By ELIZABETH WHITE
Associated Press Writer
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - Many a family has made the long road trip to the American Southwest to see one of the nation's unique wonders: the Four Corners.
But are all the photos showing smiling kids in a crab-like position as they straddle a quad of states fraudulent because the marker isn't in the right spot?
Not quite, government officials say.
The marker of the only location in the U.S. where the boundaries of four states meet was placed almost dead on in 1875, said Dave Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey, which defines and manages a national coordinate system.
Still, Doyle said, the marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is just a relative smidgen east of where it should have been placed: 1,807.14 feet, to be exact. That's about the length of six football fields.
But Doyle calls the placement a "home run" given the limited tools surveyors had to work with back then.
"Their ability to replicate that exact point - what they did was phenomenal, what they did was spot on," Doyle said. "(They) nailed it."
Doyle said some confusion over how far off the monument is from the "true" Four Corners has stemmed from how it's measured.
The measurement should be taken as 32 degrees longitude west of the Washington Meridian, which passes through the old Naval Observatory in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C. That calculation yields the 1,800 foot disparity.
Measuring instead to the 109th meridian west of Greenwich would suggest a much larger difference of about 2.5 miles.
But Doyle said measuring from Greenwich wasn't an adopted practice back when the marker was placed and that the statute creating Colorado's western boundary mandated measurement from Washington.
Besides, the measurement differences don't matter anymore, Doyle said, because "the monument controls."
"Where the marker is now is accepted," Doyle said. "Even if it's 10 miles off, once it's adopted by the states, which it has been, the numerical errors are irrelevant. It becomes the legal definition" of the Four Corners.
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On the Net:
National Geodetic Survey: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
