Pin Hunting, First Find Of The Year

One of the joys we have about our fulltime RV lifestyle is the ability to Workamp.  Not because we have to, we're blessed financially, but we enjoy the chance to give something back and support the wonderful parks maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers around J. Strom Thurmond Lake.

We've done a variety of jobs, some very interesting, others (like painting), not so much.  But each and every job is important.

Today we finally were able to go out on our favorite job, pin hunting.  Actually, it's correctly known as boundary line inspections, we like the name pin hunting better, because, uh, we're looking for survey marking pins around the lake delineating COE property.

After a rainy night, the sun came out and warmed things up.  Armed with maps, a metal detector, hand shovels, rakes and of course pink marking tape, we set out in a nice new Park Ranger truck.  Because distances around the lake are so large, it took us a while of driving through the picturesque countryside to get to the location of the tract of land where we'll be working for the next few weeks.

Tracking down trees marked with special orange painted bands, we found the first one.  It took a while to locate it's exact position with the metal detector, then some digging and there it was, the first pin find of the year.  The hunt is like crossing treasure hunting with geo-caching.  Either way, it's fun to dig out a pin, revealing it to the light of day, often for the first time in years.

 

You can see old pink tape that was wrapped around the pin from the last verification, done quite a few years ago.  We wrapped new tape around the pin and even put up a little flag marker.

 

 

The pins often get buried over time by a lot of factors, weather, erosion, leaves covering the ground in the fall.  With lots of tape on the pin, it'll help whomever comes along in the future to relocate it.

 

The boundary line inspections are important to ensure the COE owned property around the lake doesn't get encroached or even built on by people.  Every year we've done these inspections, we've noted violations that we report to the rangers to resolve.

 

Fresh air, warm, sunny skies, hiking beautiful woods and wild nature, what's not to love?  And to think this could be considered "work"!

 

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