Laying Out Development Plots

The Highways Department asked me to do the overall design of maybe a hundred lots or so. But

the project failed. The people could not handle the development, and the highway relocation was

cancelled. It was too bad because the development proposal was good, and it took a lot of

planning to lay out the lots and roads. We did an awful lot of surveying.

There were a lot of big plans in those days. There was a good fellow in the Golden area,

probably in his eighties or there about, Thomas King. He owned a lot of the vacant land around

Golden. I worked on trying to figure out what to do with this land. One of the things I tackled

was determining where an airport should be built. And it did get built in that area on the westerly

edge of Golden.

There was quite a bit of mining development going on. I can remember one case where another

firm said they were surveying ten miles away from a community in six feet of snow. I do not

know how they even got themselves fed or how they ever dried out. It was a horrendous job to

have. People would come to work, and then quit after a couple of days. Quite a few of the

surveyors said it was not worthwhile trying to work in those conditions.

I was one of the ones that had to find out where the boundary lines were. It was a terrible job

trying to find mileposts. Of every twenty we looked for, only two or three remained from the

earlier survey. The people who did the survey would have said they had set out durable wooden

posts, meaning they were made from cedar rather than some punky wood that would rot away in

thirty or forty years. And we were now looking for them sixty or so years after they were put in.

I went to a corner that had four big trees marked. These big trees were two feet in diameter, but

they were sitting in five or six feet of snow. We struggled to find other posts in areas where there

were no trees. There was no trace of the survey posts and nothing to indicate that anyone had

ever been in that small area. There was just nothing there. These surveyors had not done what I

had learned to do. I put metal posts in, which was a good thing because the area was hit by a

serious fire after the survey was done. Boy, did we ever work to re-establish the surveys. In those

days, we did not have the electronic distance measuring equipment. Everything had to be

measured out by hand with a steel tape. It was a big job.