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found a BM, but...


river ranger

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I have found benchmarks with gps stamped on it in CA that I believe are placed by Caltrans( witness post nearby marked Caltrans) that are not in our database. They are dated 1999 so maybe Caltrans places it's own disks out using gps but we don't have access to that database yet. Anyone in California know about this?

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Sadly, survey markers often fall prey to vandalism, removal, or other forms of destruction by people completely ignorant of what they represent. I have known of cases where this has occured for the following reasons:

 

Paranoid property owners who were afraid that the marker might be part of some government conspiracy to cheat them out of some of their land.

 

People with some kind of grudge against the government loooking for any means of revenge.

 

People who thought the marker may contain gold or some other valuable material.

 

People who believed that by moving the marker to their neighbor's property they could then lay claim to part of the neighbor's land.

 

People who believed that by eliminating all the markers in the area they could halt the progress of unwelcome construction projects.

 

The fact is that once the markers are set, the government has no further interest in them. They serve the needs of surveyors and engineers and where they are destroyed the only real result is that the cost of doing business goes up for these professions, which in turn hurts the community by pushng up the cost of living for the entire area. NGS markers have nothing to do with property rights and those set to facilitate specific projects will be reset if damaged, raising the cost of the project and potentially resulting in higher taxes, but not stopping the development.

 

I hope all Geocachers will help to inform the public of the importance of these points when the opportunity arises, to serve their communities by adopting and protecting the ones in their area, and to discourage any ideas of vandalizing them.

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Centaur is correct. N.A.L.S. stands for the Nevada Association of Land Surveyors. For what it's worth, C.L.S.A. is the California Land Surveyors Association, which works closely with the N.A.L.S. on items of common interest.

 

The NALS & CLSA are professional organizations in their respective states for land surveyors. Most states have some sort professional orginization of some type. They are not government run, but run by the surveyors in a collaborative effort to help with the profession on a local and state level.

 

If I had to guess as to what the cap that you found was, (marked 'NALS GPS') I would assume it to be part of a local GPS calibration network put together through the local NALS chapter. The local CLSA chapter I belong to, The San Joaquin Valley Chapter - CLSA, is working on a similar GPS calibration network. Our caps will probably be marked 'CLSA GPS' when they are finally set.

 

You probably will not find any NGS data sheets on these caps as they are of a local nature. You could try looking on the NALS Website, www.nv-landsurveyors.org for info on that particular series of caps. Being in Reno, the local chapter to contact would be the Lahontan Chapter of the NALS. I don't think that chapter has a website yet, but you should be able to contact them through the state website if you feel so inclined and the voices in your wifes head keep getting louder.

 

Keep on Caching!

- Kewaneh

 

[This message was edited by Kewaneh & Shark on September 01, 2002 at 12:29 PM.]

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