The Wilderness Route Finder

I grew up reading - devouring, really - the works of two great outdoor writers.  One was Brad Angier and the other was Calvin Rutstrum.  These two adventurers had been living the 'back to nature' lifestyle long before the backpacking craze hit America in the 1960s.  Both were prolific writers, turning out books and papers that extolled the wilderness lifestyle.  Angier's works were more philosophic - he fancied himself a modern day Thoreau and his books reflected that outlook.  Rutstrum, on the other hand, didn't just live the wilderness lifestyle, he actually worked in and made a living from the wilderness, primarily through guiding.  Rutstrum's advice was always more down to earth, more practical.

Some of Rutstrum's advice would cause modern day enviroweenies to fall over in a dead faint. For example, to deal with the biting insects that invariably got into your tent when camping in the north country Rutstrum recommended just tossing a DDT 'bomb' (spray canister) into the tent, zipping it up and letting the insecticide do its job.  Go off and do your chores and when you come back you'll have a bug-free tent to sleep peacefully in.  Keep in mind, however, that Rustrum's books were written from the late 1940s through the 1970s, so some procedures and 'best practices' are now out-dated and in many cases downright illegal.  Regardless, his books like 'New Way of the Wilderness' and 'Paradise Below Zero' are still considered classics of outdoor literature.

Another gem that Rutstrum wrote is 'The Wilderness Route Finder'.

My copy, purchased in the late1970s and well
thumbed

 I first came across this book over 30 years ago and read it cover to cover multiple times.  I believe it is the first broad application land navigation work written for the general public.  (The Army land navigation field manual, FM 21-26, pre-dates this work by several decades.  While an excellent work is targeted at military users.)  Rutstrum approached land navigation the way he approached so many things related to the outdoors - use what works.  He presents a broad range of techniques and discusses use of a number of pieces of equipment  that can assist in navigating the high latitudes where the magnetic compass becomes unreliable due to declination issues and local magnetism.

Obviously this book was written before GPS was even a gleam in the eye of senior military commanders, and many of the pieces of equipment Rutstrum discusses are out dated or simply not available anymore.  For example, cruiser compasses have not been made for decades and have now entered the status of collector's item.  However, some of the techniques he discusses, while at first glance seemingly archaic in the world of cell phones, wireless internet and GPS, are still valid and those serious about land navigation ought to give them a try.  For example, the concept of using a marine sextant to determine latitude is quite valid, and quality used sextants are available today for less than $400.  Equip one with a bubble horizon and bring along a quality quartz watch and you could even do reasonably accurate longitude determination.  Think of it as an exercise in confidence building.

The reader should be aware that Rutstrum wrote this book specifically for those navigating in the far north regions of the US and Canada.   There is little in this book about desert or tropical environments.  Rutstrum was also a man of his time and wrote like it.  Many of the explanations are a little wordy and personal pronouns are few and far between.  Keeping in mind these shortcomings, the book is still an undisputed classic and belongs on the shelf of anyone serious about learning land navigation.

Brian

Field Notebooks

Does anyone use field notebooks anymore?

In the olden days (like, up until the 1980s) field notebooks were a staple of the surveying, engineering, geology and natural sciences disciplines.  If you did any field work it got recorded for posterity in a field notebook.  Taking and maintaining field notes was not just an art, it was often a legal requirement, particularly in the surveying field; the entries that surveyors made in their field notebooks constituted the legal record of a survey and those notebooks often were turned in at the completion of a project to become part of the permanent record.

Field note taking and recording was usually part of the early coursework for beginning engineering & surveying students, and you were graded on the completeness, legibility and accuracy of your note taking.  Pencil only!  Erasures not allowed!  Mistakes had to be lined through and corrected notations added.  Our geology field classes stressed accurate structural and stratigraphic mapping along with proper representations of rock types and strike and dip measurements.  It was common during field classes for our professors to pull out an old weatherbeaten field notebook and refer to notes they had taken years before on the rock formations we were studying.

