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GIVE ME SOME LATITUDE

Once used primarily by the military and scientific communities, the Global Positioning System has landed in the hands of some wacky adventurers. Now, they’re going to places where no man has bothered going before.

Text: ANDREW FINDLAY

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I’m crashing through the bush four kilometres north of sleepy little Summerside, Nfld. The landscape is a rolling quilt of black spruce and willow typical of the Newfoundland backcountry. I’ve flown 4,000 kilometres cross-country to a town that last week I couldn’t find on a map and spent three hours navigating a maze of logging roads and bushwhacking through thick timber to get to a spot where there is quite literally nothing. Either I need to get a girlfriend or a life. Maybe both.

Actually, this is my first confluence hunt, an oddball activity in which participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate the points, known as confluences, where whole degrees of longitude and latitude intersect.

My GPS descrambles the satellite signals and finally alerts me to the fact that I’m mere steps away from a coveted and unclaimed confluence. My pulse quickens as I stumble the last few metres. "This is the spot!" I exclaim, feeling like a conquistador of the absurd. I’m now knee-deep in snow at 49N 58W, my final destination.

Our globe is shrinking and so is the supply of original adventure opportunities, so it’s not much of a surprise that someone dreamed this up. Basically, any geek with a GPS and a good dose of tenacity can succeed. Sure, it lacks the heroic pretense of adventure sports (meaning no big networks will bid for TV rights and no agents will come knocking on your door), but anyone can do it – as long as you get your kicks from random and pointless adventures.

The confluence-hunting craze started innocently enough in 1996, when Alex Jarrett, a computer programmer from New Hampshire, bought a GPS. "I noticed that I lived about 10 miles from 43N 72W, went to see what was there and made a personal Web page of my visit," he explains. He never imagined then that his impromptu visit and subsequent posting would evolve into the Degree Confluence Project, a co-ordinated effort by an ever-growing number of GPS nerds from around the world. At last count, over 3,400 of them have posted photos and stories on the Web describing their own confluence visits. What started out humbly as four snapshots of 43N 72W, which Jarrett describes as nothing more than "a nondescript spot by a swamp," has ballooned into some 20,000 images documenting 2,300 confluences in 120 different countries.

Confluence hunters spend countless hours and resources documenting the surface of the earth and sharing their sampling of topography and landscapes from places as exotic as Namibia or as familiar as Newfoundland. But because their shared passion doesn’t follow normal tourism etiquette as defined by the chamber of commerce or Lonely Planet, the project Website (www.confluence.org) now reads like a strange anthology of offbeat adventures. People have trespassed onto a military base in California, wandered the deserts of Dubai, climbed onto a warehouse roof in suburban Calgary and swatted flies in the muskeg of the Northwest Territories just to stand at spots defined by an invisible matrix of lines.

According to David Patton, a Vancouver-based computer consultant and Canadian co-ordinator for the confluence project, the appeal lies in the element of the unknown. "There’s nothing necessarily significant about these spots," he says. "It’s so random that you often don’t know what you’re going to find." Nathaniel (Natcho) Stephens, an eager American hunter who bagged five confluences in five provinces in six days, concurs: "Humans have become so predictable in their movements, always following the same highways, sidewalks and trails. This is a chance for people to briefly deviate from the path, connect with their world and learn a bit more about it. Maybe you’ll see a beautiful little creek or forest you’d drive right by if it weren’t for this wacky project."

Though I’m done conquering my confluence, I linger for a moment longer in the Newfoundland backcountry and savour my achievement. As I begin retracing my steps back through the bush to Summerside, I feel a strange kinship with all those who have joined in this odd pursuit. And then I recall the late George Mallory and his famous reason for attempting to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. "Because it’s there." I guess I can relate. [ ]

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