2009 BLM Manual of Surveying Instructions

This past Wednesday night, The Arizona Professional Land Surveyors Association (APLS) Central Chapter held it's monthly meeting at the Fiesta Resort in Tempe, AZ. The main order of business at the meeting was to introduce the new BLM Manual of Surveying Instructions. The BLM Manual is the governing procedural document for the surveying of public lands in the western 30 states. In short, all land that is federally owned is divided using the guidelines laid out in this book. When you retrace any land boundary, you follow the history of that boundary back to its original owner and original division. In most cases, the original owner was the U.S.A. and this is how they divided the land. As you can imagine, the procedures for those divisions could be complex and the rules interpreted differently by each surveyor. We now have the latest version of The Manual, of which its successor was written in 1973. We have been using the 1973 Manual as our guide until now. The release of a new BLM Manual is a monumental event in the surveying profession of the United States.