January 18, 2023

Maddy Beaver As a lover of the outdoors and healthy challenges, I am an ambitious junior surveyor at Avenue Consultants. I enjoy hiking, camping, hot springs, and road trips to new places. In my free time at home, I love to play my guitar, sing old country songs, and watch movies. I grew up in […]

In 1954, the breakfast cereal market was a highly competitive one. Some cereal manufacturers hired tigers and bears to promote their products, while others lured customers by stuffing their boxes with premiums – whistles and marbles, buttons and soldiers, and plastic airplanes. Quaker Oats tried toy cannons that actually shot cereal across the kitchen, and rings with prisms that could really burn holes in Mom’s tablecloth, but they hadn’t gone over too well – Mom, after all, was the one who bought the stuff.

Ten men are deep in the Grand Canyon. Their expedition – to map the river corridor – marks the end of the era of exploration in the canyon.

It would be difficult. USGS Topographic Engineer Claude Birdseye faced enormous challenges to run an unbroken traverse and level line for 251 miles through the Marble and Grand Canyons. His expedition team included able boatmen, a geologist, hydrologist, second topographer, rodman and cook; ten men in all. Four 18-1/2’ by 4-1/2’ wooden boats “decked fore and aft and fitted with water-tight hatches and airtight compartments” conveyed the party and instruments consisting of “specially-constructed plane-table and telescopic alidades, a custom fourteen-foot long, folding stadia rod (which could be read from 2800 feet away, allowing for long shots through the canyons),” and “three additional alidades of varying styles (sight, Bumstead, and Gale), extra stadia rods, an aneroid barometer, tripod[s], four Brunton compasses, levels, tapes, field glasses, and field books.”

Construction of the Layton temple began summer of 2020. Diamond Land Surveying joined the project after the footings and the lower part of the sheer walls were already poured. Diamond was contracted to mark out over 400 precast concrete panels encapsulating the structure. The top left photo on the following page shows the view from the east tower of the temple at approximately 125 feet above the main floor.

Smartphones have completely changed how we live our lives, in many ways for the better. Their use, however, can also create hazardous situations. Smartphones are a huge distraction from simply walking down the street and texting to taking a driver’s eyes off the road for hundreds of feet of travel at a time. While it is a well-known fact that actively using a smartphone (or a regular cellphone) distracts you from other tasks at hand, recent research reports show negative effects from just having your smartphone in the area near you.

Much of America’s surveying practice descended from the English, but our early surveying equipment did not. The Old World used the delicate, expensive theodolite to divide its lands, sighting on points and measuring angles on a divided, graduated circle. American surveyors needed to establish boundaries over vast wildernesses that were difficult to traverse, and they needed to do it quickly and cheaply. Enter American innovation, technology and craftsmanship to improve a device used by mariners for hundreds of years, a form of which was being made in England: the magnetic compass. The result was the rugged, inexpensive standard American compass. One commentator said of the American compass: “Where accuracy can be sacrificed to speed and cheapness.”

“I am grateful for the recognition!”

Meridian Engineering’s QC/QA Manager Brad Mortensen, PE, PLS, received the 2021 UCLS Surveyor of the Year award. It was presented by Meridian’s Michael Nadeau on Friday, April 1, 2022, at the award ceremony during the Western Regional Survey Conference in Las Vegas, NV.

Alex Black, Park City Surveying Ben King, David Evans & Associates Brandon Mccloy, Ensign Brandon Oborn, Meridian Engineering Brock Christensen, Gilson Engineering Carlos Rivera, Utah County Land Surveyors Office Dallas Nicoll, Visionary Homes Daniel Butterfield, CIR Engineering David Hamilton, Anderson Wahlen & Associates Dorian Scoville, Salt Lake City Public Utilities Gary Pratt, Talisman Civil Consultants

As of July 20, 2022, Utah has 10,378 Professional Engineers, and 720 Professional Land Surveyors licensed in the state. Here are a few stats from DOPL for the professions from 2017 to 2022: