CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED The California Surveyor ... - CLSA

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From Stone Walls to Section Corners By: Susan Ruschmeyer, PLS Back in New York State in the 50’s and 60’s, a frequent family activity in my childhood home was the viewing of our home movies on a portable screen in our den. One of our all-time favorite viewings was the one of me at about age seven, “helping” two local surveyors survey our tenacre property in the rural mountains of the northern Adirondacks. The party chief, Edwin Knox, was the father of my best friend Gracie, so he let me tag along with them all day, asking questions and carrying what I could, which I am sure was not as much fun for him as it was for me! Our summer camp, aptly named “Cragsmere”, sat high on a rocky bluff at the lake’s shore, surrounded by dense and steep eastern woodlands; much of the boundary was marked by a long line of blazed trees which the surveyors axed their way around as I watched with great fascination. We had no road or electricity, accessing the property by boat or by foot, and our eastern boundary was a good stretch of rocky shoreline, meandering in and out of some ”table” rock outcrops and nice deep bays, where we safely moored our floating boathouse. In the ensuing years, I would make many annual treks around the property lines, on foot (and also by boat) bringing with me anyone who wanted to go, re-painting the blazed trees and making sure the perimeter path was unobstructed. Looking back, I guess that’s where my career began. My serious interest in land surveying developed when I went to a technical college to study forestry many years later. In the interim, I had been through the typical elementary and high school education for a girl at that time, which basically conformed to the standard educational mantra of that day, i.e., “girls are good at language and home economics; boys are good at math and science”. In other words, we (girls) were not encouraged to study anything in school other than what our school counselors felt would make us be good “home-makers”, and being a land surveyor did not fit that mold, to say the least! It was not until I had graduated from high school, attended a liberal arts college for one year, dropped out and worked at various jobs, that I found something that really interested me: forestry. So I returned to the Adirondacks to attend Paul Smith’s College of Arts and Sciences, aka Paul Smith’s College of the Adirondacks. At Paul Smith’s, surveying courses were a part of our forestry curriculum, as was algebra and trigonometry, and I discovered two things: I loved surveying and I was good at math! We tromped all over the vast Paul Smith’s campus in the Adirondack Mountains on different timber cruising, silviculture and surveying projects, using fairly primitive field equipment such as stadia rods, chains and chaining pins, plane tables, abney levels, and closing traverses using logarithms and slide rules. We had a 300-foot topographic “tape” with a trailer, and were required to convert our slope distances to horizontal as we went. I remember that the first survey traverse we had to run went through two bogs (swamps) and dense woodlands (with lots of biting insects). All of the crews had to run it again because no one was able to close it to our required specifications of 1:5000! I was hooked. Paul Smith’s was a great place to be. Even at that time, although definitely in the minority, there were a fair number of female students in my program, and our professors worked us just as hard as they did the boys. Continued on page 40 38 www.californiasurveyors.org
Index To Advertisers Allen Instruments & Supplies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Allen Precision Equipment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Berntsen International, Inc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 California Surveying & Drafting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 Cartwright Aerial Surveys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 CD Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31 HJW Geospatial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 Holman's, Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 Latitude Business Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 Lewis & Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 Office Depot (Member Benefit) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 RBF Consulting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39 Reese Water & Land Surveying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 Rick Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 Santiago Canyon College . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Silver Shields System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Sokkia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 Software By D’Zign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .48 Surveyors Service Company (SERVCO) . . . . . . . .2, 55 Surv-Kap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13 TopCon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Trimble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 Tri State Surveying, Ltd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43 Vista International . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 Fall 2008 39
Page 1: CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED The Califo
Page 5 and 6: Inside This Issue: Features: Women
Page 7 and 8: From the Guest Editor By: Annette L
Page 10 and 11: By: James M. Herrick, PLS - Preside
Page 12 and 13: By: Delia K. Smith, PLS Girl Scouts
Page 14 and 15: I Would Not Trade It For Anything B
Page 16 and 17: Practical Applications of Photogram
Page 18 and 19: California’s Only Female County S
Page 20: Maps and Mountains: A Lady Surveyor
Page 24: From Musician to Map Checker By: Ca
Page 28 and 29: Standing in Tall Barley By: Linda R
Page 30 and 31: By: Jas Arnold, PLS, CP Controlling
Page 32 and 33: Continued from page 30 • By shift
Page 34: By: Levi Cox, PLS Virtualization, C
Page 37: Continued from previous page CCP 33
Page 41 and 42: Welcome New CLSA Members CORPORATE
Page 43 and 44: Continued from previous page career
Page 45 and 46: Across 1. FOUNDER OF ESRI 3. ADMISS
Page 47 and 48: Continued from previous page and I
Page 49 and 50: Continued from page 47 the bull by
Page 52 and 53: Sustaining Members SUSTAINING MEMBE
Page 54: CLSA Central Office 526 S. E Street

CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED The California Surveyor ... - CLSA

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