Found Four Benchmarks In Seven Hours Today! :)

[grannyoldr]

We started at 10am and stopped at 2pm. We went all around Leesburg, Lucketts and Lovettsville, Virginia and found four benchmarks! That's a benchmark every hour and fifteen minutes. Of course, we didn't find about 10 other benchmarks we went to.

 

This has been the most benchmarks we've found in a day. What is your record of finding benchmarks?

 

[ArtMan]

Glad you're enjoying Benchmarking. There are several other active participants in the DC/Northern Virginia area, where there are lots of marks to be found, but also many, many lost over the years to sprawl, highway widening and general growth.

 

-ArtMan-

[grannyoldr]

Glad you're enjoying Benchmarking. There are several other active participants in the DC/Northern Virginia area, where there are lots of marks to be found, but also many, many lost over the years to sprawl, highway widening and general growth.

 

-ArtMan-

Yes, Bicknell and I have found this out, to our dismay. That's why we try to go out to places that haven't been touched too much by new construction yet. But it's fun all the same.

[+PFF]

That's a benchmark every hour and fifteen minutes.

 

Give yourself a pat on the back! That's actually fourteen attempts in seven hours, with four "finds". Not a bad total, really.

 

My best solo occurred about two weeks ago, when I arrived at the first BM site at 8:30 AM and visited 18 sites during the next six hours--with 15 finds. However, I must confess that I spent many hours in preparation, including:

 

*Printing the data sheets,

*Making a diagram of some of the marks and their reference points,

*Printing a topo map (and in many cases, an aerial photo),

*Transferring the data to Streets and Trips, which allowed me to set up a very efficient route;

*Arranging the data sheets in the order in which they would be searched, and

*Loading some of them into the GPS.

 

I've calculated that I spend one hour in preparation for every hour on the road. On two occasions, I've teamed up with Neweyess on hunts for 100-year-old marks. We spent so much time researching and preparing for the hunts that finding the marks seemed somewhat anti-climatic. But for us, the research is part of the joy. Or, as a wise man once said, "Planning a trip is almost as much fun as the trip, itself."

 

Summary: If you went on a "casual" hunt and logged four marks in seven hours--with ten others attempted--you did a great job! And I'm sure you had fun, as well.

 

Best regards,

-Paul-

[+bicknell]

Prep does make a big difference. We always print the sheets to take with us, and carry a laptop with a cellular data card. We don't use the laptop much to save battery, but when we stumble across a mark we didn't plan or need some extra info it's there for us.

We sort the BM's in a general geographical path, and make heavy use of my GPS V's driving directions and the "find nearest" on both the GPS V and the Legend we carry around to make sure the next one is close. Sometimes to have to go on a detour to try and see a landmark on private property from a distance.

 

I will say, the marks set on a concrete post 4-6 inches ABOVE the ground are the best. I don't understand all this flush with the ground aka covered in 4-6 inches of dirt after 50 years nonsense. We need a metal detector.

[grannyoldr]

We spent so much time researching and preparing for the hunts that finding the marks seemed somewhat anti-climatic.  But for us, the research is part of the joy.  Or, as a wise man once said, "Planning a trip is almost as much fun as the trip, itself."

Interesting way of doing it. The way Bicknell and I do it is the following:

 

1. Figure out what town/city we want to try (e.g., Berryville, Leesburg, Lovettsville, etc).

 

2. Find a zipcode for the city we want to try.

 

3. Look up the zipcode in the benchmark search

 

4. Print out the list of benchmarks. Print out the information about the benchmarks that we want to go to. The ones we usually go to are the ones that no one has tried to find yet, or at least taken the time to log. We will use the USGS database to see if there are any newer updates on the sites, but we mostly print out what's on the geocaching wesite.

 

5. Bicknell loads the BM's onto his computer and our two GPS's.

 

6. We take our high speed cellular broadband EVDO card with us. Sometimes we find BMs on the GPS (we usually load up by county) that we didn't have in our paper list, and the EVDO card allows us to get on the Internet and look up what's there.

