Another Hobby

Another one of my hobbies besides taking photos is geocaching. You use your handheld GPS receiver and go around the world looking for little caches that have been hidden by other geocachers. You can learn more about it at http://www.geocaching.com/, and it is quite entertaining. Anyway, one of the little side things you can do is locate US Geodetic Survey markers. Those are everywhere, and they can sometimes be difficult to find, or at least difficult to get to. I found this one the other day. It is quite close to my house and I'd been meaning to go find it for a while because it is old. It was originally placed on top of Columbiana Mountain in 1887. The original marker was a beer bottle buried in the ground, but it has since been replaced by a more official marker set in concrete. I think the original beer bottle is still buried under the concrete block holding this marker.

This one was fairly easy to find after I'd huffed and puffed up Columbiana Mountain because it had a witness post right beside it. Yeah, I know Columbiana Mountain only has about 200 feet of elevation change from where I parked, but it's still a huff and a puff for me. This witness post is a metal pipe sticking out of the ground about three feet with a sign on it.