Surveying Merit Badge

Requirements 2 and 4 are one afternoon

Requirement 4 opens: Use one of the corner markers from requirement 2 as a benchmark with an assumed elevation of 100 feet. Those markers are wooden stakes or pins in somebody's ground. They are there because your counselor put them there for your session, and they will not necessarily be there next week.

Read the badge in order and requirement 3, an hour of careful drawing at a table, sits between the two things that have to happen in the same field.

Do 2 and 4 in one visit. Draw the map afterwards.

The counselor supplies the badge

Requirement 2 says it twice: a five-sided lot laid out by your counselor, measured as directed by your counselor.

Almost none of that is a Scout's own kit, and the lot has to be laid out by somebody before anything can be sighted. In practice this badge starts with a conversation about when the counselor can run a field session, and everything else waits on it, so ask at the first meeting, not when you reach requirement 2.

Requirement 5 can run in parallel

Get a copy of the deed to a piece of property approved by your counselor, from the local courthouse or title agency.

Two steps in one sentence: agree which property, then go and get the deed from a public office that is open on weekdays.

Nothing else on the badge depends on it and it depends on nothing else. It is the one requirement with a lead time measured in days, so start it early and let it run alongside the field work rather than queueing it behind requirement 4.

It is an outdoor badge

Requirement 1 is first aid for cuts, scratches, snake bite, insect stings, tick bites, heat- and cold-related reactions and dehydration, plus why a surveyor should be able to identify the poisonous plants and animals in your area.

That list belongs to a hiking badge, and it is here for the obvious reason: requirements 2 and 4 are several hours standing in a field, often in long grass, usually in summer.

This badge asks you nothing

There is no "Do ONE of the following" anywhere on it. No alternatives, no options, no choice of project, including at requirement 8, which on most badges is where the career-or-hobby fork lives. Every step here is done by everybody.

What this page is

The Surveying merit badge, drawn so the two field requirements sit together instead of being separated by the drawing. It is not a copy of the requirements and it teaches no surveying: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.