Virtually all of the big name engineering and survey supply companies sold field notebooks.  They were all pretty much the same - a hard bound book filled with blank lined pages (or alternating lined and graph) about 5" x 7".  The paper was 50% cotton rag content and usually treated to ensure archival stability and prevent wrinkling  from high humidity.  Most books included tables of conversion formulas, trig functions, curve tables, etc. in the last few tables; things now easily handled by a simple scientific calculator.  My suspicion is that there were only a few companies that actually produced these books and just did job orders for the big manufacturers.  There was a slight difference in quality from manufacturer to manufacturer, and the K & E and Post field books I've got in my collection are clearly a step above the average field book with sturdier covers and radiused page corners.

The US Army even got in on the act, and produced two styles of field books they classified as 'forms'  One, the DA Form 4446 - Level, Transit and General Survey Record Book was laid out like a generic notebook.  The other, DA Form 4196 - Horizontal Distance Book, was laid out specifically for recording traverses.  Both included a handy tear-out address label so that if found all someone had to do was tape the label to the outside of the book and drop it in a mailbox and the Army would pay the postage to get it back to its owner.  To this day I kick myself for not picking up more of these manuals when our Army surveyors abandoned them in favor of pre-printed recording forms.  They had boxes of them laying around new in the shrink wrap and I'm sure most went into the dumpster when they got tired of looking at them.

Thankfully, field notebooks are still available from engineering and forestry supply houses. Still in the same format and the same construction.  I guess when you hit on a winning formula there's no need to change.

But like so much in life, electronics got in the way.  With the arrival of total survey stations (theodolites), GPS-linked data collectors and computers running surveying and engineering-specific software the need for writing down project notes in a field notebook quickly disappeared.  While surveyors still use field notebooks to record things like the height of instrument or the serial number of the GPS receiver they are using on a particular project, the field notebook is no longer considered an indispensable item.

For much of my Army career I used field notebooks extensively, a practice carried over from my geology fieldwork days.  I was a sloppy note taker (see above), but I managed to get stuff into a logical and readable format.  Over the years I filled about half a dozen field notebooks with data collected on various projects in different parts of the world.  As I neared retirement I got caught up in the digital craze and abandoned notebooks for whatever was hot at that moment.  I've owned or used Pocket PCs, BlackBerrys, smart phones, iPhones, laptops, digital notebooks, you name it.  I've stored my notes in Borland Sidekick (anyone remember that piece of malware?), Windows Notes, Lotus Notes, Outlook, Outlook Express, iPhone Notes, MS Word, Wordstar, PC-Write, Open Office, and Google Docs.  Guess what?  Just about everything I stored in digital format is gone, gone, gone - unless I made a paper copy as back-up.  Roughly 10 years of meeting notes, field notes, observations, discussions, instructions from supervisors and directions to subordinates, everything gone.  Not because of some catastrophic event, but lost simply to the march of time, the changes in technology and the inevitable degrading of the storage media.

How many of you still have 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" floppies sitting around you can no longer read simply because you don't have a device capable of reading them?  Can your new DVD drive read that CD you burned back in 1999?  Ever wonder why TV shows shot in the 1970s and 80s look so funky?  It's not because of the bad hairdos or polyester leisure suits, but because so many of them were shot on videotape and the tape is starting to deteriorate.

Today the only way I can resurrect the record of my military career is through the written word put down on paper.  Thankfully I saved just about everything. I can't tell you the meetings I had in 2005, but I can tell you in some fair detail about the meetings I attended in 1985. In 2005 I trusted digital technology to store my data. In 1985 I trusted a notebook and a pencil.

About a year ago I realized I was missing key notes on some fairly heated meetings we had held with one of our business units at work.  I knew I had probably written my meeting notes and observations in a series of emails to my boss, but for the life of me I couldn't find the emails.  After about two days of searching on my computer and on our shared drives I remembered that I had done an email backup and clean-out about six months earlier and that my backed up files were on a USB drive - a drive I knew I had misplaced a few weeks before!  At that point I resolved to start writing things down and decided to start using field notebooks again.

