I've been continuing my amateur research on the
Salt River Recreation Area. During that research, I found a 1932 General Land Office Survey map of the area on the
BLM - General Land Office search site. The General Land Office (GLO) was the precursor of the Bureau of Land Management and was created to manage public lands in the US. Part of that responsibility included surveying public lands and administering homesteading applications. During various strolls around the area, I've stumbled upon brass disks mounted on pipes marked "General Land Office Survey 1930" with information indicating that it marks township 2 north (T2N), range 7 east (R7E) and a section corner. I decided to spend some of my new found retirement time trying to chase down more of the markers.
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| Portion of 1932 GOL Survey of T2NR7E |
In true engineering nerd fashion, I turned it into big data gathering project that ultimately ended up going from Google Earth to Google Maps and finally to the
Waypoints web site. It turns out that there's a nice topo map overlay available for Google Earth that shows township/range/section lines on the earth view.
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| Google Earth with Topo Overlay |
Using the overlay, I determined approximate coordinates for locations of section corners in the area. Once I had the coordinates, I entered them into Google Maps so I could find survey markers offline. It's an easy but time consuming process (not really an issue for retirees) to get the coordinates but the challenge is in actually finding the markers.
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| T2NR7E S8,S9,S16,S17 Corner Marker |
The marker in the lower left corner of the above photo took me two tries and several hours to find. Looking for it involved finding the coordinate using Google Maps then circling up and down ridges and washes until hopefully sighting the marker. By mistake, I chose to look for this marker first because I knew the area well. After failing to find it the first time, I looked for other markers closer to nearby roads and found two fairly quickly. The location of those markers allowed me to refine the initial coordinates and eventually find the above marker several hundred feet west of where I first looked. It was in the bottom of a narrow wash under a bush.
After going to all this trouble finding markers (7 so far), I decided to try and find a good way to share them. After looking around a bit, I settled on
Waymarking. It's a community of folks interesting in looking for (mostly) interesting things and logging them using GPS. I've just dipped my toes into it and used it as a place to log sites that I've found and researched while strolling around in the desert. We'll see how it goes. I've entered 10 locations, so far.
Adios
