2014 Issue

69 Leon Day is a home-grown Sanpete County farm boy,receiving a B.S degree (1985) from Utah State University in Irrigation Engineering. He obtained his PE license in 1993 and his PS license in 2005. Other than 5 years in Kansas with the USDA and SCS, he has been mostly self-employed as an engineer/construction surveyor. His introduction to surveying started in 1987 as a grade checker on the Great Salt Lake Pumping Project in the west desert. Leon has been married for 40 years to (Lorele) who is a master teacher with 34 years teaching experience in public schools. He has two daughters and three grandsons. After moving around the US and Utah for about 30 years, Leonmoved back to Sanpete County to stay. He is a veteran of the US Army, a bandsman, who plays sax and guitar. Leon lives in Fairview, Utah and his little one horse outfit goes by the name of Highterra, LLC. discovered the blunder but didn’t report it in the notes. In this area, I was able to locate most of the stones and mounds needing protection, along with a few others that I used as an aid in the hunt. The position of one particular corner, I failed to find was somewhere in a pristine location of burnt off hilly juniper/oak with no fences, roads, or past cultivation that would have disturbed it. After three attempts and looking at prob- ably a hundred different suspects, I was unable to locate the actual corner. This was a very interesting project and because of it, I believe many corners were saved and their positions perpetuated. A mapwas prepared and filedwith the county surveyor showing the locations of the cor- ners located. The following statistics is a summary of the project: • Corners searched for: 67. • Corners located - Original stones: 31; • BLM Markers: 6; • Sanpete County Caps: 8; • Other rebar, possible fence corners: 10; • USGS benchmarks and triangulation stations: 3; • Corners not located, hopefully still existing or obliterated and not lost: 12. • Field sessions: 16 days, 83 hours (travel time not included). • Office time: 36 hours, many more were not billed. All in all – l love doing this kind of work and wish I could spend most of my surveying days doing it. Another dream of mine is to be able to go back, remonument these corners with county caps, and file official geodetic corner records. It may be a dream, but who knows, maybe funding will materi- alize out of deep space. My recommendation for future fire reclama- tion and chaining projects would be to de- velop a plan, early in the process, to protect and preserve these corners. Additionally, the plan should include using the services and expertise of a land surveyor and allow the surveyor time to complete the whole job before the dozers are running. Better yet, let’s get the rural areas retraced and their corner positions documented into a modern geodetic recordASAP. The corners are out THERE! Let’s save them before another fire, or the slow burn that’s been going on for the last 150 years gradually smolders them away.