As I've gotten back into the process of writing things down archivally I've been surprised at how my seemingly random scribblings begin to come together to tell the tale of the projects, events or items of interest that impact my life.  I can flip through the pages of my notebook and clearly view the progress of projects and issues I'm tracking.  I can go back to meetings held months ago to remind myself precisely what was said and agreed to. When an engineer has a question about the invert of a pipe we measured three months ago I can show him my original field notes. Sure, all of this information can be stored digitally (and most of it is), but my experience shows that I can't put much stock in that digital data being available five years from now. In five years I'm pretty sure my notebook will be sitting on my shelf ready to be opened and referenced.

If it's important, write it down on paper!


Brian

A Detached Fascination

By any measure yesterday's earthquake in Japan was a horrific human catastrophe.  It'll take weeks, maybe months, to tally up the loss of human life.  The reconstruction of Japan will take decades.  I have no doubt that this earthquake and its aftermath will be viewed as seminal event in Japanese history.  From this point forward the Japanese as a people, a society and a nation will never be the same.  My heart goes out to them.

From the perspective of a geoscientist, however, this earthquake is an absolutely captivating event.  I'm following the emerging technical reports with almost morbid fascination.  Reports now are that the earthquake intensity may be upgraded from magnitude 8.9 to magnitude 9.1, based on post-event analysis.   There was an almost 60 foot displacement along the crustal plate boundaries at the epicenter.  The quake shifted Honshu, the main island of Japan, by over 8 feet.  The earth was knocked off it's axis by about 10 inches!

And today, over 24 hours after the event, the area is still shaking.  Japan experienced a 5.8 magnitude aftershock in the same area just this morning.

If this event, like Katrina, teaches us anything it is that the earth will have her way with us and man can only do so much to anticipate and prepare.  We are all just along for the ride on this big blue marble.

Happy Birthday USGS

Missed it by a day, but Happy Birthday to the US Geological Survey!

The USGS was established on 3 March 1879, almost as an afterthought in a Federal budget submittal. It's stated mission was "classification of the public lands, and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain."

The first part of that mission, "classification of the public lands," was what drove a lot of the USGS's early efforts.  The US had acquired a lot of land as the result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, but we didn't have a very good picture of just what it was we had gotten our hands on.  The USGS launched a standardized mapping effort that continues to this day, and will never really be completed.  Mapping the United States is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, as soon as you finish at one end it's time to go back and start again at the other.

I'm hard pressed to name another federal agency that has done so much good work for both the nation as a whole and its citizens.

So here's the the US Geological Survey. Happy one hundred and thirty second birthday!

Book Of The Month for February 2011 - "The Candy Bombers"

Oh my gosh, I've been negligent!

I just realized that I never did a Book of the Month for January, and today is the last day of February.  I hustled over to my book stacks and pulled a few good candidates off the shelves.  Plenty of fodder for future months!

This month's choice was a surprise book.  It's one I had never heard of and picked it up from the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble, thinking I'd give it a read when all else had been devoured.  I got it home and started glancing at the opening chapters and realized I needed to put this book at the head of the reading list.

"The Candy Bombers, The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America's Finest Hour" by Andrei Cherny is a must-read for anyone interested in early post-war Europe and early Cold War history.  In fact, the drama and situations Cherny outlines regarding immediate post-war Germany and our more recent history at 'peace enforcement' post-war Iraq share startling parallels.

I had always thought that America ended the war in Europe with a clear vision of just what to do with this conquered country.  Cherny makes it clear that America stumbled into her post-war role in Germany, moving hesitantly towards the realization that we bore not just a huge responsibility in getting this wrecked nation back on its feet, but that unless America and her post-war allies, the British and French,  took decisive steps the Soviets would have their way with Berlin and ultimately the entire German nation.

Cherny's story pivots around two key players in post-war Germany; General Lucius Clay and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.