 

7. Go to the site and use the paper directions to find the landmarks in the instructions.

 

8. Hopefully find the Benchmark from here!

 

I guess Bicknell and I mostly go by the seat of our pants and hope a benchmark comes out of it. I think if we did more research it wouldn't be as fun.

[ArtMan]

Another planning approach that I've been using with some success recently includes Jim Cox's excellent program USAPhotoMaps. You can download it from his website.

 

That program allows you to then download aerial photos or topo maps of an area you're interested in and display benchmarks thereon. (It imports benchmark data in the form of XML or GPX files; the latter can be generated using a little utility called BMGPX.)

 

Once you've done this, you can see at a glance where benchmarks are located within a geographic area (a county, say), and you can focus your attention on a particular area or plan out a route more efficiently.

 

(As I visit each benchmark, I delete it from the GPX file, so next time I'll display just the remaining unvisited locations.)

 

Everyone has their own approach. When I got a PDA a while back, I thought I would go paperless. Tried it. Didn't like it. I still prefer to use datasheets on a clipboard. Others swear by the PDA method. I always use the official NGS datasheets; others use printouts from Geocaching.com. Be open to suggestions, but at the end of the day you have to decide what works best for you.

 

-ArtMan-

[+PFF]

Print out the list of benchmarks. Print out the information about the benchmarks that we want to go to. The ones we usually go to are the ones that no one has tried to find yet, or at least taken the time to log.

 

Good system......

 

Be sure to click on NEAREST BENCHMARKS when printing your targets. Several North Carolina hunters went after the rocks marking a county line, recently. A unique mark, to be sure. But all of them missed a standard benchmark just a few feet away--which would have been an easy addition to their collection. During your most recent hunt, you visited a courthouse, but didn't log a church spire 0.2 mile away. Perhaps you were running out of time/gasoline/daylight.

 

On the plus side, you folks showed great wisdom not breaking onto the grounds of that hospital for the mentally ill, to look for the 1898 smokestack! I know Bicknell was tempted!

 

Keep up the good work! I'm enjoying your finds, and your posts in the Forum.....

 

-Paul-

[+Klemmer]

Found three benchmarks in about 10 minutes yesterday, and a couple RM's also (still debating an azimuth mark on another thread here). Of course, we had to hike about 4 hours and up most of a 3000 ft mountain to get there! (and then down again!) Hey, to each his own! We had fun. Oh yeah, we also geocached (actually, planted 4 of them). See AA7647, third picture down, for critter we have to deal with while hunting benchmarks out here on the left coast.

 

Personally, I have gone about 90% paperless, with 3 counties (about 12,000 marks) on my PDA. Paper still good when things get messy, like with the azimuth mark issue I mentioned above.

[+superpowerdave]

My wife found five in one afternoon without having data sheets for any of them, although three of the five turned out to be city discs not included on the geocaching site.

 

As far as we go, we shoot from the hip most of the time. Pick out a spot of town we want to visit and do a general search and then see what's been found and what hasn't. We've gone mostly paperless. I download the data sheets into my iPod but still carry a notebook for things I want for quick reference.

 

Sometimes we win. Sometimes we don't. We always have fun though and see things we wouldn't have normally seen.

[+bicknell]

Be sure to click on NEAREST BENCHMARKS when printing your targets. Several North Carolina hunters went after the rocks marking a county line, recently. A unique mark, to be sure. But all of them missed a standard benchmark just a few feet away--which would have been an easy addition to their collection. During your most recent hunt, you visited a courthouse, but didn't log a church spire 0.2 mile away. Perhaps you were running out of time/gasoline/daylight.

We did a day trip to Staunton, about a two hour drive from here. Found the one church, the court house, and one on a C&O bridge. It's a good place to hunt, and we may go back, but we did run out of time that day.

 

What I did is downloaded the entire county for each county we search in from the NGS. I then use BMGPX to convert to GPX, and then load into mapsource. I'll then put the entire county into the GPS units before we leave. That way we have them all for "find nearest" and soforth while searching.

