It was 9 p.m., and all five members of the Hazeltine family reached the top of a 4-mile uphill hike after a 100-mile drive.
"It started with finding caches in each quadrant of Albuquerque, then used math and waypoint projections to lead us to the mountains in each quadrant of the state," said Larry Hazeltine, Albuquerque resident.
Geocaching is an online game that uses a global positioning system device to find caches of objects.
It requires players to hide a box with a logbook and trinkets in it.
People in more than 200 countries play the game, using a GPS device to find the longitude and latitude of a cache.
"Someone can go out into the woods, a mountain top, a beach - anywhere you want," game co-founder Bryan Roth said.
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From there, people hide the box where it isn't easily seen and use a GPS unit to determine its coordinates. Whoever finds the box has to sign the logbook, take the trinket, and replace it with something else.
Hazeltine's team got a good lead on the competition by finding two of the caches before everyone else, he said.
"One of the other local cachers then logged three of the mountain caches in one day," Hazeltine said.
On the way up the hill, the Hazeltine's children sat on a rock to rest. Turns out, what they were looking for was right underneath them.
"The kids really liked the treasure hunt-feel of the game," he said.
There are hundreds of Geocache sites in the Albuquerque area, including some on the UNM campus.
"Geocaching is treasure hunting with GPS units," Roth said.
Hazeltine had planned to use his global-positioning system device for elk hunting until he found the Geocaching Web site.
"There were a few caches near my house on the West side of town, so we went out looking," Hazeltine said.
Once caches are found, the player posts a rating from 1 to 5 for terrain level and difficulty on the Web site.
Roth said the idea for Geocaching came about four years ago when former President Clinton's administration removed selective availability from the GPS network.
Selective availability was put in place by the U.S. military to obscure signals to prevent other nations from pointing nuclear missiles at the United States.
"The accuracy was fudged by the government so you would get about within 100 feet," he said.
It is now within 15 to 20 feet, he said.
The Hazeltine family has found 382 Geocaches, but there have been "at least a couple of dozen that we looked for and didn't find," Hazeltine said.