Clay was Harry Truman's very last choice for the post of military governor of Germany.  A number of seemingly more suitable civilian candidates turned the president down flat when offered the position - the job and all it implied was viewed as political suicide.  Out of frustration Truman told the Pentagon to find a general officer who could be ordered to take the job.  They shoved Lucius Clay through the door to the Oval Office and a few minutes later he came out the effective overlord of post-war Germany.

As it turned out, Lucius Clay was perfect for the job.  An extremely talented Army Corps of Engineer officer with extensive wartime project and program management experience, Clay had the intelligence, experience, education, political savvy and powers of observation that were precisely what the ruler of post-war Germany needed to not just set the defeated nation on the course to reconstruction but to stare down the Russians in what were effectively the opening gambits of the Cold War.  Cherny does a great job of tracing Clay's metamorphosis from a believer in the good intentions of the post-war Soviet Union to a ram-rod believer in the Soviet Union's evil intent towards Germany and all of Eastern Europe.  Clay arrived in Germany in 1946 believing in and determined to abide by the the Allied agreements on the partitioning and control of Germany and Berlin.  In a very short time he realized the Russians had long since stopped abiding by wartime agreements and were charting their own course for domination in Eastern Europe.  Clay's observations often put him at odds with Truman administration officials who still viewed the Soviets through the lens of wartime cooperation and good will.

Clay found an able, if somewhat unstable ally in James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy who was about to become Truman's first Secretary of Defense.  Forrestal was a self-made man, a multi-millionaire investor and Democrat who was driven and passionate about national defense.  Forrestal was also nobody's fool, and he quickly discerned that the Soviets were now the emerging global enemy - an enemy that needed to be stared down wherever they tried to force their hand.

And the first place the Soviets tried to force their hand was in Berlin.  I won't go into the details of mechanics of the Berlin Airlift.  The book tells the story quite well.  The Airlift is not just a simple story of the movement of supplies to keep a city alive, it is the story of a defenseless nation watching as their former conquers marshaled all the technology of war to beat back a looming menace and set the conditions for the rise of a free and democratic Germany.

This book demonstrates that America is a force for good in this world.  It's a lesson far too many of today's  politicians need to learn and understand.

Measuring Things

US Coast & Geodetic Survey leveling party working in Atlanta, 1927

In the olden days, like before GPS, before you could make an accurate map real men had to go out and measure things.  This 'measuring' was called surveying, and it involved the extremely precise and accurate determination of the horizontal and/or vertical location of points on the ground known as survey control.  This survey control establishes the accurate framework upon which a map is built.  Horizontal measuring was called triangulation. Vertical measuring was called leveling.

The picture above comes from the US Coast & Geodetic Survey 1927 Seasons Report prepared by Captain E. O. Heaton (USC&GS).  It shows a topographic leveling party at work in Atlanta.  If anyone can figure out where in Atlanta these guys are working I'd love to know!  

A few things to note.  The fellow holding the umbrella is most likely a black local laborer hired to help the party haul equipment and provide general assistance.  The umbrella he's holding isn't to keep the surveyor from getting sunburned - it is to protect the instrument from direct sun and prevent glare when sighting through it.  To ensure accuracy survey parties often used umbrellas to shade their instruments and stabilize temperatures.  

The fellow squatting is a surveyor who is acting as the recorder.  He is writing down the readings being called out by the surveyor looking through the instrument.  The recorder's job was extremely important because he didn't just write down what the surveyor called out, he would do on-the-fly quality control checks on the values the surveyor gave him to ensure they were staying within the accuracy standards established for that particular survey.  If the recorder makes a single mistake, such as not catching an error in the surveyor's observations or by writing something down wrong (like inadvertently transposing a number or putting a decimal point in the wrong place) he could lose an entire day's work.  In my experience you wanted your  most meticulous guy and your best mathematician doing this job - perfectionists made good recorders.  The recorder is writing his notes down in a bound hardback book known as a survey field notebook.  That notebook would be turned in to the USC&GS at the end of the project and go on to become a part of the legal record of the survey.  I have no doubt that very notebook still exists in the archives of the USC&GS now held by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  I'd love to take a peek at it!

