Photo mystery

Kadizzle was set to spend the day burning some brush, but Helen messaged Kadizzle and asked if he wanted to search for the missing spot one more time.  Sure, that would be more fun than burning brush.  What is the missing spot?  The Forest Service has some strange research project where they take a picture in exactly the same spot every so many years.  It is easy to find the spot if you have the GPS coordinates, but without them it is a puzzle.  The reason for this is so the vegetation from 1995 can be compared to the vegetation in 2020.  How do you find the spot without the coordinates?  What you do is take the photos from 1995 and try to figure out where the person stood when they took the pictures.  With good pictures this might not be too hard, but with poorly reproduced pictures it is no easy task.  The last time we tried we had to give up. 

At eight we set out this morning to try again.  In the jeep we traveled way back into the mountains in the area the map did give us clues to.  Someone marked a spot on a topographic map 25 years ago.  The trick would be to get everything to line up.  That meant standing in a spot where two mountain peaks lined up and just a small smidgen of the lake showed.  The spot on the topographic map was way off.  After wandering around we began to get things adjusted.  To make more of the lake disappear we needed to go lower.  To line up the mountains we needed to go farther east.  There were some other clues in the photos including an old dead tree.  Kadizzle was about five hundred yards too far East when Helen called out over the radio she found the spot.  The spot was marked with a piece of rebar.  Kadizzle had been thinking from the pictures it was a fence post.

Once you discover the spot new pictures need to be taken from the exact same position as the originals.  With our mission accomplished we headed back to the ranch.  The whole process is kind of fun. It is like looking for a treasure.