DAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of my favorite places to visit is the Four Corners Monument, located on Navajo land at the confluence of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, near Shiprock and Teec Nos Pos.


Not Quite

But now it turns out that this may all be an elaborate sham, fooling yours truly not once, but twice!

Marker was off, but Four Corners monument legit
By ELIZABETH WHITE – 3 hours ago
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Many a family touring the Southwest has made a stop in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado — all at the same time.
Or have they?
News reports this week that the site of the Four Corners monument was off by a whopping 2 1/2 miles drummed up some concern that anyone who ever got down on their hands and knees to touch four states at once had lived a bit of a lie.
Not to worry, government officials say. The marker is indeed the only place where four U.S. states meet, even though surveyors were a little off when they set the marker in 1875.
The marker is 1,807.14 feet east of where it should have been placed, said Dave Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey, which defines and manages a national coordinate system. That's about the length of six football fields, but Doyle calls the measurement a "home run" given the limited tools surveyors had to work with back then.

Close, but not close enough--it cost me $3 to get to the monument (at least it did the second time, I snuck on the first time), and now I want my money back.


The Navajo owe me $3

"Their ability to replicate that exact point — what they did was phenomenal, what they did was spot on," Doyle said. "(They) nailed it."
There would be about a 2.5-mile discrepancy had the monument been measured to the 109th meridian west of the Prime Meridian passing through Greenwich, England, but Doyle said that isn't what happened. The statute creating Colorado's western boundary mandated measurement from the Washington Meridian, which passes through the old Naval Observatory in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
In any case, 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. (link)

Like Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember x 2