Tonight I have my first quilting class. I hope I can locate the fat quarters of fabric I bought for the class! I'm really looking forward to it. Not just for the chance to learn how to quilt, but for the potential of meeting some new people with similar interests.

Today, and all this week at work I'm taking a 40 hour course on reading Master Title Plats presented by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Being from the east coast, it's all very alien to me the way surveys are done and maps are drawn out this way. I guess most of the US does land mapping this way, just not the states in the east. Go figure.

Turns out, the whole state of Alaska is divided up in to little squares called townships. These townships are approximately 36 square miles a piece. So basically, they're comparable to your average "town" boundaries back east. The town we lived in back in central NY was 50 square miles (a 5 mi x 10 mi rectangle). Anyway, there are around 19,500 township squares covering the state of Alaska. Just imagine any other state with almost 20,000 towns! That's huge! Much of that (about 8000 townships) is owned and mapped by the State. The feds manage more than we do at the State. And the rest is managed by other municipalities and native corporations (I think!). Suffice to say, it's far from cut and dry! There is no one land parcel map available for the whole state. It's all piecemeal and fairly frustrating actually.

Once you come to terms with the inability to map land ownership, you might then struggle with the even larger barrier of finding aerial photography for the state. It just isn't out there basically. At least not at anything close to a useable scale.

Anyway, it's very interesting. And it gives me a greater appreciation for geographic data availability in the rest of the U.S.