3D Scanning in Gold Country, CA

Amador County, just south of our home county, is full of buildings and structures no drawing set describes. In Jackson, the county seat, the Kennedy Mine's East Shaft reached a vertical depth of 5,912 feet, and the mine has been on the National Register since 1981. Sutter Creek's Knight Foundry is on the National Register too, and the Central Eureka mine there began work in 1869, and mining in town stopped in 1942 during World War II. In Ione, the Preston School of Industry building known as Preston Castle, a Romanesque Revival landmark begun in 1890 and opened in 1894, was vacated in 1960 and listed on the National Register in 1975. It remains substantially damaged, and the Preston Castle Foundation is working to restore it. Buildings in that condition are a strong case for scanning: the scanner documents walls, openings, and interior volumes from safe positions, without anyone touching unstable masonry, and gives engineers measured geometry for stabilization planning.

Farther south, Angels Camp is the only incorporated city in Calaveras County, while the county seat, San Andreas, is unincorporated; its Old Calaveras County Courthouse, built in 1867, is where Black Bart was tried and is now a National Register museum. Sonora is the only incorporated city and the seat of Tuolumne County. Nearby, Columbia State Historic Park preserves almost 30 Gold Rush buildings, many of them brick built after fires in the 1850s, and has been a National Historic Landmark since 1961. At Jamestown, Railtown 1897 keeps the Sierra Railway's 1910 roundhouse and belt-driven machine shop, listed as the Sierra Railway Shops Historic District. On the Stanislaus River, the Bureau of Reclamation's New Melones Dam, completed in 1979, is a 625-foot earth and rock embankment. Structures of that scale are documented for the agencies and engineers who own them, under their access rules, with targets tied to control so a later scan can be compared directly. To the north, Nevada City, the Nevada County seat, keeps a downtown historic district and the 1865 Nevada Theatre.

Control is GNSS primary and Trimble S3 total station secondary, held to 0.01 US survey feet relative to project control; scans come from a Trimble X9 and are processed in Trimble Business Center. Deliverables are a registered, cleaned point cloud (E57, LAS, or RCP), scan-to-CAD plans, sections, elevations, 3D linework, coded points, and a report stating the control basis, units, and accuracy achieved. Amador County is next door to us; Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Nevada County are longer trips that we plan as full field days. See 3D laser scanning, and scanning in Placerville, El Dorado Hills, Grass Valley (next to Nevada City), and Auburn. Our Placerville page covers general surveying in our home county.