 

Also, having the whole county while you're driving around makes you look at things differently. []

[mloser]

Since we are bragging, I want to bring up my "13 find day". I didn't head out with a personal record in mind, but that is the way it happened. In addition, it was probably the best benchmarking day I ever had--read the forum post.

 

I also found 4 yesterday after heading out without any description sheets. Needless to say they were ones that had been located before and were easy to spot since they were all scaled, so I had no real idea where to look once my GPSr took me to the spot.

 

I gotta get wireless so I have the datasheets with me at all times! I am trying to create a link to the NGS datasheet pages for my web enabled cell phone, but Verizon has such a horrid web interface that I can't get it working yet.

[+BuckBrooke]

I've found 15 or so in a day, a couple of times. I usually look for something of interest (and now with the Extreme Benchmarking page I have a few more things to look for), then look at the path from home to there, the area around there, judge how much time I have to search and start printing pages like mad. It usually takes me an hour to prep, and I try to do at least two hours, usually 4.

[grannyoldr]

Found three benchmarks in about 10 minutes yesterday,

I'm jealous!

[+GEO*Trailblazer 1]

My Personal best is 23 in one day and 17 the next day and 10 the next day.

But I worked weeks on it before we went on the trip.

I also hit an area that was very Old and no one has been in a long,long time.

 

I did not keep track of the not founds that 3 days.

[+BuckBrooke]

Today I went 26 found, 9 not found, 1 destroyed, in about 5 1/4 hours. This took an hour prep time or so. I could have squeezed in another dozen finds if I had had another hour and a half or so.

 

Not to detract from the effort, but I worked on two lines of marks, one along I-25 (1972 standard mark placements) and one along NM-60 (1980 placement, the flip up lid over a metal rod type). The first line were adjusted, witnessed posted and easy to find. The second line was scaled, but along a barbed wire fence w/ witness posts. All the marks were less than 50 feet from the highway.

Edited March 19, 2005 by BuckBrooke

[+bicknell]

We did a bit better today. 33 benchmark sites visited, 9 finds, and one half find (witness post, but fence prevented us from looking for the mark). Took us about 8-9 hours. Some of the ones around here are confusing!

[+WRITE SHOP ROBERT]

My best day was 18 found out of 26 on my list. Not counting the ones I spotted that are not in the CG.COM system. I found some of the remaining ones on the list at other times.

 

I know some of you hold yourselves to a very high standard when logging benchmarks, so you may not have counted some of these, but I do.

There's a list of the links on my cache pagehere.

 

When I was planning a geocaching trip to Angel Island, in the middle of the northern part of San Francisco Bay, I did a bit of reading up ahead of time, to see how many I could find. Most of them are not disks, but are things that were not on the island, but could be seen from there or on the boat trip over.

 

I didn't have a working printer, so I wrote down the info that I thought I would need to identify the points, and marked them out on an area map. I think I spent anout 4-5 hours researching the list, which could have been made much longer by including many that are atop the buildings downtown, but I was tired of the research and would have had trouble being sure I was looking at the right thing.

 

I was also pleased to spot several along the waterfront in SF (at the foot of each of several piers) They were marked like this "DPW/BM 0008" and each had a different number. I'm guessing they belong to the City and DPW might be "Dept. of Public Works"? I found "0008", "0009", and "0010" all in a row as I was walking down the waterfront. It makes you curious to see if you can find the others. How much further would I have to walk to find "0011", I wondered.

[+PFF]

We did a bit better today. 33 benchmark sites visited, 9 finds, and one half find (witness post, but fence prevented us from looking for the mark). Took us about 8-9 hours. Some of the ones around here are confusing!

 

Great job! The dynamic duo is hot! Especially for an area known to have a high percentage of marks lost to urban development!

 

Even so, it would be an interesting experiment to check the NGS data sheets on the ones you did not find--looking specifically at how recently a particular mark had been recovered. If you see multiple "not founds" that were recovered in the past year or so, it might be a "heads up" that you need to add a compass, measuring tape, metal detector, etc., to your benchmark hunting tool kit, or perhaps print the TOPOZONE map (complete with red dot marking the coordinates) prior to going on the hunt.

