K 19

After hiking in the Long Pond area on Saturday, we took a closer look at the area on a map and recalled that years ago, we had looked for a USGS benchmark near the entrance to the Long Pond Carriage Road system. We were pretty new to survey mark hunting at the time, and I don’t think we even realized that we could pull decent coordinates for the USGS-only marks from the topo maps: we were working only from the description.

This year, as we were looking at the map, we saw the “BM” in that location and realized that all those years ago, we were likely searching the wrong spot. The description says the mark is “95 ft. west of a private road,” which we assumed to be the road that is just southwest of the carriage road (now the road to the parking area), so we were looking to the west of that road. Instead, we should have been looking between that road and the carriage road—it is in fact the carriage road that is the private road referred to by the description.

When we realized that fact yesterday, we were very excited to try again! We pulled coordinates from the topo map and put the search for K 19 on our agenda for today.

Unfortunately we had no better results this time. Initially, as we walked toward the coordinates, we both were fooled by a green circle on an open ledge. When we got closer we could see that it certainly wasn’t the mark, but rather moss or lichen of some kind. We searched for at least 20 minutes, but we couldn’t really find any other probable ledges in the area, at least not anything that was accessible today. Everything was covered by at least an inch of old pine needles. Even if we can narrow down the location, it’s going to take some digging. We found one ledge that we both consider a slight possibility, but we’ll need a metal detector to know where to clear off the debris. We’ll try again!