Benchmarks can be quite fun.  When I first got my GPS and about the same time
I was first getting into geocaching, I found the NGS website that lists
benchmarks and their descriptions.  I tried to find most of the NGS
benchmarks along Kinney Road west of the Tucson Mountains and went after them
whether or not they had been reported as not found during their most recent
attempts.  It was quite fun and a number that were recorded as missing were
actually still there.  One of my favorite finds was a marker that was
reported as not found in 1995 that was close to the Old Tucson studios.  By
the site description, it should have been pretty close to Kinney Road along a
wash, so I started by pacing off from the road along the wash and couldn't
find it.  I even found a small block of concrete that I thought might have
been the remains of the marker not far from the Old Tucson parking lot.  
Just before giving up, I double checked the coordinates of the marker as
listed on the description page and followed my GPS to an area several hundred
feet from the area I had been seaching and there it was!  I recalled that
they had done some work on the road maybe 10 or 20 years earlier and expanded
the parking lot as well so that the description was out of date due to that
work.  I placed my very first geocache next to an NGS marker along an old
abandoned dirt road out in the middle of nowhere.  I had to convert it to a
virtual later ("Surveying the Desert", in case you're interested).

The neat thing about NGS benchmark hunting is that if you log your find on
their webpage, you are actually contributing your small part to that project
while being out enjoying the world and using your GPS.

Jim.

On Thu, 6 May 2004, SquishyGecko wrote:

> Today I finally clicked the link and discovered what benchmarks are.  I
> haven't noticed very many folks attempting to find these.  Anyone have any
> thoughts on the joys or unjoys of hunting a benchmark?
> 
> Thanks.
> 

Jim Scotti
Lunar & Planetary Laboratory
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721 USA                 http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~jscotti/