More Pointless Than You'd Thought At The Time
So apparently the National Geodetic Survey has determined that Four Corners, North America's favorite secondary quadripoint, is actually about two and a half miles west of the real Arizona-Utah-Colorado-New Mexico border. As friends will attest, I'm a little too fascinated by maps and all things cartographical, so this got my attention. Almost all the articles I can find on this are pretty sparse on analysis and just talk about the monument itself. My favorite is from Backpacker magazine's website:
So instead of putting one limb in each state, you were simply flailing about somewhere in eastern Utah. Our condolences.
While yeah, that does kind of bug me since Four Corners was part of a family vacation when I was eight (and every bit the nerd about such things that I am now if not moreso) and I was well pleased to straddle what I thought were four states, I find it odd that nobody seems to be talking about the fact that there's about 925 square miles of New Mexico that actually is a part of Arizona, and 700 square miles of Colorado that's really Utah.
Granted, this is mostly a sparsely populated strip of desert we're talking about so maybe nobody cares, but it still seems like a lot of land to me. I'm guessing that the Navajo nation, which gets to charge admission to map geeks and people wanting to take novelty photographs at the site1, would probably be happy if everyone would shut up about this already.
1I will note that on my family's trip out west, we hit the monument early in the morning so as to get there, take our pictures, and leave before they started charging admission for the day, because that's the way my family rolled. I guess my dad seems even smarter now in retrospect.
So instead of putting one limb in each state, you were simply flailing about somewhere in eastern Utah. Our condolences.
While yeah, that does kind of bug me since Four Corners was part of a family vacation when I was eight (and every bit the nerd about such things that I am now if not moreso) and I was well pleased to straddle what I thought were four states, I find it odd that nobody seems to be talking about the fact that there's about 925 square miles of New Mexico that actually is a part of Arizona, and 700 square miles of Colorado that's really Utah.
Granted, this is mostly a sparsely populated strip of desert we're talking about so maybe nobody cares, but it still seems like a lot of land to me. I'm guessing that the Navajo nation, which gets to charge admission to map geeks and people wanting to take novelty photographs at the site1, would probably be happy if everyone would shut up about this already.
1I will note that on my family's trip out west, we hit the monument early in the morning so as to get there, take our pictures, and leave before they started charging admission for the day, because that's the way my family rolled. I guess my dad seems even smarter now in retrospect.