A friend introduced me to the concept of glamping—glamorous camping. Think muslin curtains and rustic beams separating you from the great outdoors, a queen-sized bed with fluffy pillows, a cooler stocked with champagne and aged cheddar. Sounds relaxing, doesn’t it? That’s not what my heroine Meg Pero faced on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers survey in 1871 Arizona, in A Distance Too Grand. I have camped a good portion of my life, even dabbled with backpacking in high wilderness at one point. But the life of a survey team was something beyond that. Each team had staff that could log topography, determine flora and fauna, check minerals and geology, photograph the area, and determines weather patterns. Larger teams boasted cooks, a surgeon and one or more hospital stewards, and even a chaplain . Lieutenant George Wheeler, who led an ambitious survey to map lands west of the one-hundredth meridian from 1869 to 1879, also took with him 30 guides plus men to help him manage the camp. A cavalry detachment escorted each survey. On smaller expeditions, like the one my Meg serves on, everyone might have more than one role. Equipment like theodolites, telescopes, and hand-walked odometers had to…