Cowles Mountain Benchmark

[+sandiegoellers]

My wife and I just got back from a hike on Cowles Mountain here in San Diego, and did a little caching. My question is that there is a benchmark on top of Cowles that I want to log. I did a search and can't seem to find it in the geocaching database. The PID is DC1471.

 

Could someone help me find it?

 

Thanks,

 

sandiegoellers

[Bill93]

For whatever reason, this mark got classified as Destroyed in 1983. Destroyed marks were not copied to the geocaching data base of benchmarks and cannot be added. You may want to enter it in Waymarking.com

 

However, there are recovery entries after that. It is weird that there is a GEOCAC entry dated 1998, which I think was before the geocaching site was established. I suppose someone could have dug up their photos from 1998 and entered the old recovery recently.

 

The last recovery entry on the current NGS data sheet appears to be from a professional surveyor who found the disk good enough to take GPS data and found it 41 cm from the published value, assuming they are given in the same datum and epoch, which I am not certain I understand well enough. That at least shows it doesn't have totally mistaken coordinates.

 

Maybe DaveD will enlighten us.

 

DC1471 HISTORY - 19830206 DESTROYED NGS

DC1471 HISTORY - 19980424 GOOD GEOCAC

DC1471 HISTORY - 20080426 POOR INDIV

 

DC1471 STATION RECOVERY (1983)

DC1471

DC1471'RECOVERY NOTE BY NATIONAL GEODETIC SURVEY 1983 (CLN)

DC1471'SURFACE MARK REPORTED DESTROYED.

DC1471

DC1471 STATION RECOVERY (1998)

DC1471

DC1471'RECOVERY NOTE BY GEOCACHING 1998 (GAH)

DC1471'PRIMARY MARK RECOVERED, DAMAGE TO CENTER OF DISC BUT LEGIBLY STAMPED

DC1471'COWLES 1939.

DC1471

DC1471 STATION RECOVERY (2008)

DC1471

DC1471'RECOVERY NOTE BY INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS 2008 (JJH)

DC1471'THE MARK IS BADLY MUTILATED, BUT THE NAME COWLES AND THE WORDS CONTROL

DC1471'MARK ARE STILL READABLE. THE DIFFERENTIALLY POST PROCESSED POSITION,

DC1471'DERIVED FROM 59 MINUTES OF CARRIER PHASE DATA IS N 32 48 46.15096

DC1471'LAT, W 117 01 54.73634 LONG.

DC1471'

DC1471'THE EPOCH DATE IS JAN 1, 2002 FOR THE REFERENCE CORS DATA.

DC1471'

DC1471'A COWLES REFERENCE MARK WAS ALSO FOUND. THIS MARK IS ALSO BADLY

DC1471'MUTILATED. THE DGPS POSITION, DERIVED FROM 13 MINUTES OF CP DATA IS

DC1471'

DC1471'N 32 48 46.28462 LAT, W 117 01 54.84243 LONG. THIS RM IS

DC1471'APPROXIMATELY 328 DEG AT ROUGHLY 4.6 METERS.

Edited July 25, 2008 by Bill93

[+sandiegoellers]

I don't know what they consider "destroyed", but it seems to be in pretty decent shape.

[+Black Dog Trackers]

sandiegoellers -

 

I'm curious about this find. Does the benchmark disk say:

COWLES, or COWLES RM, or COWLES RM1, or COWLES RM2 ?

[monkeykat]

i'd be interested in seeing some pictures if it went from stamping obliterated to GOOD.

[Wintertime]

For whatever reason, this mark got classified as Destroyed in 1983.

It's odd that on the old (1994) datasheet that's on PeakBagging.com, there's a GOOD report from 1987. Now, there's no 1987 report and, as you noted, the station is listed as having been reported DESTROYED in 1983.

 

However, there are recovery entries after that. It is weird that there is a GEOCAC entry dated 1998, which I think was before the geocaching site was established. I suppose someone could have dug up their photos from 1998 and entered the old recovery recently.

Or he meant to put "2008." I see that GAH has also recently (2008) filed a bunch of reports for marks in Yosemite.

 

The last recovery entry on the current NGS data sheet appears to be from a professional surveyor who found the disk good enough to take GPS data

I actually had a talk with a professional surveyor about that person (JJH) a while back, because JJH had gone through Yosemite Valley filing a bunch of reports just a year or two after I had done the same. He had all this fancy language about the accuracy of his readings, but seemed not to know the first thing about NGS datasheets. For example, on multiple occasions he expressed surprise that the mark was not at the specified coordinates. Yep, you guessed it--they were scaled coordinates!

 

How would a surveyor not know what scaled coordinates were?? My surveyor friend speculated that they guy might be a contractor hired to do GIS research. He would know how to operate professional GPS gear, but would not be familiar with geodetic stations and NGS datasheets.

 

Perhaps GAH is in a similar situation. He's going around filing reports from Yosemite Valley just a year or so after JJH, including additional MARK NOT FOUND reports for stations that were destroyed decades ago. A bunch of extra work for Deb for no purpose that I can see.

 

Patty