To boundary surveyors who have actually spent weeks in the field beating through brush and climbing steep hillsides looking for the remnants of stone mounds, quarts of charcoal, glass rods, scribed trees, or some other 100+ year old monument set by GLO surveyors, the techniques described by Roger Frank sound revolutionary. Reliably reducing search circle diameters from 100-feet or more down to a few feet makes it possible to actually find far more crucial original monuments. And it saves days in the field — finding 20 original PLSS corners in four days, in rough country, is world class surveying.

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Angus W. Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002.