Land Surveyor in San Anselmo

Water defines survey work in San Anselmo. San Anselmo Creek and Sleepy Hollow Creek meet in the middle of town, and their limited in-channel capacity has produced serious flooding, with the 1982 and 2005 events causing tens of millions of dollars of damage through Fairfax and the lower Ross Valley. The Marin County Flood Control District has been advancing the San Anselmo Flood Risk Reduction Project since 2016, including removal of a channel-constricting building over the creek downtown and a detention basin on former nursery grounds west of Fairfax. For anyone building near the creek, that means the first survey questions are vertical: existing grade, lowest floor, and the current effective FEMA mapping, all on NAVD88 rather than an assumed datum.

Away from the water the town climbs. Winship Park, Yolanda, Sleepy Hollow, and Fairfax's canyons off Bolinas Road are steep, wooded, and subdivided into small early-century lots served by narrow streets, unimproved paper streets, and public stairways, so boundary work is retracement: recovering what monuments survive, reconciling old maps with the county record, and filing a Record of Survey with Marin County when warranted. Our terrestrial laser scanner suits both settings. On a hillside lot it captures the slope, retaining walls, stairs, tree trunks, and the existing house in one visit, and we filter vegetation from the cloud to produce a bare-earth model with contours and a layered DWG base map. Downtown, the same scans document older commercial buildings as scan-to-CAD as-builts and BIM-ready models.