By CHERYL NORRIE - The Dominion Post | Monday, 20 August 2007

There's nothing quite like hunting for treasure, and for Wellington IT specialist Neil Milne, it's the thrill of the chase which attracts him to geocaching – a hi- tech treasure hunt where participants use global positioning systems to track down hidden stashes.

He is the fastest geocacher in Australia and New Zealand, having found 1000 caches in just 184 days. In his quest he has walked 22 kilometres through the remote Tararua Ranges, thrashed through blackberry bushes, scaled rock faces and climbed to the top of the Ruahine Ranges.

A technical specialist with TelstraClear, he has traversed the country by motorbike, car, quad bike and on foot to track down treasure hidden by fellow geocachers, who post the longitude and latitude coordinates on the United States website www.geocaching.com. Stealth is a big part of the sport, and geocachers must accomplish their mission without being discovered or observed by "muggles" – non-geocachers.

For Mr Milne, geocaching has returned him to his early love of the mountains. Around Wellington he's found caves, waterfalls and dams he never knew existed. "I am born and bred in New Zealand but all I really knew were the main roads, the main towns and the main tourist destinations."

Geocaching took off in 2000, when the US Government stopped intentionally degrading global positioning signals to civilians, making GPS receivers substantially more accurate.

The move prompted US computer consultant Dave Ulmer to hide a black bucket filled with treasure – videos, books, software and a slingshot – in the woods in Oregon on May 3, 2000 and post its coordinates on the Internet. Within three days, two keen GPS users had found the container and geocaching was born.

New Zealanders have been involved from the sport's earliest days. A cache was hidden in Rotorua just nine days after Ulmer's cache, the first to be placed outside the US.

The sixth-oldest surviving cache in the world remains in Wainuiomata, where it was hidden on May 26, 2000.

Geocaching.com now holds the coordinates of more than 400,000 active caches around the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The original rules – take something from the cache, leave something in the cache, and write about it in the logbook – are the same.

Kiwis' zeal for geocaching is not always matched by their generosity. Though US and Australian geocachers are in the habit of replacing the treasure they remove with items of similar value, New Zealand caches tend to get degraded over time, often winding up stocked with a collection of old plastic toys.

• NZ InfoTech rummaged through its offices for trinkets to set up its own cache. Details of the location of the NZ InfoTech Lookout Cache should be posted at www.geocaching.com today.

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