Mapping out the land

I've been stuck on two problems. Later I'll write about the footing details, but right now I want to look at the mapping difficulties. This isn't the first time I've written about this problem, and it probably won't be the last.

The land is a full city block, 270 feet on a side. It is split in to two equal-sized parcels. The orientation is close to North/South, but appears to be about 3 degrees askew from true north. I can accept that error for now. (It appears to be ~7 feet off when I'm 1/2-way between two marked points, calculated as 'tan(3 degrees) * 270 / 2' but my trig is weak.). The great news is that it's already surveyed, with rebar at each of the corners.

I want to cut down as few trees as possible. I love the woods, and putting trees back is hard to do quickly. I know we'll clear some to build the house, and more later, but I want to do it incrementally. So, I walk around the land looking for areas that are already pretty clear, having few trees, or trees that are very small, or short-lived trees like Alder. I want to mark these down on the above map, but that is turning out to be tricky.

I tried using a compass and measuring tape, but ran in to a few difficulties:

- Taking a bearing on a compass is hard! Siting down the needle at a landmark is highly inaccurate. Maybe I can get within 5 degrees.

- The land is full of brush, making it hard to run a tape measure in a straight line.

- The land is full of brush (still?), making it hard to get around.

- The land is full of brush (no!), so I can't put up a reference string around the borders

I tried using the GPS unit that came with my Streets and Trips software, but it seems like the accuracy too far off for my purposes. I am going to try a GPS unit with WAAS next week.

As for getting around in the brush, I tried pulling Salal by hand (it works, but it's really slow) and I tried cutting with a machete (not much luck, maybe I'm not using it right). I'm going to look in to renting a brush cutter (a weed eater but with a blade instead of a string), and possibly buy a small tractor with a loader and excavator (should be useful in the future around the homestead).