoled into a shopping trip in the DC area by my ABS (Anti-Benchmarking Spouse), so I was given clearance to disappear for 3 hours & look for local marks. I had sized up about 2 dozen w/ in 5 miles or so...piece of cake in my area. But in the metro area, the traffic & amount of widening/destroying/creating that goes on, adds an additional dimension to the Metro hunt - every bit as challenging as the multi-fork, dim woods road, 75-yr old to reach descriptions. For those of you who do most of your hunting in these areas, I have a whole new respect for the amount of time you need to put in, just to navigate to the location you are heading for..as well as the research needed to locate & compare references to the present day. I've done some city-hunting before, but limited my searches to out-of the way areas - it's just that this weekend, I fanned out from the center of a large Retail Googolplex.

 

..Anyway - congrats to those of you who manage most of your finds in these areas!

 

PS - other observation...don't hunt in the snow! (ran into a closed park, several places where I could not pull off to look & some that were truly entombed in a thick layer of ice, or a 4-foot mound of plowed snow) ....but I sure had a great time anyway ! ..might just leave the rest of the waypoints in the GPSr for next time!

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

Luckily when we were in DC we had a full run of the Capitol area.

The town had been evacuated from the approaching Rita.

 

Not us we took full advantage of going the wrong way down one way streets,circling the same block 5 times for trying to just get right over there.

 

I love the "RURAL"hunt no traffic,no cars,no people...well most of the time.

[+PFF]

Metro hunting is tough for the reasons mentioned above. The advantage is that there are food and bathroom facilities nearby!

 

Rural areas have less traffic, and when you have to ask permission to go on land, you usually meet nice, cooperative people. But the marks are more spread out.

 

I really admire the folks who spend hours (or an entire day) hiking up a peak to snag a single mark!

 

-Paul-

[AZcachemeister]

This makes me wonder about my percentages..

 

Neighborhood street-curbs, no problem.

City street intersections, sometimes!

Mountain peaks, absolutely.

Rural highways and back roads, the best!

[+Harry Dolphin]

I mostly run rampant across North Jersey, with forays into New York and Orange Counties,NY, and Pike County, Pa. That'll take me from downtown Paterson to the AT on Kitatinny Ridge. Burgeoning surburbia wreaks havoc on benchmarks. The road gets widened. (There are actually stations listed as 10 feet from the centerline of the road!) The construction of I-80 took out thirty or so benchmarks. The MIT disk was in a mining camp. It's now 15 feet from someone's back door. The old industrial areas give way to condo complexes. Then there were the idiots surveyors who put out a hundred disks, or so, along the Passaic and Hackensack River fronts in 1913. In clay tile pipes! Not a one of them remains. Harbor Line 1913 had at least 26 RMs around Newark Bay. Not a one remains.

Percentage-wise, I think I do better in Manhattan, than in North Jersey. I took the day-trip around the Capitol Mall in DC without too much luck (but we did find a number of poor quality Virtual Caches.)

Paul, I prefer the bathroom facilities used by the bears rather than trying to find facilities in urban areas.

I think I'm goig for the disk burie in the concrte island at the intersection of Rte 206 and CR 513 for my 2.

[+shorbird]

In Cleveland(OH), most of the benchmarks are either in the sidewalks(easy!) or in the middle of an intersection(not so easy). Some are in buildings. The most fun for me are along the abandoned railroads, since often there is a trail(tracks are gone), but most of the bridges with benchmarks are still in place. No matter what the terrain, hunting benchmarks is always fun!

[Relic_Hunter_Finder]

Statement: I really prefer rural areas instead of urban, however, when it comes right down to it it's bench marking for the sport of bench markings; besides bench marking seekers can't be to picky or can we?

[+Ernmark]

They're all fun! ...well except for that one that, when I looked up, I found myself standing in the middle of the biggest meanest patch of poison ivy I ever saw. (I somehow managed not to get any on myself..how, I'll never know!)

[Bill93]

Oh, yes, the PI. I had my first reaction last summer at age 56. I usually noticed the knee-high stuff and was careful to not get it on bare skin and to change clothes when I got home, and that seemed to be sufficient for me.

 

This time I figured out afterward that a 6 ft high weed I broke off to get at LE0251 was poison ivy, and I had spread it around some before figuring it out. The undergrowth was pretty dense.

 

You can also find PI in urban settings, though it usually isn't giant.