Walking Every Creek Before Closing Saved My Purchase

Everyone told me to hire a surveyor and call it done. Walk the ridgelines, check the corners, shake hands. I almost listened. Before closing on our current 47 acres, I spent two full days walking every inch of the creek corridor on foot. What I found: about 8 acres of the riparian bottom were functionally unusable due to a massive autumn olive infestation that would take years of serious work to remediate. The aerial imagery looked fine. The listing said nothing. The seller wasn't hiding it — he genuinely didn't know what autumn olive was. That ground-level walk changed my offer by $18,000 and shaped a realistic restoration timeline I could actually commit to. Conventional land-buying advice focuses almost entirely on legal and financial due diligence, which matters enormously. But ecological condition — especially in creek bottoms — is where your actual long-term costs live. I'd argue a boots-on-ground ecological walk is as non-negotiable as a title search. Has anyone else found that the legal process absorbed all the attention while the land itself almost got ignored?