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Last Thursday afternoon, two men walked the green grass of an Urbana park, patting down utility poles, looking under bushes and parting tree branches. The weather earlier in the day was almost balmy for October-the high that day was 77 degrees-but the sun was starting to set, the temperature was dropping and time was running out.

These men, Greg Huey, 32, and David Larson, 26, are geocaching, an activity that sends participants armed with global positioning system (GPS) equipment on a high-tech treasure hunt to seek out caches-the game's term for treasures-hidden by other participants. Once the sun goes down and the park gets dark, the men's hopes of finding the cache quickly diminish.

"It's fun, it's good for people and you never know what you're going to find," said Quinn Stone, who was part of the USENET newsgroup that gave birth to the sport five years ago and has since caught the attention of the world.

Since the first geocache-then called a GPS stash-was hidden outside of Portland, Ore. in May of 2000, the sport has formed a subculture of hiders and seekers all over the world. There are currently 202,507 active caches hidden on every continent on the planet, including Antarctica. As of Oct. 16, the United States is home to 134,622 caches-more than

two-thirds of the world's total. Three thousand three hundred fifty-three of those are in Illinois, according to Ed Hall, the Web master of a popular source for up-to-date cache locations, statistics and news, Buxley's Geocaching Waypoint

(http://www.brillig.com/ geocaching/).

Geocaching was born on May 1, 2000. Prior to that day, the United States Department of Defense added extra noise to their GPS signals to keep their satellite navigation system for exclusive use by the military, according to Mark Steger, author of The History of Geocaching (available at geocaching.gpsgames.org).

Because of the added interference, known as Selective Availability (SA), civilian GPS signals were only accurate for about 100-300 feet, according to Hall. Virtually overnight, SA was lifted and everyone was able to receive GPS signals accurate to 10-20 feet.

Once SA was lifted, Dave Ulmer, a member of the USENET newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav, decided to test the accuracy of the clean signals, recalls Stone, who now runs navicache.com, a geocaching resource. Ulmer hid a bucket with a logbook and some goodies and posted the coordinates online. Ulmer called his first cache a GPS stash, but Hall recalls that after the game caught on, "stash" was dropped to prevent any negative connotations associated with the word.

Since then, geocachers in the Champaign-Urbana area have hidden 55 treasures in Champaign County. The locations range from well-known parks to seldom-visited historical landmarks. The geocachers range from businessmen looking to put their lunch hour to good use to families looking for a fun way to spend time together. There is no profile for the typical geocacher. According Steger, the appeal of geocaching spans all ages and backgrounds.

"For some, it's the lure of hidden treasure, even though the value of the prizes in the caches is never much," Steger writes in an e-mail from his home in Richardson, Texas (e-mail is his preferred form of communication). "Many geocachers have young children who delight in any prize. And others are just big kids at heart. Still other geocachers just enjoy getting outside and visiting what usually is a great natural spot that they didn't know about before."

Many caches, usually called virtual caches because of the lack of a physical marker, are placed at little known points-of-interest such as a spot with a magnificent view or a secluded park.

"Looking for caches is a great way to find places you've never been before," Hall said. "If it's off the beaten path, people only find it if they're looking for it."

Since virtual caches are designed solely to attract people to a new destination, they have no container or logbook like a regular cache. Instead, most require visitors to take a picture of themselves at the location and post it on the online log.

Every summer Hall, who lives in California, takes his two teenage sons on a geocaching road trip.

"We took road trips before geocaching, but we've found more interesting places thanks to geocaching," said Hall.

"It's something for us to all do together," said Kyle Klein, who geocaches with his wife and their three sons. With nearly 200 finds to their name, the Klein family, under leadership of Dillo King and Ma Dillo (Klein and his wife), is better known as Team Armadillo. "It really does take you everywhere."

The Armadillo boys, 12-year-old Cyber Dillo (Brett), 8-year-old TaeKwonDillo (Brandon) and 5-year-old Dillo Boy (Kyle), have 16 caches hidden all over the Champaign-Urbana area.

