When we bought our country land a year ago, we had just a vague idea of where our land boundaries lay. There were some crude markers still standing at our property corners with bright pink tape tied around it, but most were knocked down by wind, deer, and tractor. As months went by, grass, weeds and dirt covered them—it’s amazing how fast Mother Nature swallows up what is left and forgotten.

Since we plan to build a cabin in late spring, I figured it’s time to plan out some ideas on where to place the cabin. I needed to get a general idea of where my boundaries resided before moving forward with a site plan. A professional surveyor will be hired as we get closer to construction time, but for now, I decided to use a combination of Google Earth, Microsoft Bing Maps, a hand held GPS, a metal detector and a plat map to get a pretty good idea of the land borders. Since Google Earth had old outdated satellite imagery for my land, I had to use Microsoft Bing Maps and its “bird’s eye” feature to get a sharp aerial view of the property. I snapped a screenshot of the bird’s eye view and took it to the land. Once there, I used my plat map to find the first marker (my plat map used the old “metes and bounds” surveying method which basically says “from the West bend of the Pedernales River, walk 400ft to the big oak tree. Then, turn left and go 142ft to the ½” bar set in the ground”…yea…this is the old school way of doing surveying, no surprise since my property is part of an original Spanish land grant). The problem is, once I found the first marker I could not find anything else. Using my GPS (Garmin etrex Vista H), I stood over the first marker and flagged my location (the GPS accuracy in these consumer models are accurate only up to about 15-5ft. With Google Earth, I’m able to import these GPS waypoints and overlay it over the satellite image of my property. This helps immensely with pre-visualizing the boundaries of my property—but the problem is that the GPS accuracy is + or – anywhere from 15-5ft. Of course, you would never build a fence or house with that kind of variance in data, but like I said previously, this is just rudimentary for now.  On my printed satellite map, I also marked a dot on my first marker. At home, I will compare the marked dot with the GPS waypoint for even more accuracy. I would do this for all other markers I find along the way.

There was one more problem. I could not find the other markers. I walked over a certain spot about a hundred times and according to the plat map the marker was supposed to be there. I then got out my Garrett ACE 350 metal detector and after a few swings was able to locate an interesting metal contraption I hadn’t seen before. It seemed to be a piece of pipe joint that the surveyor used to mark this spot. I thought that perhaps I was mistaken and found something other than the marker, but I later was able to uncover 2 more of these things on locations identical to the points in my plat map. Some of the markers had steel spike struck in the ground with a colored cap denoting the surveyor’s name. The marker often was laying down next to it. I took my axe, sharpened the edge of the marker and hammered it back in the ground.

Before I knew it, 4hours had passed and being winter, I was losing light. I knew I had to make the long drive back to the city ….and to the rat race.   Soon, that rat race will be no more.