HAZLETON -- They come armed with a set of coordinates and a rough description of the treasure they seek.

It's a black PVC tube stashed among the trees in Fontana Park in Buchanan County. These careful observers are geocaching.

The game marries technology like Global Positioning System trackers and Internet Web sites with outdoors buffs who enjoy a good trek through the woods.

"Basically, it's a high-tech scavenger hunt," said Sondra Cabell, a naturalist with the Buchanan County Conservation Board. "Somebody hides something and puts those coordinates on the Internet and says 'I hid something at such and such location, go find it.'"

And now, Cabell and the conservation board hope to use that game to draw people to their more than more than 30 holdings throughout the county.

The board kicked off a contest built around geocaching this month as a way to increase usage of all their lands, Cabell said.

Fontana Park is by and large the most popular park the Buchanan County Conservation Board owns, with 90 percent of county residents paying a visit annually, according to a survey done by the board last year.

"We have a lot of people utilizing Fontana Park and our main parks that we have, but there's a lot of them who haven't been to any place else," Cabell said. "We have 34 sites, and this is the only one that they've seen."

Cabell came up with the contest idea while geocaching with her son.

"My thought was how can we get people to more of those off-the-beaten path locations who normally wouldn't do that?" she said.

Conservation officials have hidden special punch cards and decorative scrapbook punches in caches across the county. If a geocacher is able to get punches from 12 of the sites, they can then send their card into the conservation board and be entered into a drawing to get either a $25 gift certificate or a free weekend of camping.

The contest ends in December.

The game of geocaching began a year after the federal government removed controls over the accuracy of civilian GPS tracker accuracy. This meant hand-held trackers were accurate within 15 feet of their spot.

The first geocache was planted in 2000 in Portland, Ore. Dan Ulmer planted the cache and posted it on a satellite navigation Internet site. Since then, the activity has spread like a prairie fire.

Participants now find out about caches through sites like www.geocaching.com and download coordinates onto hand-held GPS trackers.

More than 20 geocaches are sprinkled throughout the county, so it was almost natural to use geocaching as a way to promote the lands, Cabell said.

Many geocachers have been open to the contest idea so far.

Joseph Ahles of Waterloo said he and his family have found more than 500 caches across the Midwest, including 26 counties in Iowa, over the past year. The treks around the state have taken them to many new places, like Crumbacher Wildlife Area south of Independence.

"A lot of these parks I didn't know were out there until I was geocaching," Ahles said.

Now, he has moved onto placing his own caches. He said he has several in the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Black Hawk County, a popular geocaching spot.

"You don't get a lot at one time, but constantly throughout the year, you may get a few, and then you might get like 10 to 12 in one day," Ahles said.

The biggest indicator of the Buchanan County contest will be whether there are enough caches placed in some of these remote areas to make the travel worth the cacher's time, Ahles said. Many people don't want to travel far for just one cache, he said. They want to hit six or seven in a day.

For more information on the contest, contact the Buchanan County Conservation Board at (319) 636-2617.

Contact Josh Nelson at (319) 91-1565 or josh.nelson@wcfcourier.com.