1670.46

After documenting the CORS station south of the National Monument Visitors Center, we searched around for another mark (this one) that was supposed to be nearby. We had some doubts from the beginning; the coordinates did not seem to match up with the description. While this isn’t unusual for NGS marks with scaled coordinates, we had checked the USGS topo map and found the mark displayed very close to the NGS coordinates. So we searched all around the area, suspecting that something was off with the description (or maybe the monument headquarters had moved) and that the topo map’s coordinates would lead us to the mark. No luck!

We decided to make our way to the visitors center (which had been the National Monument Headquarters, or so we assumed) and see if they knew anything about the history of the building. They did, surprisingly. They confirmed that it was an historic building and that it was indeed the same building in use as headquarters in the 1950s. They also mentioned that the auditorium had been added on at a later time, which may figure into our search if distances were taken from the original corners of the building. So we poked around in the area southeast of the center (now a nature trail) but still couldn’t find anything. We checked several areas that would have been 174 feet SE of the SE corner, basing that estimate on different corners in case we were unintentionally including an added-on area, and checking with the distance from the highway. Still we came up with nothing, so this one remains a mystery for now.