COON

This Saturday was another beautiful day for a hike. After three successful benchmark hunts in the morning, I was ready to tackle COON. My father and I followed Rich’s route and with just a couple complaints and only a few hundred feet of very light bushwhacking (“I’d never go here in the summer!”) we reached the coordinates.

(There was an injury that took half the skin off my elbow and turned my right leg purple with bruises, but we don’t need to go into that. I wasn’t horsing around, seriously!)

The station mark was an easy find, and the reference marks took only a few minutes of searching to locate. RM 2 was still nicely cleared off from Rich’s visit, but RM 1 was again covered over with soil and roots. They’re still in good condition, of course.

(Recovered on April 6, 2003)

This triangulation station is about ½ mile north-west of the summit of Coon Hill. It can be reached by following the winding, uphill trail from the gate just off the Lake Scranton loop road (¼ mile north of the concrete spillway), to a jeep trail running roughly south and south-southeast, and to an ATV trail at N41° 22.326’ W075° 37.578’. The historic descriptions lead only roughly to the locations for all three marks since the witness post no longer exists. Also, RM1 and RM2 were each found buried under a layer of duff, pine litter, and a thick mat of dirt and roots. At the station mark my Garmin GPSmap76 receiver indicated 0.0 (zero) feet from the NGS datasheet coordinates. The discs are in very good condition, well exposed (now), and the stamped designations are legible. There is no azimuth mark for this station.

~Rich in NEPA~