The weather has made it impossible to resist motorcycling the last few days. Yesterday’s ride started down route 507 to New Foundland, then up route 191 through Sterling and over Spring Hill Road to one of the many small airports that dot the countryside of Pennsylvania. It is always interesting to see what kind of runway they have and what types of planes are there. My goal, in addition to enjoying riding through the hills and valleys of the area, was to find eight USGS benchmarks. This turned out to be far too aggressive.

The first one was to be on the lower shelf of a concrete bridge, eight feet below the road, near Madisonville, PA. I found the bridge but could not find the mark. There was a lot of erosion of the concrete and possibly some vandalism. After climbing down to the stream and looking closely, I finally gave up and headed to the second benchmark. Long story short, the next six were all on private property. Most of the marks in this area were placed between 1934 and 1959 so, not surprisingly, a lot has changed since then. Many have been bulldozed or become absorbed into private property. Attempt number eight was in the town of Jubilee — population probably less than 50. The mark was in a huge boulder next to a building on a corner lot. The boulder was so huge that it was not able to be bulldozed or surely it would have been.
One out of eight was not very good but generally my luck is better. The Jubilee mark was #77 (plus 73 geocaches). If you haven’t looked for any benchmarks yet, you can visit geocaching.com/mark and enter your zip code. You will be surprised how many there are close to where you live. I hope to find a geocache while in Norway this week for a board meeting at Opera Software.