2014 Issue

66 I ’M A SOLO land surveyor in rural San- pete County, Utah. 2012 was a big wildfire year. South Central Utah was the location of the Wood Hollow Fire that started in June, just southeast of Fountain Green, and burnt about 50,000 acres northward passing Indi- anola into southern Utah County, southeast towards Mt. Pleasant and east almost to Fairview. For days, I watched helicopters dip water out of our irrigation ponds, never realizing the impact the fire would have. We were even evacuated from my town, Fairview, one night as the fire threatened the town from the west. After the fire finally burned out and was under control, things sort of returned to nor- mal until the rains came and the county was flooded with black mud due to high runoff from the burn scar. Unfortunately, there has never been adequate funding to preserve the PLSS in rural Utah, but I was anxious to get up in the hills and hunt for the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) corners while Protecting PLSS Corners By Leon Day the vegetation was burned to the ground. It would be prime hunting season! In the spring, sheep ranchers often use low flying airplanes to hunt coyotes so I wondered why so many planes were flying in late September. Then I read in the paper that the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) was dropping seed onto the burn scar and they are going to chain it with bulldozers for wildlife habitat restoration. I’m immediately alarmed – knowing that PLSS corners will also be destroyed! Any surveyor that has searched for PLSS corners in a chained area knows what the problem is. Two D8 dozers are bearing down on the corners pulling a large sized 130 foot long chain between them, munching up every- thing in their path. I get sick even thinking about it. I immediately make phone calls to find out what was being done to protect the corners. As it turns out, plans had been made to protect the PLSS corners but the needs were different from my perspective and experience. The plan was for landown- ers to work with the DWR field biologists to flag the corners. As it turns out some of the landowners had surveys previously and knew where their corners were, however most of the landowners did not. Therefore theDWR planned to locate the corners with hand held GPS, using the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Geographic Coordi- nate Data Base (GCDB) as provided by the Utah Automated Geographic Reference Center’s (AGRC) PLSSwebsite. Funding had not been budgeted to protect the corners or even a plan to have land surveyors in- volved. The GIS was going to save the day, but as far as I’m concerned, the protection plan was totally inadequate! I started calling everyone and firing emails to anyone I thought might have some influ- ence. The response from surveyors across Utah was tremendous. Finally the county found a way to fund, on a limited basis, the hiring of a land surveyor to hunt for and flag the corners. After an abbreviated and quick bid process, I bought the job. It’s a sort of