Opps! Four Corners is in wrong place!

I paid my $6, and I'm keeping the pictures, so don't let my relatives know that we missed the spot.

Hi Deb - I heard that on the news this morning. And to think - it only took them 141 years to figure it's been wrong!

I'm with emalloy on this one.
One of my favorite "tourist traps" of all!
The pics of the kids on horseback are some of the best of the vacation pictures. LOVE 4Corners - even if it is misplaced.

A local TV station investigative report indicated that this has been known for a long time, the actually location is closer to a 1000 feet off and the current boundaries are legally accepted for land boundary purposes so therefore that is the four corners. Who knows ??

How funny - my dd was just there - they drove from Orange County to NM for a week long ministry project on a reservation and all took many pictures at this "four corners"

I can appreciate the folks who enjoyed the "Four Corners". If you stop to think about it. To think about it though, the Four Corners Monument is controlled by the Navajo tribe. Three sides where the four States come together is on Navajo tribal lands. The fourth, in Colorado, is on Ute Mountain Ute tribal lands. Methinks that folks have been wandering around the "point" thinking they were in four states when in reality they were either in just one state or two at the most. Sounds like some hoodwinking was going on back when the monument was built.

The first surveys were done in the late 1800's so it's pretty amazing that surveyors of that day were as accurate as they were, given the crude equipment of the era. The first monument didn't come along till 1912 so I really doubt there was any hoodwinking done. Just better technology today to pinpoint the exact location.

Utahtea

So why are they cutting the corners now?

As a resident of the American Southwest, I give this whole episode a great big "so what"! If you have ever been there, you can witness that "Four Corners" is miles and miles of scenic desolation and neglect by The Great White Father and his cronies in Washington.

Oops! DebitNM can't spell oops. Using a transit in the 1800's is just a little harder than spelling oops.

Hmmm. The original site must have been plotted by using Mapquest!

Oops, mea culpa! Topping a year old thread to correct my typo, wow!

Update; it's closed until approx. June 2010 for improvements.

By improvements, are they moving it to the right spot?

No -
http://www.navajonationparks.org/htm/fourcorners.htm

DebitNM: "Topping a year old thread to correct my typo, wow!"

It is even weirder than that (!) . . Voyager62 registered today just to top your thread (his first and only ever post)

So, do tell - which old time Fodorite have you annoyed -- so much so that s/he just had to re-register w/ a new name to slap you around???

janisj - that is really odd! I didn't even bother to look at their profile. I can't imagine who this might be, I have been rather low keyed here in recent months.

So, who are you now, voyager62???

First of all, it's a $3 entry fee, and although it is in the "wrong" position, it is not off by 2.5 miles and it is accepted as the "true" position as are most other surveyor errors of that time.

The laws that originally defined the point intended it to be at 37° north (the free-slave boundary at the time) and 109° 2' 48" west ("32 meridians west of Washington", where the "Washington Meridian" was defined as that of the central dome of the US Naval Observatory, 77° 2' 48"). The actual location of the monument on the ground is at 36°59′56.31532″N 109°02′42.62019″W, according to USGS, which you can confirm with a high-resolution topographic map. By my calculations, that is a couple of hundred feet away from the intended point, or probably within the parking area around the monument.

The monument's location on the ground is legally accepted as the corners of the 4 states, despite the errors marking it. See http://supreme.justia.com/us/267/30/case.html

Surveyor errors of this type were not unusual at that time before GPS, and the monuments erected by the surveyors were accepted as "ground truth" unless they were horribly off. For another example, the northern boundary of Vermont was fixed by the Treaty of Ghent that ended the Revolutionary War to be 45° North. The surveyor team that marked it placed the line a bit North of the treaty's intent and not very straight - east-west lines were difficult for surveyors of the time- but their result is legally accepted today.

And yet another top from a first time poster.

The fee is $3 per person for all over 6.

http://www.navajonationparks.org/htm/fourcornershours.htm

I thought it was strange it was topped after so many years - weird.
I have never been, but would like to someday. Now, I have more information then I ever needed.