Survey Camp Returns to Barrier Lake!

ENGO 501 Field Surveys, better known as Survey Camp returned to Barrier Lake this August. The annual field course is the highlight of our undergraduate program and occurs at the start of the students fourth year. The course has been run at the Barrier Lake Field Station for 40 consecutive years from 1980 and 2019 but was moved to Campus, and partially online, in 2020 due to the pandemic. In 2021 the course was run in person, but again on only campus.

This year’s camp was held over 9 days from August 22^nd to 29th with 32 students attending. Our students completed exercises in instrument calibration, conventional cadastral surveying, precise engineering deformation surveying, static GNSS and precise levelling, RTK GNSS, Hydrography, and GIS.

While we managed to include all these in the two on-campus versions in 2020 and 2021, it was exciting to see our 2022 students experiencing real fieldwork in the Kananaskis valley. This included the logistics and planning aspects, getting to do hydrography in a real boat on a real lake, surveying in forested environments with historic field evidence, and of course managing the workload and social aspects of spending 9 days with their teams and classmates.

The course was one day shorter than many of the past editions with the removal of a rain day from the schedule, and of course, this year we had a fair amount of rain. Despite the weather the instructors were all impressed with how hard students worked in completing their projects.

The lost peg competition was held on the final day, with the winning team coming in with a respectable result at 0.050 m. This was followed by our annual professional seminar, with in-person presentations from four professional land surveyors about their experiences and exciting projects they have worked on. Our students spent the week and a half after camp writing their major reports while also starting their 4^th year courses.

The Department of Geomatics Engineering would like to thank the following professional representatives for volunteering their time and expertise: Marie Robidoux, CLS, Registrar ACLS & CBEPS , Robert Pinkerton, ALS, BCLS, CLS, SLS, P.Eng, Warren Lippitt ALS, CLS, P.Eng, Richard Deis ALS, P.Eng for their presentations and Aaron Shufletoski, BCLS, P.Surv, EIT for his continued support in organizing the seminar series over the past many years.

We would also like to thank the Association of British Columbia Land Surveyors, Challenger Geomatics, Mission Geospatial, and Fortress Geomatics for their generous donations of field supplies for this year’s edition of ENGO 501. Planning has already started for Survey Camp 2023, scheduled for August 21 to 29, 2023.