A week ago today, National 811 Day was commemorated. It’s a national awareness campaign to highlight the need to call 811 before digging – in our yards or at a construction site. Many organizations in charge of utility assets use this day to promote the importance of calling 811 BEFORE digging. For example, The Southern Gas Company created this “No Diggity” video to help promote awareness.

Since I was vacationing in a few of our national parks on August 11, I didn’t get a chance to add my voice on that day. But the “Call 811” message is relevant every day for everyone who is planning to dig. It doesn’t matter where you are in the United States, you can go to call811.com or simply call 811 to “Know What’s Below” before you dig. The service is required to respond quickly, usually 24 hours in most states.

Today, I’m covering two days of thrilling (and hot) outdoor activities in our National Parks. The first day, we were “living on the edge” at Kanab Utah. This is the site of the Moqui Caves, which features a roadside museum that started as a local tavern and dance hall.

As promised in my National Parks Month blog, I said I’d be posting from my vacation to tour just a few of our national treasures. We finished a great time at Mount Rushmore, and then we visited Zion National Park.

The Oxford Dictionary defines "breathtaking" as: astonishing or awe-inspiring in quality, so as to take one's breath away.

To say Zion National Park is breathtaking is an understatement. Words just cannot describe and pictures just don't do it justice. I’ll try with a few, though – sublime, magnificent, glorious, mind-blowing , splendid, and my favorite – divine!

Do you know what a Hedonometer is? Yeah, me neither until just recently. No, it’s not another ancient surveying tool – it’s actually an analysis that determines how happy people are by their tweets.

The Vermont Complex Systems Center analyzes 50 million tweets per day, scoring happiness based on the categories of words that people use. It turns out that the pandemic produced the deepest and longest period of national malaise since the Hedonometer started in 2008. Fortunately, things are trending up as the pandemic is easing in most parts of the country.

Surveyors have been doing their job for millennia, and the ingenuity (and accuracy) of ancient instruments is mind-boggling. My last blog was focused on the surveyors of ancient Egypt, who were responsible for laying out temples, palaces, pyramids, boundaries for the Pharaoh to be able to levy taxes accurately.

As most surveyors know, Egypt potentially produced the first known surveyors, known as “Rope-Stretchers” [harpedonaptae in Greek]. They earned that name because one of the tools used in surveying was a calibrated rope. These ropes were specially-treated to hold their length by being stretched out taut between stakes and then rubbed with a mixture of beeswax and resin. They were graduated by 13 knots tied at equal intervals (small or large, depending on the intended use).

After the heady celebrations of National Infrastructure Week, we’re sliding right into National Public Works Week. Ok, I’m being a bit silly here, but it is certainly true that things are looking up for our infrastructure and those involved in building and maintaining the structure that undergirds our modern way of life.

Urban flooding results in more than $9 billion in damages annually, while federal funding to support stormwater maintenance/upgrades averages about $250 million annually. It’s not surprising that stormwater infrastructure is in bad shape and has earned a grade of “D” from the ASCE.

The United Nations passed a resolution creating this day to celebrate the creative economy, which actually makes a lot of sense, considering the entire world is just beginning to come out of a pandemic that really forced us all to get creative just to do our jobs.

Fortunately, surveyors have made creativity a way of life. It seems like we have a pretty straightforward job – use our tools to verify property lines, monitor structures for movement over time, lay out the lines for construction, etc.

In the US, everybody knows a little bit about the Declaration of Independence. This document was the formal announcement of the split between the Colonies and the British Crown – ultimately creating the United States of America.

Berntsen International, the leader in infrastructure marking solutions, announces that it has earned the Esri Release Ready Specialty status. This designation recognizes companies, products and solutions that integrate with Esri technology and are created by partners with expertise in leveraging Esri solutions and software.

As a surveyor, did you ever have the opportunity to be part of a historic project? Jack Savlan, now of Milwaukee, did. He was one of the surveyors on the original Cadastral Survey of the Navajo Nation that began on June 21, 1982 at the corner of the sections 35 and 36, T24N, R14W, New Mexico Principal Meridian. Jack’s going to take over the blog for today and share this incredible experience.

Just in time for National “Women in Construction Week”, Bertsen’s own Emily Pierce, PLS, CFedS, was asked by Point of Beginning (POB) to provide her response to the question “Is Land Surveying Still a Man’s World?”

Today (February 23) is the festival of Terminalia, named after the Roman god of boundaries, Terminus. Terminus is likely one of the older Roman gods, reportedly introduced by Romulus himself at the founding of Rome.

According to legend, the last king of Rome, Tarquin, AKA Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (534-509 B.C.), sought to leave a legacy to his “superb-ness”, so he decided to reshape Rome with a large-scale building campaign. A key part of this effort was the reconstruction of the Temple of Jupiter on Capitol Hill.

It’s well-known that a number of our presidents were surveyors – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and even Roosevelt (kind of).

Did you ever wonder how the early surveyors learned how to survey? Many biographies say these men were “self-taught” . . . for Washington and Jefferson, this means they got a copy of “Geodaesia,” the first surveying book created for the New World surveyor.

In 1632, Maryland (governed by the Calvert family) was granted “that part of the Bay of Delaware which Lieth under the Fortieth Degree of North Latitude”. Unfortunately, the fortieth parallel ran right through the middle of Philadelphia, cutting it off from its only harbor. Pennsylvania (governed by the Penn family), didn’t think this was fair, and the case dragged out in English courts for decades. By 1750, a boundary was agreed upon - on paper.

Georg wasn’t always a business owner. Back in 1996, he was working for a company that sold construction products and had the opportunity to see the problems surveyors faced on construction sites, particularly issues with Finished Floor Level (FFL).

He says “Back in early 1996, I visited a good customer on a construction site and observed him scraping off plaster from the wall to search for a pencil line that marked the Finished Floor Level.

I was on the back ridge of maples where a large 30” hemlock stands; the branches were covered with snow – it looked like a Christmas card! Birds were chirping and the tracks of deer, fox and snowshoe rabbits were outlined in the pristine, crunchy snow. An eagle made a slow, silent arc overhead. I couldn’t think of anywhere in the world I’d rather be than on this plot of land in the forest.

Looking back at the start of our nation, there are those that stand out for their singular contributions that laid the foundations of democracy. Surveyors, including Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, literally set the boundaries of our country and its ideals. Other surveyors made significant and lasting contributions, including Benjamin Bannaker.

Little did I know that dusty old geography would become the one of the most interesting (and explosively-growing) fields in science. Today Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is shaking up the world of geography – and statistics, data analysis, spatial data, modeling, geostatistics, cartography, data integration, GPS – and on and on.­