 

I went through this self-evaluation process after a few months in the hobby and it encouraged me to slow down and study an area before giving up on a mark. (I'm an impatient old cuss.) I also became aware (thanks to the helpful participants in this forum) of the difference in SCALED vs. ADJUSTED coordinates. With that education, my "found" ratio took a leap upward.

 

By the way, Neweyess and I once did a team hunt for very old marks in Greensboro, North Carolina. I noticed that when we found a mark with SCALED coordinates, it always was about 100 feet east and slightly south of the position given in the data sheet. Armed with that fact, we found a lot of targets by going where the GPS receiver pointed, and then walking east and south! (Of course, you have to determine this correction factor for each USGS quad, based upon a couple of finds. But it works!)

 

-Paul-

[+bicknell]

Even so, it would be an interesting experiment to check the NGS data sheets on the ones you did not find--looking specifically at how recently a particular mark had been recovered. If you see multiple "not founds" that were recovered in the past year or so, it might be a "heads up" that you need to add a compass, measuring tape, metal detector, etc., to your benchmark hunting tool kit, or perhaps print the TOPOZONE map (complete with red dot marking the coordinates) prior to going on the hunt.

I think we're looking in a slightly interesting area. Most of where we looked yesterday is relatively undeveloped. Many roads were still gravel. Some fields were just starting to get turned into houses, so that may change soon, but for the most part the area is relatively undisturbed.

 

That said, 90% of the marks we've found were monumented in 1942. Of those, 75% have never been logged since, and the 25% that have all have logs in 1965-1972, usually from the highway department. Looks like during that period a number of bridges and such were replaced, and generally the highway department reset the marks. The 10% that weren't in 1942 are all much more recent marks, late 80's early 90's, also generally from bridge replacement.

 

Of the 33 yesterday, I logged 7 as destroyed. 6 of those had resets, and it was clear from the description of both marks and the site that the original structure (in all six cases a bridge) had been destroyed, and a reset mark placed on the new bridge. After looking to make sure the old bridge wasn't in a different alignment (as sometimes they get left) I logged them as destroyed on geocaching.com. Doesn't quite meet the NGS criteria, but I'm 99.999999999% sure they are gone. The one that wasn't a reset was also on a bridge, a "steel bridge", and at a location that otherwise meets the description all we could find was some rather modern looking culverts. I don't think the 1942 bridge survived.

 

Anyhoo, if you add those in, we're at 16 and a half out of 33.

 

For the rest, we logged a note with all of them. 4-6 of them were on private property and simply not accessable. Indeed, I think most all of those are still there (simply fenced fields). The remaining ones are the ones that need more searching. In particular we don't have a tresure hunter / metal detector, and when they are marked "flush with the ground" and not found where they should be I suspect that's our problem. However, we had two yesterday that just made no sense. The descriptions didn't match the roads (one referenced a road number we couldn't find on any map, but the description seemed to go with a different number), and even having a couple of locals (always nice when you run into friendly people) seemed quite confused by the descriptions. The good part about yesterday is we were running lines of them, they were always 1.1 miles apart (why 1.1?), so when there was a gap in the middle that was further confirmation we were likely in the right spot.

 

I'm gonna see if I can get late 1940's map of the county to try and match up with the 1942 descriptions better, perhaps some of the numbers have come and gone or something.

 

We're going to get a metal detector / treasure hunter soon, might try and find someone on here who has one locally and go back to some of these locations so they can help us learn how to use it.

[+PFF]

The good part about yesterday is we were running lines of them, they were always 1.1 miles apart (why 1.1?)

 

Very interesting, and a good question. Hope someone offers an answer. Meanwhile, I'll check my area to see if we have such patterns. I've seen a series of marks along railroads, but never paid attention to the spacing.

 

-Paul-

[+mantis7]

It may or may not have anything to do with it but 1 Nautical Mile =~1.15 Miles.....

 

Just a guess

 

------

Mantis7

[+BuckBrooke]

Out here in New Mexico, the lines are pretty straight and uniform in spacing. The series A 403 -> Z 403 are all about 1.1 miles apart, but I've seen other lines, like on I-25, where they're approximately 1/2 mile apart, with some variation, and I-40 where they're on 1/2 mile spaced bridges.

