High-tech treasure hunt game rescues mountain climbers

Two mountain climbers owe their lives to a popular treasure-hunting game.

Matthew Pitts and Justin Votos ran into whiteout conditions and got lost, winding up far from where they expected to be on Monday.

A cell phone call got through to one of the men's phones Tuesday morning, and they were able to tell searchers they had spent the night in a snow cave, but still didn't know where they were.

After they started down, however they found a Geocache, used by participants in a high-tech treasure hunt using GPS receivers and the Internet.

Searchers were able to use the latitude and longitude numbers from the Geocache and lead the adventurers to a trailhead.

One doesn't have to go to the mountains to participate in Geocaching, however.

A check of the geocaching.com Web site shows about nine active Geocache's around McCook -- some in surprisingly public places. Dozens of others are located in area towns and other sites around the countryside.

Check out the Web site to find out more, but don't expect to find any real treasure. Most caches contain a few trinkets to be traded with finders, a log book and a pencil. Some hold "Travel Bugs" asking finders to advance them toward a predetermined goal. Others are tiny "micro caches" with little more than a log and pencil in a magnetic key holder.

Successful finds or failures are logged on the geocaching.com site for the owners of the Geocaches and other participants to enjoy. Local sites are visited by a surprising number of Geocachers from near and far.

Participants are expected to be good citizens -- searching never involves a shovel, caches must be placed with permission and online moderators must approve any new Geocaches.

Sites are rated by difficulty and accessibility, and searchers often have to watch out for "muggles," a term borrowed from the Harry Potter books, used to describe people not acquainted with the Geocaching sport.

The military probably didn't have recreation in mind when it launched the Global Positioning System satellite fleet into orbit, but it did make the sport possible when it released more accurate data to civilians beginning in 2000.

Now, using GPS receivers starting at about $100, perhaps even augmented by in-car units, people around the world can pretend they're pirates of old hunting hidden treasure.

Check out http://www.geocaching.com for more information.