131
TIL Colorado isn’t a rectangle and actually has 697 sides, mostly due to poor measurement tools
(www.atlasobscura.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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Copying my reply to someone saying we should change it. Just here to spread the knowledge. :)
"Land surveyor here. That's actually more complicated than it sounds. You would have to disregard all historical records and section corners throughout the entire state and neighboring states. Section corners are actual physical monuments set in the ground. In the past they'd literally just put a mark on a rock with a chisel. Nowadays we use a rebar with a two inch aluminum cap stuck into the ground similar to the property corners you'd find around your house but bigger. They're set up in a "grid" all around the state and sections are around 1 square mile with half sections and quarter sections being very common as well.
Whenever someone needs a land surveyor to do anything, the first thing we do is find section corners to orient ourselves because they are known points. We will literally hike miles into the wilderness with field notes from 1892 to go on just to find these things so someone can build a fence. Just because people don't live there doesn't mean a section corners doesn't land in the "grid." Some of them are so remote it's a whole day of work just to find one. If these points were to change not only will all of our records from the past 100+ be completely obsolete, we would have to manually set new physical section corners and make a new grid across the entire state. Not only that but all of our information about everything from property lines to the elevation and location of the curb outside your apartment building is all based on those section corners to an extent. The actual legal definition of someone's property is based on a known section corner with a bearing and distance to the property (Google "land surveying legal description."). The information for this kinda stuff is like a giant tower of information and records dating back from the 1800's with everything today being at the top. If you take out the bottom the whole thing collapses. Also we would have to rewrite the legal definition of every single piece of land and property in the entire state if not the country.
Also the funding for it would be astronomical. Like, hundreds of millions of dollars. And most counties are already cutting their land surveyor budgets as we speak."