(The job of recorder is one of those skills that has been replaced by computers.  Today's surveying instruments now automatically store the readings and calculate values internally.  The computer integrated into the survey level lets the surveyor know via a digital display if the readings are within the specifications set for the job.  It's called digital leveling.)

But what is the surveyor looking at?  Well, there are two people missing from this photo that make up the leveling party.  The surveyor is looking through the survey level at a stadia rod being held by another party member known as a rod man.  A stadia rod is a long pole marked off in feet and inches.  Behind the surveyor is another rod man with another stadia pole (the location of the stadia poles is determined by the survey party chief and is based mainly on topography and the ability to see both poles from where the survey level is set up).  The surveyor looks though the level and calls out the elevation mark he sees on the first stadia rod.  He then reverses direction and calls out the elevation he views on the second stadia rod.  The difference in numeric values he views on the two stadia poles is the difference in elevation between them:

Click on the image to open full size

Additionally, if this is a simple differential leveling job (and I think it is based on the type of level being used), there is another crew of chain men measuring the distance between the two stadia rods.  In 1927 this would have been done using steel survey tapes or chains.

Leveling is slow, tedious and physically demanding work.  There were no old farts out working on leveling parties except perhaps as party chiefs.  The rod men and the chain men were constantly moving, carrying the survey forward.  The instrument man and the recorder were responsible for moving and setting up the level in a new location, and the party chief was moving between all members of the survey party and scouting ahead for new setup locations.

Their work was absolutely critical, though.  The meticulous work of the surveyors of the US Coast & Geodetic Survey and the US Geological Survey created the accurate spatial framework that this countries maps and charts continue to be built upon.

But that's not the end of this story!  I got interested in this picture for a particular reason.  The vertical survey control for the airport I work at was established by this particular USC&GS survey project.  I would like to think that it was these three unnamed gentlemen who, sometime in 1927 or 28, ran their traverse down into College Park, GA and set the single elevation benchmark that became the origin point for all vertical survey work done at the airport until the advent of GPS-based survey in the late 1990s. 

Brian  

A Really Neat Thing

View Larger Map

I'm a geospatial engineer (or, if you read my last post, a Topographer) and a large part of my job these days deals with making geospatial data - mapping data - available to users in easy to use formats. In the past (like, waaaaay back in the 1990s) it was easy - paper maps were the pinnacle of content delivery for most organizations.  Hit the 'Print' button, wait for the map to come off the plotter then sneakernet it to your customer.

Then this thing called the Internet came along, and folks started to think hard about ways to deliver maps and geospatial data across the web. Early efforts were crude by today's standards, little more than snapshots of maps posted on websites. But considering we were moving up from a plain paper map (itself a static representation of the earth's surface) the early web technology was pretty slick and drew lots of ooohs and aaaahs from users.

Things improved rapidly from there, but it was clear to early developers that creating worthwhile web maps was going to take some pretty heavy duty custom programming. The early web technologies - web servers, web mapping software and even the web browsers themselves were still rough around the edges and smoothing out those rough edges took lots of dedicated programming. This is where we started to see the rise of the IT-centric GIS professional, folks who focused heavily on web development to help other GIS professionals get their content out to users via the web.

It is the rise of the IT-centric GIS professional that gave me lots of heartburn. I watched as basic GIS skills and concepts - those skills and concepts that defined our profession - were de-emphasized in favor of IT skills. This rapidly increasing dependence on IT services for content delivery also triggered some nasty organizational battles. Suddenly IT managers and CIOs were able to leverage this emerging technology to their advantage. Their argument was simple - "If you want access to the heavy web and database server technology you say you need to do your job then you'll have to move your GIS organization into IT.  We need keep a proper eye on you and make sure you don't put our precious network infrastructure at risk."

