There's "treasure" to be found in Southern Illinois.

And a whole lot of folks are out on the hunt.

Murphysboro resident Joseph Gray, 28, is chiseling out the inside of a log of firewood. Once he is done, he will place a Tupperware box containing trinkets, a pencil and a log book inside the log and hide it somewhere in the woods of Southern Illinois.

He will then post the geographic coordinates of the location online.

"It will be hard to find, I can guarantee you that," he says.

The sport is called geocaching (pronounced "geo-cashing") and it embraces a rapidly growing group of high-tech treasure hunters looking for hidden containers called geocaches.

Once a cache is found, geocachers "log" their find, take a trinket, put another trinket in its place, replace the cache where they found it and share their experiences with the online geocaching community.

A quick search on the geocaching Web site reveals more than 2,500 hidden caches located within a 100-mile radius of Carbondale alone.

Anyone can join in. All you need is a GPS device costing anywhere between $90 and $600, a vehicle to get you around, access to the Internet, a love for adventure and the outdoors and you're ready to go.

Take Chuck and Karen Short, for example. The couple, both 53 years old, may live and work in Salem, as a production manager at a bakery equipment company and bookkeeper, respectively; but their obsession with geocaching has taken them all over America and even Canada.

They are just back from a vacation spent geocaching in Wisconsin and Minnesota and are already talking about their next trip.

"The idea is to use a GPS device and take advantage of the billions of dollars of technology our government has invested in satellites, looking for Tupperware hidden in the woods!" Chuck explains with a chuckle.

The "treasure" by itself is usually insignificant - a keychain or some small bauble; the real thrill lies in the hunt. It takes a lot of skill to find the watertight plastic container, or ammunition box hidden in the woods or an urban area, sometimes in plain sight, other times completely hidden in creative ways, such as the inside of a hollowed-out log or an innocuous looking birdhouse hanging from a tree.

"My wife and I enjoy geocaching every weekend," Chuck says. "We sort of compete amongst ourselves and are pretty much obsessed with it."

Currently, the Shorts, who go by BlackJeep1989 online, are rated No. 17 in Illinois for the sheer number of caches they have found - 4,100 finds.

"We chose to call ourselves BlackJeep1989 because our caching vehicle happens to be a barebones 1989 Jeep Wrangler," Chuck laughs.

The Shorts usually find between 25 to 100 caches on a typical day, when they go caching from sun-up to after sun-down.

"Our all-time record for a day was 113 caches," Chuck says. "This is a hobby you either love or hate. Besides, it's a great way to get into shape. It gets you traveling the back roads of America, biking, hiking, talking and spending time with loved ones."

poornima.jayaraman@thesouthern.com

351-5019

NEW TO GEOCACHING?

Geochaching is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache's existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache.

- Source: www.geocaching.com