1636.94

A few times now, people have coincidentally contacted me a day or so before I’m about to head to a particular location to send me benchmark information about that location. This find resulted from one of those situations! Just before heading to the annual Death Hike (which begins with festivities in Hazleton), Bob of the geocaching team brub2 sent me some City of Hazleton mark descriptions. Perfect timing! This is what Bob wrote:

I had visited the Hazleton City Engineers office a few years ago and an assistant named Mike Gombeda very kindly acknowledged our sub-hobby. He gave me a copy of a list of their marks. About half of the Hazleton marks were carved on concrete curbs. A large percentage of those have been destroyed by the construction of the wheelchair cutouts at the corners. Most of the others are on concrete steps of private homes and businesses every few blocks and are still there, although they may have been covered with outdoor carpet. […] The disk that was in front of City Hall appears to have been destroyed when they replaced the sidewalk back in the 90’s.

After the hike and before our usual meetup for pizza, I only had a chance to search for one of the marks: this chiseled cross carved into the step of the old Masonic Temple. Mr. and Mrs. Monks were happy to drive me there, since they knew exactly where the temple was. It was neat to be able to show them a different kind of mark, because while they’re familiar with standard disks they had never before seen a chiseled mark. Ken thought it was pretty funny that it was called a chiseled cross, like it’s a religious symbol of some kind. It’s not, of course, I explained; it might as well be called a chiseled X, which it is in some descriptions.

The mark is in good condition, quite deeply chiseled and probably not in much danger of destruction.

On our way for pizza we also very briefly checked the area around City Hall and could confirm that the disk is most likely gone, as Bob suspected.