iio
Bronze Cacher
Posts: 13
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Post by iio on Jul 15, 2007 20:44:45 GMT -9
Hey NorthWes, Here's a list of Nome area benchmarks I've logged: UW3771 UW3775 UW3793 UW3795 UW3835 UW3809 You mentioned locating marks for NGS in my Western Alaska thread, not sure what thats about, but I'd be interested in hearing! iio
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Post by NorthWes on Jul 16, 2007 7:34:59 GMT -9
Howdy! Those are some pretty cool recoveries you've made out there on benchmarks. Those WWII ones are older than what's commonly found in the Anchorage area, where there's only a few left that predate the 1964 post-earthquake survey. The cairns are rarely seen back east; as a 'type' of station they're one of the rarest to be found. In Alaska, if the station PID (such as UW3809) contains a UW-prefix it's generally a pre-statehood benchmark.
The National Geodetic Survey accepts volunteer recovery reports from members of the geocaching community, and has established a special agency 'code' (GEOCAC) for marking the recovery as made by a geocacher. You can submit your finds to the NGS for inclusion on the datasheets - when they do their annual update of the online database for Alaska benchmarks, the update will show your recovery report at the bottom of the datasheet. It's of great value for users of the NGS database to know if a particular mark's still out there, and it's really great when the finder includes a note with updated coordinates for marks listed as 'scaled' rather than 'adjusted'. As a matter of 'pride' for the geocaching community the 'GEOCAC' agency mark has become pretty respected by the surveying community in terms of the quality of reports filed. Apparently some other volunteer recovery groups aren't as accurate or careful in ensuring the mark they report as found is in fact the mark in question!
When I get home from work tonight I'll put up a thread called 'How to submit a recovered benchmark to the NGS' which will walk you through the process. It's really pretty simple and only takes me about a minute max per mark, but there's some 'conventions' to follow in how to do it that I'll explain in detail. I'll send you an email once I've posted that thread.
I see that some of those marks were recovered while you were out hiking with a Boy Scout Troop. I liked seeing that; I'm an Eagle Scout - class of 1971 - and I'm really grateful for the time that Scout Leaders invested in me back in those youngster days.
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