News Local

Surveyors paved the way for things to come

Local land surveyor John Lehners recounts a time when he was helping a senior co-worker find a survey pin right on the side of a hill at Dunvegan, one of the oldest settlements in the region.

"I was pretty green. He was telling me to go down this hill and I had these snowshoes on and all of a sudden, my snowshoes started taking off on me and I was sliding down the hill. Finally, I leaned back and thought I had grabbed on to a tree. I pulled back and I hung on and I stopped and I looked back and there it was, I had grabbed the pin halfway down the hill," he said. "It was one way to find the pin. It was always a comedy of errors sometimes but it all works out; it's all good fun."

Walter McFarlane's survey crew probably experienced similar incidents when they subdivided 17 townships in the County of Grande Prairie 100 years ago. This represented the last major land rush in North America and allowed families to legally live on the land.

Surveying has dramatically changed since 100 years ago, when the sun or stars were used to find bearings and chains were used as measuring tapes. Today, electronic measuring devices, particularly GPS, have replaced the mechanical instruments of yesteryear, explained Lehners.

"Back 100 years ago when they surveyed the Grande Prairie area, they would come up here with a crew of over 20 with cooks, cutting crews and chainmen and instrumentmen and the actual land surveyor would be on site, doing all the work. It was very long and tedious and very manual work. The quality of the instruments was not near they are today," he said. "Amazingly enough, they made up for it with meticulous standards and did a wonderful job of breaking ground."

Lehners added it was hard work for the crews back then as they had to deal with Mother Nature and fight off Cabin Fever.

"Often they would leave in the spring and come back late in the fall and fight the mosquitoes and the swamps and the muskegs," he said.

The advancement in technology means a job will be done faster by fewer people while the accuracy has increased, he said.

"Stuff that used take weeks to do can now be done in sometimes even hours," he said. "You still need to go out and find the survey evidence that people put in hundreds of years ago - that's really what defines the boundaries - but any time . you put in new monuments, a lot of that's all mathematically figured out using satellites. What used to take 20 people can now be done easily with two or three."

Lehners studied civil engineering before taking his land surveying certificate in 1998. He said he always had a strong interest in math and the outdoors and has been involved in the survey field off and on since 1990. He is now the co-manager of the engineering department at Beairsto Lehners Ketchum Engineering and Surveying in Grande Prairie.

"It's kind of a unique feel because you're the first ones out there, short of an explorer and many of the explorers were actually surveyors. They had to have a real adventurous spirit," he said. "I think you even see that today in surveying. People like to go where people haven't been for 50, 60, 100 years, finding pins and survey evidence in the middle of un-surveyed territory. It's quite exciting that way."

Had Lehners been alive 100 years ago, he said he probably would have volunteered to survey the area.

"One hundred years ago, the other options would not have been near as exciting. It would have taken a real commitment. It was a different mindset back then to leave your family and to go out and spend six months in the middle of nowhere . " he said. "You feel like you're going where no one's been before. You're defining boundaries and making a difference. I think it would have been an exciting field back then as well."

When McFarlane and his crew surveyed the area, it was to open up the west. Today, land surveys are typically done for development, explained Lehners.

"They were doing some pretty broad base stuff - defining quarter sections for agriculture purposes," he said. "Now, we're doing lots for residential subdivisions. We're doing leases for oil field and right of ways. So it's really development-driven."

Lehners said land surveying is still important today because it helps define ownership.

"It's doesn't sound very sexy but the economy and everything runs on people owning stuff. It's important . that you have a good land title system that co-ordinates with the land parcels and the rights within those parcels," he said.

"Without a defined area, people wouldn't have confidence to know that if they put that work and energy into developing something that they knew would be theirs. That was necessary before anything could happen up here."

Featured Businesses

Go to the Marketplace »