Land Surveyor in Mill Valley

Mill Valley's boundaries are among the hardest in Marin. The town grew up the redwood canyons on the flank of Mount Tamalpais — Blithedale, Cascade, and Old Mill canyons — from an 1890s land auction, and many lots were laid out on paper across terrain that had never been walked. Today those lots sit on narrow, winding streets, connected by public stairways and unimproved paper streets, with retaining walls, decks, and driveways that often straddle lines or encroach into rights-of-way. Original monuments are frequently buried, disturbed by slides, or gone entirely, so boundary work here is a retracement exercise: recovering what evidence survives, reconciling old subdivision maps with modern records, and, where the resolution warrants, filing a Record of Survey with Marin County.

Hillside and creek rules shape the topographic side. Additions and rebuilds on steep lots need existing-conditions surveys with accurate contours, retaining-wall geometry, and setbacks from creeks such as Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio, and the lots are usually too steep and too vegetated for a fast conventional topo. Our terrestrial laser scanner captures the entire site — ground surface, walls, stairs, tree trunks, and the existing house — in a single visit, and we deliver contours, a digital terrain model, and a layered DWG base map alongside the point cloud, so the architect can pull any additional dimension later without a return trip. In the flats around Sycamore Park and downtown, the same scans serve renovations of older homes and commercial buildings as scan-to-CAD as-builts.