One of them, "Armadillos Might Be Under Cover Spies," is the cache Huey and Larson were searching for on Thursday. The men found it on geocaching.com, another Web site that lists cache coordinates in a database that can be searched by city or zip code. Most hosting sites require caches to meet a variety of requirements designed to keep the activity legal and environmentally friendly.

Huey, who is working on a post-doctorate degree in cosmology at the University of Illi-nois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Larson, who is a cosmology graduate student at UIUC, are part of an amorphous group of geocachers known as Cosmo Posse and A Condensed Matter Guy (CPaaCMG). The team is named for the original members' fields of study. As people come and go, the makeup of the team changes, Huey explained.

Before Thursday, CPaaCMG had 88 finds to their name. "We don't really keep track of who on the team found which cache, or how many of the total they found," Huey said "Basically, if a team member finds a cache, the team finds the cache."

Armadillos Might be Under Cover Spies was number 89. This particular cache is a multi-stage cache, meaning that the waypoint-the latitude and longitude coordinates listed on the Web site-directs a searcher to the first of a series of many coordinates, usually within a mile of each other.

Although this cache has only two stages, there are some that involve 30 to 40 waypoints, each with a puzzle that must be unscrambled to reveal the next coordinate, according to Stone.

A cache can be anything its creator wants it to be. Since most are hidden outdoors and intended to last many years, caches are often stored in weatherproof containers. According to Klein, army ammunition cases are the container of choice for many geocachers. They're durable, weatherproof and can hold almost anything, he said.

Josh Miller, who has found 49 caches with the help of his wife, said that Nalgene brand bottles, a durable container for transporting liquid, also make for good cache holders. Some simply use Tupperware.

The waypoint coordinates listed as the first stage of the Armadillo's cache puts seekers in the general vicinity of the cache, but because of the varying degrees of accuracy of GPS equipment, finding the precise location requires work. For many participants, this is the part they enjoy; the coordinates can only get you so far, the rest is brainwork.

When Larson and Huey reach the coordinates posted on the Web site, Huey uses a hiking stick to mark a point the men refer to as Ground Zero-the spot their GPS device claims to be the coordinates listed for the cache. Today, they are using Larson's e-Trex, a GPS device manufactured by Garmin that he picked up in April for around $200. According to Jessica Myers, senior media relations specialist at Garmin, a basic GPS device costs around $100.

Since CPaaCMG have found other Armadillo caches in the past, Huey knows there is usually a difference between the Armadillo's coordinates and his, simply because they use different machines. The accuracy of GPS signals fluctuates with cloud cover and interference from overhead trees and leaves. According to Huey, this can sometimes put the actual

container up to 30 feet from Ground Zero.

"Once you get to the location, the best thing to do is zero out, turn off your GPS or set aside, and look around," said Huey. "Try to think like the person who hid the cache. If there's a tree nearby, maybe there's a little nook in the tree, or if there's a rock nearby, maybe it's under that."

As Huey and Larson methodically search the area surrounding Ground Zero, Huey thinks he's looking for a 35-millimeter film canister, a popular container for microcaches. They look in the knots of tree roots and frisk utility boxes as they thoroughly comb the area. In order to maintain the integrity and security of the cache, Huey and Larson ask that no identifying features of the park, including its location and name, be disclosed in this article.

Within a few minutes, the microcache is discovered and the coordinates to the next location are revealed. When replacing the microcache, the men are careful to replace the container in the exact place they found it, making sure no one sees them in the process. Geocachers take great care not to be seen while looking for a cache, mostly because they don't want curious on-lookers disrupting the cache after they're gone.

When geocaching alone, Huey said he pretends like he's looking for his keys or fumbling with something to disguise his intentions. CPaaCMG have even gone as far as to send a teammate to strike up a conversation with nosy onlookers to give the seekers a chance to look around without being watched.

Some geocachers, including Team Armadillo, call non-geocachers "muggles," the term used in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books to refer to non-magical humans. Other people, such as Huey and Larson, simply refer to them as non-geocachers.

From afar, some could mistake the geocacher's mysterious actions for suspicious activity in public areas.

