New sport called 'geocaching' raises red flags

BOISE — Scot Tintsman says he never had any troubles with the law until his girlfriend introduced him to what became his all-consuming passion: the satellite-navigated treasure hunt called geocaching.

"She got me hooked," said the 33-year-old Idaho man, who faces criminal charges for hanging a green bucket beneath a concrete bridge on a major state highway last September.

His "cache" was placed for other players to find using handheld Global Positioning System units. But before he could even finish adding the requisite trinkets and log books to the cache and posting its GPS coordinates on the Internet, it was indeed discovered — by a state bridge inspection crew.

That triggered a seven-hour road closure and emergency response from officials who feared a bomb had been rigged to the bridge.

Unaware of the alarm, Tintsman was returning to finish rigging his cache when he rounded a corner on his motorcycle and was confronted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain that it was all a misunderstanding.

"I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on their holsters," he said. "I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator."

Tintsman's case of cache confusion isn't isolated. In November, a suspicious box placed outside the Provo, Utah, police station was blasted by a bomb squad robot. It turned out to be a geocache containing a toy gun, holster and nightstick. Geocachers usually take a trinket from a cache and leave another behind.

In June, a bomb squad in De Pere, Wis., used a robot-mounted shotgun to blast the lid off a suspicious-looking military ammunition box found in a park. It also turned out to be a geocache.

And on the night before the 2004 presidential election, police and the FBI spent hours questioning a man who was seen prowling along a chain-link fence at Los Angeles International Airport with a GPS unit. He was a geocacher from Vermont trying to stash a green-and-purple toy snake into a cache placed five weeks earlier that had already been visited by 463 people.

Guidelines on www.geocaching.com — the most popular Web clearinghouse for registering geocache hides and finds — advise players not to place caches near critical infrastructure or public buildings that might be terrorist targets. And with more than 1 million people worldwide estimated to participate in the sport, geocaching.com co-founder Bryan Roth of Seattle says the number of homeland security false-alarms is comparatively low.