Why I'm doing this....

A long time ago, someone introduced me to geocaching.

Needless to say, I caught on to it fairly fast. Hooked a bunch of people on it along the way, too.

But I wanted something more. Sure, geocaching is fun, and I still do it to this day. In fact, my kids call it "treasure hunting".

Somewhere along the line I found out about NGS benchmarks. Now, that was neat. Similar to geocaching, but the prize was finding things that haven't been noticed or sometimes seen in decades. Something solid. Something that wasn't necessarily hidden, but hidden in plain view. That's what appeals to me with the benchmarks.

And then, about July of 2009, I was at a meeting of the County GIS Pros in Mifflintown, PA. At this meeting was a presentation by a fellow named Eric Jesperson about municipal, county, and state boundaries in Pennsylvania. And how a lot of these boundaries exist solely in the name of "well, that's where we think it may be".

What a perfect combination of things I find interesting: spatial awareness, historical research, and trudging through a field to find something largely ignored or forgotten.

So, I've taken it upon myself to explore the boundaries of the county I work for, Erie, and get a feel for the validity of the boundaries that we ignore or take for granted.

Along the way, I've realized there are many objects out there to find: boundary monuments, highway markers, bridge markers, benchmarks, both NGS and State, other types of monuments: they're everywhere!

Which brings me to this blog. I've been told I should do this as an ongoing collection of the stories of going out and finding these things. So here it is.

Obviously, I have found quite a few things up to this point, so I will be backtracking from the beginning and bringing it up to present. I realized there are lots of stories to tell, so here they are.