Funny.bytes
a look at the lighter side of BLM issues

The Life of a Survey Monument

Scene opens with background music and butterfly flying over a country scene.

Survey field notes appear showing the description of the monument that is being set in 1855.

Surveyors mark a tree and set a wood post survey monument. As a timeline advances, the use of the land changes over the years - a fence is built, cattle graze on the land damaging the wood post, the tree grows taller, the survey mark on the tree slowly disappears, a house is built on the property, lightening strikes the tree and burns it to a stump.

Through time, the land boundary becomes uncertain, and a request for a new survey is submitted. Using current technology, evidence of the original monument location is recovered, and a new stainless steel post is set. The land owner disagrees with BLM over the land boundary when he discovers his home is partly on private land and partly on public land.

Not the End.

Funny.bytes are bought to you by the News.bytes Team, Bureau of Land Management California

For more information:

Geographic Services, (BLM California website)

Cadastral Survey (BLM national website)

NOTE:

Monuments and surveying public lands: The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) is a way of subdividing and describing land in the United States. The PLSS typically divides land into 6-mile-square townships. Townships are subdivided into 36 one-mile-square sections. Sections can be further subdivided into quarter sections, quarter-quarter sections, or irregular government lots. Normally, a permanent monument, or marker, is placed at each section corner. Monuments are also placed at quarter-section corners and at other important points, such as the corners of government lots. Today permanent monuments are usually inscribed tablets set on iron rods or in concrete. The original PLSS surveys were often marked by wooden stakes or posts, marked trees, pits, or piles of rock, or other less-permanent markers.
Source: National Atlas of the United States^® (Department of the Interior website)

BLM California homepage - www.ca.blm.gov