Why GLO Field Notes Still Matter

The original surveyors who walked every section line in the American West left behind something remarkable — handwritten notebooks that remain the legal foundation of land ownership across nine states.

When the General Land Office surveyors walked the sections of what would become Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and the surrounding states in the 1860s through 1910s, they recorded everything by hand. The distance between corner monuments in chains. The witness trees they blazed. The streams they crossed. The steep bluffs they climbed.

Those notebooks are still the legal bedrock of PLSS — the Public Land Survey System — that underlies virtually every land description west of Ohio. When a title company searches your deed, when a county assessor draws your parcel, when an oil company stakes a drill pad — it all traces back to those handwritten pages.

At Valley Land Surveying PLLC, we built GLOFieldNotes.com because too many of those documents are sitting in scanned PDFs that are hard to search, impossible to compare, and disconnected from any modern map. Our goal is simple: put every original survey call on the ground, where it belongs.

The BLM has digitized hundreds of thousands of field note pages. We've built the tools to OCR them, parse the survey calls, match the section corners to the GCDB coordinate database, and interpolate everything in between — so you can look at a 150-year-old field note and see exactly where that surveyor stood.