[+bicknell]

Well, 9 more finds today. Unfortunately I bumped a setting on my camera early in the day and didn't notice until late in the day, so many of the shots came out underexposed. A huge bummer, but at least I can log them all, and add pictures to a few.

[+PFF]

Thanks to GrannyOlder and Bicknell for bringing up the idea of calculating how many marks one finds in a day's search. I'd not been tracking this, but I decided to monitor my activities on Monday, just for fun.

 

I jotted the time and miles on my sheets, and I let the Garmin GPS monitor my travel. I searched exactly seven hours, beginning with the first mark (which was 25 miles from home).

 

SITES VISITED: 32

MARKS FOUND: 18

MARKS NOT FOUND: 1 (none of the references remained)

MARKS WHERE SITE WAS FIRMLY IDENTIFIED BUT MARK IS MISSING: 13

TIME VEHICLE WAS IN MOTION: 2.5 HOURS

TIME VEHICLE WAS STOPPED: 4.5 hours

TOTAL DISTANCE FROM FIRST TO LAST MARK: 83 Miles

 

Of the seven hours, a half-hour was spent on food/gas stops, and another half-hour was occupied chatting with a local resident about the history of the area. Also, a 25-minute period was spent going along a portion of the VA-NC state line. (I have this "thing" about tracing boundary lines.)

 

The marks were concentrated in five primary "clusters":

Creedmoor NC......8

Oxford NC.............3

Boydton VA...........4

Clarksville VA........12

Soudan (Ghost Town!)....3

Misc locations........2

 

Obviously, the tighter the clusters, the more that can be found in a day. For instance, the eight in Creedmoor took exactly one hour, with a travel distance of 7 miles.

 

But the number of marks is not the important thing. As was said earlier, the purpose is to have fun and feel a sense of accomplishment. Some of our participants spend six hours on one mark--by hiking several miles to the top of a mountain.

 

By the way, the conclusion I reached after finding 13 sites where the mark was destroyed or submerged, and after reading the exploits of the Northern Virginia bunch, is that the Ye Olde Commonweath of Virginia is a hostile environment for survery markers. [grin]

 

-Paul-

[grannyoldr]

By the way, the conclusion I reached after finding 13 sites where the mark was destroyed or submerged, and after reading the exploits of the Northern Virginia bunch, is that the Ye Olde Commonweath of Virginia is a hostile environment for survery markers. [grin]

 

-Paul-

I think it's just northern Virginia that is a hostile environment - when Leo and I go outside of NoVA, we have a better chance of finding benchmarks.

 

Rachel

[+bicknell]

It does seem like the various virginia agencies are unlikely to reset a benchmark on a structure if the original was damaged. We've found a few resets on bridges, but also a lot on bridges that are clearly gone and that there is no reset in the database.

 

Up here in Northern Virginia we also have all the ones on private land being bulldozed real fast.

[+Klemmer]

So PFF, some marks were submerged? You let that stop you? What about Scuba gear? Wouldn't that make them tidal stations?

[+PFF]

So PFF, some marks were submerged? You let that stop you? What about Scuba gear? Wouldn't that make them tidal stations? 

 

 

[Laughing] One of my real estate clients owns a Scuba shop. Perhaps I could get him to organize a dive. We could use the GPS in the boat to set a marker buoy......

 

-Paul-

[+ddnutzy]

Today was the 1st hunt since early January because of the snow. I don't mind searching in the snow but I have to travel to find interesting bm's so I don't want to waste to much time. Anyway, I had nine bm's on the list and found them all including the oldest bm in RI. and the reset for same. Both are from the 1800's. I had to pack in for three of them and the rest were near the roadways. Eight were in RI. and the last was in Mass. Like PFF I do a lot of prep work for the search including printing my own maps with the bm's marked on them. I left the house at 7:00 AM, got back at 1:30 and put 108 miles on the speedo.

Edited March 27, 2005 by ddnutzy