High-tech hunters scour US for buried 'treasure'

Our tale of mystery involves two couples, one treasure, hundreds of trees, and millions of mosquitoes.

If other hikers had chanced upon the party on a recent Saturday at 7:30 a.m., searching the base of trees and hollow logs, they could have been forgiven for mistaking the group for some sort of woodland cult involving mushrooms.

"Here it is!" cries out Thomas Quick. "I found it!" His wife, Monica, and their friends Walter and Andrea Morrison hoot and cheer as they converge on a large tree.

Next to the base of the trunk, buried under leaves, is their prize, trinkets barely worthy of a swap meet: fake gold coins, a keychain, and a pocket knife.

What would inspire perfectly sane adults to trek through the wilderness in search of fake treasure? The chance to try out a high-tech toy, of course. The nifty gadget in this case is a hand-held global positioning system (GPS) capable of pinpointing its holder in the Arctic tundra, a tropical rainforest, or a state park 30 miles west of St. Louis.

The Quicks are among the 30,000 to 50,000 gamers who have literally begun sweeping the country since last May, when a change in federal regulations allowed the public to access GPS data with an accuracy of within 25 feet.

"People are just starting to think about and devise new games using GPS," says Jeremy Irish of Woodbridge, Wash., founder of a website devoted to geocaching, as the sport is called. "When the world is your gameboard, the possibilities are endless."

Mike Teague of Portland, Ore., was the first to realize the gaming potential of the government move. He hid a cache, including a slingshot and a can of beans, and posted the precise coordinates on the Internet. Mr. Irish subsequently founded Geocaching.com to help treasure-seekers easily look up coordinates of the loot stashed all over the globe by fellow scavenger hunters.

When his website went online in July 2000, it listed approximately 75 sites. Last month, it had coordinates for 4,300 caches in 60 countries.

The growth of the sport has been so rapid that Hollywood has taken notice of its potential as (what else?) a marketing tool. Fox Studios hid caches containing props from its hit "Planet of the Apes," and posted the coordinates on its "Apes" site.

Geocachers come from all walks of life. Many are outdoorspeople, looking for a hike with "value add," but plenty of others are just looking for the thrill of the hunt. Many searchers also plant caches, perpetuating and expanding the game.

There are no real rules except for common courtesy and common sense - if you take out part of a treasure, put something back; and no explosives, drugs, or food - animals might dig it up.

"The great thing about this - for people who love to be outdoors, but want something a little bit more intellectually stimulating - it's a challenge. It gives you a mission," says Quick, a banker.

He and his wife, Monica, an information systems professional, read about the sport in an outdoor-oriented publication on Christmas Day last year. The next morning, they bought a GPS unit. The day after that, they traveled 150 miles away to Illinois, at what was then the closest geocache to St. Louis, digging through eight inches of snow to find their first treasure.

They had so much fun, they planted a cache of their own - Missouri's first - on New Year's Day. Seven months later, Geocaching.com listed 123 in the state.

The game is calibrated, with sites rated for both difficulty and terrain with one to five stars. Some caches are set in public parks in flat terrain where the "sport" is little more than a spiced up Sunday stroll. At one birthday party, for example, the presents were hidden in a cache, and all the children were sent out to find the stash in a kind of Easter Egg hunt.

On the other end of the spectrum is extreme geocaching. One such site involves rappelling down a cliff. The cache is hidden at the bottom of a ravine in a car that long ago rolled over the precipice. Another can only be retrieved via helicopter.

Urban settings are a favorite locale for "microcaches," treasure hidden in, say, a plastic film canister, to make the search a challenge. In addition, the small size hides it from view in heavily traveled areas where caches are susceptible to plundering.

One Michigan woman did find a real treasure: a piece of paper from her boyfriend, reading "Marry me, Debbie!" She said yes.