Treasure hunt yields unexpected trove

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in real life to begin working together via sites like Tweleve.

According to Landauer, more than 100 partners who had never met teamed up to search for tokens in locations across the United States. All told, at least 18,000 people used Tweleve.org and 12 Gems.com for the hunt.

"I think we might have been the first team to organize," Pacolitch said, "but after that it was all partnering. It was people from one side of the country partnering with someone from the other side. It was kind of neat."

Of ladders and salad tongs
As clues were solved and posted online, efforts to land the tokens got downright creative.

In New Mexico's Santa Rosa Lake State Park, earnest knot hole inspectors drew the attention of a park ranger, Landauer said. "The knot hole...was too high off the ground for people to reach in. When the ranger found out that there was a treasure inside the tree, he called his wife. She brought his truck and an extended grabber to the park. He roped off the tree and allowed his wife to use the truck bed as a ladder."

Dan Ford, from Dallas, who was a co-finder of the Ant token, said he was initially unable to reach inside the small hole of a tree in Moab, Utah, where the token was hidden. So his friend, Atlanta's Chris Seacord, returned to the park a few days later and pulled it out with a pair of salad tongs.

After starting the hunt with 12 tokens, Stadther extended the game by adding a 13th, called Pook, in April. Pook was also a character in the book based on his favorite dog, Stadther said. The 13th token has yet to be found. But even though the others have all been located, the finders likely won't get their rewards until January 2008. That's because Stadther has plans to tour with the jewels until then.

Landauer thinks Stadther should pay up sooner, especially since the author has another book--and a new treasure hunt--in the works that is slated to be published next year.

"I think it's a little in bad taste for Stadther to launch his next hunt before he's paid out on the last," Landauer said.

Stadther responded only by saying that he's received a long list of requests to show the jewels and that he plans to honor them. "If that interest drops off," he said, "it wouldn't make sense not to award them."

Regardless, Landauer relishes the momentum he and the moderators of the other sites created. He said that members will likely move on to Stadther's next book, and may even begin coordinating to help solve real-life criminal cases.

"In a way, the Web community was like a massive intellectual computer with a heart...Since the vast majority of the people leave this hunt with only memories and not tokens," he said, "the lasting reward was the experience and the future hunts and friendships to explore."

This is a great story

I think this story really gets to the heart of the issue, and I thought it was well written, thoughtful, insightful, and accurate. Nice quotations from sources, and excellent synthesis.

Dick