Miller warns that geocachers must be careful not to stick out when searching for or hiding a cache. "In some cases, [onlookers] report suspicious activity to the police and a bomb squad gets called out to investigate," Miller wrote in an e-mail. Many geocachers conduct much of their daily business online and claim it is more time-efficient to correspond online than over the phone.

Although there might have been a few cases of police being called to the scene of a geocache, said Stone, it's not common.

"I can't blame them in a way," said Stone. "If I was a police officer and I saw someone carrying something into the woods, I'd be spooked."

To help alleviate this, geocachers are required to get permission to put a geocache on city or state property prior to listing the cache online.

"We try to emphasize not to hide caches under bridges or near buildings on private property," said Quinn.

One of the golden rules of geocaching is to leave the environment around the cache in the same condition it was found in, if not better. Geocaches are never buried and it is frowned upon to damage the environment in any way while hiding or seeking a cache. Most hosting sites ask seekers to report any damage in the area surrounding a cache, such as a worm trail or trampled vegetation, to the cache owner or Web site so the problem can be addressed. Stone adds that since there usually aren't multiple visits to a cache on the same day, the damage to the environment is kept to a minimum.

Many geocachers even bring trash bags and pick up litter along their journey. Team Armadillo keeps extra bags in their geocaching backpack, which sits ready in the corner of their dining room.

"If you're going to go, pick up garbage along the way," said Stone, who estimated that 60 to 70 percent of geocachers do litter-patrol. "If a guy picks up a couple bags of trash and puts it in the garbage, he's doing more good than harm to the environment."

At the second waypoint of the Armadillo cache, Huey and Larson conduct another systematic search and find the cache. Like many caches, this one contains a mix of dollar-store trinkets, a pencil and a logbook for visitors to sign and date.

Over the years, geocachers have developed their own shorthand to communicate with each other. It's not uncommon to see TNLNSL (took nothing, left nothing, signed logbook) in a logbook. Similar to instant messaging jargon, this type of geo-speak is an accepted list of abbreviations for the most commonly used phrases.

Sometimes, creators give a cache a theme that ties together the title, location and contents. Themed caches are the most interesting, said Hall.

"Hiding a cache in the bushes behind Walgreen's doesn't make for a memorable cache," Hall said, adding that a cache doesn't have to be super-fancy to be good, just clever.

"For a cache that takes a lot of time and effort, both physical and mental, to complete, a themed item at the end is a nice memento of having done the cache," said Huey, recalling some of the mementos he's found that, as usual with geocachers, won't be mentioned in order to keep the contents a secret. "It's nice to have something to remember it by later, and show people and talk about."

Larson, who only looks for caches from time to time, doesn't have a collection. "I usually have one piece that I trade in and trade out every time," he said. Larson said he usually takes something he can fit in his wallet so he is always ready to replace whatever item he takes, a known rule among geocachers.

"Geocaching fulfills the human desire to collect," Steger wrote. "Coin collections, stamp collections, baseball cards, whatever. Some geocachers keep collections of prizes swapped out from each cache. Others just keep a count of their 'smilies'." A smiley is the icon many Web sites use to designate a successful find.

The sky begins to grow dark and the sun is no more than a bright orange ball sinking in the western sky as Huey and Larson put the cache back together and replace it to its original spot so the next seekers face the same challenge.

Later that evening, the online log for Armadillos Might Be Under Cover Spies reads: "Thanks Armadillo for an enjoyable evening walk in a park we didn't know existed. SL, TFTC, Happy GCing, CPaaCMG." For all the muggles out there, that means "So long, thanks for the cache, Happy Geocaching."

Everyday, new caches pop up all over the world and more people discover a hobby that's really nothing more than an old-fashioned scavenger hunt with a little boost from modern technology.

"There were just a few ingredients to Dave Ulmer's ingenious creation," wrote Steger, "a hidden container holding some inexpensive prizes and a log book, and a rule-take something, leave something, sign the log. There's no evidence that he thought long and hard about it. No focus groups or beta testing. Dave hit on something right off the bat as he spontaneously celebrated the demise of Selective Availability with that first cache."