Just as I was nearing the brink of despair the lighbulb came on (and in my addled brain it's a very dim bulb).  For the past few years ESRI, the Big Dog in GIS technology, has been pushing the concept of the "ArcGIS map service."  An ArcGIS map service is simply a map definition file (map extents, content layers, coordinate system, text styles, etc.) similar to an XML file that sits on a GIS map server waiting to be 'consumed', or used, in another application.   I'd attend ESRI seminars and conferences and listen to the ESRI Acolytes expound the virtues of ArcGIS map services; they were going to revolutionize geospatial content delivery, they were going to bring web mapping to the masses, they were going to cure world hunger, boils and wheat rust.

I have been beating ESRI up for years over the direction they are taking the GIS profession - we are in a situation where the software defines and drives the profession and not the other way around.  The result is that now that when you say 'GIS professional' to someone they immediately think of the software, not the skillset; a GIS professional is now merely someone who operates GIS software, not someone who has the education, training and experience to solve complex spatial information issues.

But on the issue of web mapping it looks like ESRI is on track to redeem themselves.  ESRI's goal is to make mapping ubiquitous - both the creation of maps and the access to maps via the web.  They realize that if web maps were to become easy to make and easy to access they needed to find a way for the GIS professional to step right over all the complex IT technology and put their maps out on the web with just a few button clicks.

While ESRI is not quiet there yet, the concept of the ArcGIS map service takes them a far bit down the road towards realizing their goal.  Just as important - by easing the technology burden ESRI is, perhaps intentionally, starting to ease the GIS professional's heavy dependency on IT.  Creating ArcGIS map services is simple, and it all starts with the desktop mapping and geospatial data management software.  Once the GIS professional creates a map he or she 'publishes' it to a GIS map server using simple functions built into the desktop software.  Once that ArcGIS map service - that map definition file - is available on the map server a large and growing number of applications can use it.  You can use a service or combination of services to make custom web maps that run inside your own website, you can display and use map services in applications like AutoCAD and Microsoft SharePoint.

In the arena of 'mapping for the masses' ESRI gives the average user a number of ways to create custom maps using map services.  On ESRI's website www.arcgis.com you can create maps from ArcGIS Services available on ESRI's data servers (or your own GIS map server if you have one set up).  You can search for available map services a number of ways - content, geographic extent, developer, etc., then add them to your map.  Once added, you can stack the services for the best presentation of data (for example, if you were building a map that showed rivers in a particular region and you were using one map service that provided a map background and another service that showed rivers you probably want to make sure the services are stacked so the rivers layer is sitting on top of the map background layer).  After you build your map and have it looking the way you want it you save it on the ArcGIS.com website and you can then view it either in the native ArcGIS.com map viewer, in the ArcGIS Explorer Online website (this site uses Microsoft Silverlight to add some unique functionality like the ability to do markups) or you can view it using ESRIs ArcGIS Explorer desktop application which you can download for free.  Heck, ESRI even makes applications for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices that let you view your maps anywhere you have an Internet connection.

Last but not least, you can embed your ArcGIS.com map in your website or blog using code automatically generated for you.  The map at the top of this blog entry is a perfect example.  I created this map using three map services available at ArcGIS.com.  It uses an imagery basemap (Microsoft's Bing Imagery) service, a digitzed USGS topographic quad sheet service and on top of it all a dynamic US National Grid overlay service.  You can roam around and zoom in and out on this map from within the blog, or you can click the "View Fully Functioning Map on ArcGIS.com" link to open the map using the native ArcGIS.com map viewer.

From a GIS professional's perspective this is exciting technology.  For the first time the average GIS professional has the power to create and launch robust GIS-based web maps and have them available across a number of platforms.  Gone are the days when a GIS professional needed to also be a code jockey to get even the simplest representation of his or her data out on the web.  The ArcGIS map service concept doesn't allow GIS personnel to completely ignore the IT burden (we have not even touched on the issue of RDBMS-based geodatabases), but it is clearly a move in the right direction.  I like it, and for the first time in about five years I give ESRI an 'atta-boy'!

Brian