First benchmark (unintentional)

Fast forward to Labor Day Weekend, 2007.

The parents had organized a trip for the family: them, me and my family and my brother and his family to the Pymatuning Lake area for some general touring and a picnic.

By this time, my wife Brenda and I were full force into geocaching, as time allowed. Her and I decided this would be the perfect time to introduce the rest of the family to geocaching. Brenda found something along the same lines called letterboxing. We figured this would be a better way considering a. we had all the kids with us and b. there was one right next to the nature center we were going to.

So, we sprung it on them as we pulled into the Nature Center, that after the tour we were going to walk the trail and find this letterbox.


It worked like a charm. They were all extremely intrigued and finding the letterbox proved to be a very successful venture.


Brenda and I had hoped for this result, we came prepared with a handful of geocaches for the family to try out.

Using my father's Garmin Nuvii, we were able to track down a couple of geocaches successfully and a good time was had by all.

In the midst of this trip, part of the itinerary was to go the Linesville Dam, 'where the fish walk on the ducks backs'. I had decided to walk to the other side of the causeway, when I saw something shining on the ground. Didn't know it then, but it was the first benchmark I had seen. And there it started....

First Geocache

My first geocache was in spring of 2006, while I was in my last semester of my second time around in college.

A guy in my class by the name of Tony Nardo dragged me out into the wet forest east of Edinboro University to help him find this thing someone had hidden. I had no idea what i was in for.

Apparently there were four geocaches hidden in this forest. He had a GPS and the coordinates and for three hours we trudged around and found all of them, except for the last one, a manically hidden microcache named Woodpecker. Unbeknowst to us, Woodpecker was named because it was hidden in a tree in a hollowed out knot. IMPOSSIBLE to find.

Luckily, the guy who hid it just happened to be out there to retrieve the cache. Apparently, EUP had told everyone who had hid caches on campus to remove them. I'm not sure of the reason why, but hey, their property, their prerogative.

So, he showed us where it was and we all talked about how much fun this 'new' game was on the way out.

And I was hooked.

But, I was severely lacking in the equipment side of things: no GPS.

So, new hobby=on hold until better equipment magically surfaced.

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.