When Alex Jarrett packed up his GPS navigator and trekked to a bog near his New Hampshire vacation spot eight years ago, he had no idea he'd be starting a global craze.
Mostly, Jarrett said, he wanted to find something to do with the global positioning satellite mapping device he'd bought a year ago. So he scanned a topographic map he'd picked up for his trip and noticed that a few miles away a longitude line intersected with a latitude line.
He hiked to the point, a bog near a swamp, and snapped a digital photo. Back at home, he created a website and posted the picture online.
"I put up this outlandish goal that I had no intention of anyone taking seriously, which was to take pictures of all the points in the world," said Jarrett, who runs a delivery service near his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, on his bicycle. And at first, true to his expectations, no one but friends and acquaintances paid much attention.
But a couple of years later, as GPS devices and digital cameras became both cheaper and more widely available, the site began to draw attention. Slowly, people who'd never met Jarrett began to add their photos and travel stories.
Today, more than 4,400 GPS-toting travelers have participated in the Degree Confluence Project, covering nearly all the easily accessible points in the United States and Western Europe, and putting a sizeable dent into other populated portions of the globe.
In recent months, hard-core trekkers have ventured to remote areas from Antarctica to the jungle of East Timor to Svalbard, an Arctic territory bordering on the Barents Sea.
In all, project coordinators estimate that about 3,000 confluence points -- the intersection of whole-number latitude and longitude lines -- have been visited, out of a total of 16,000 global confluence points located on land and meet the goal of the project. If one includes intersections of latitude and longitude lines at sea, about 64,000 confluences exist worldwide.
But, Degree Confluence isn't collecting pictures from mid-ocean or confluence points close to the poles, where longitude lines can be as little as a few meters apart.
Gilles Kohl, one of the site's coordinators, says it's too early to guess when the project might realistically be completed. Given the difficulties involved in getting to many of the remaining confluence points, there's a question as to whether it will ever be finished.
Kohl believes some points in Nepal near Mt. Everest would require an expedition to reach. Another point is located in a heavily guarded nuclear testing site in the Nevada desert.
Access to other points is hindered by an array of obstacles: civil wars, dense foliage, swamps or just plain awful weather. But those hindrances haven't deterred determined trekkers.
Sam Robinson, a banking expert with the International Monetary Fund in East Timor, ventured with friends to a confluence point a short distance from the Indonesian border, ignoring the fact that the United Nations had classified the region in its highest risk category. Once close to the point, he attempted, in several languages, to enlist the help of local residents to navigate the brush, with mixed results.
"I explained (so I thought) that we were going to a place determined by the meeting of certain lines of latitude and longitude as a sort of sport," he wrote in an e-mail. "They understood that we were from a bottled water company looking for a new spring."
After Robinson convinced a local man to cut a path through the brush with his machete, he finally reached his destination. He is hoping to visit some of the four remaining confluences in East Timor, one point in his home country of New Zealand and potentially some spots in Tanzania.
Other travelers have had some initially chilling encounters. One group was speeding across the desert of Algeria in a Land Cruiser when they were stopped by a group of armed men near the border of Niger. Luckily, the armed men were friendly, gave them bread, cookies and yogurt, and offered water.
The party that traveled to Svalbard found a peaceful and barren Arctic scene at their chosen confluence point. A half-kilometer away, however, they glimpsed a rare view of one of the more ferocious local inhabitants: a polar bear, resting in the snow.
Some U.S. soldiers reached their desired confluence point in Iraq with the help of a Black Hawk helicopter.
In all, Kohl said, close to 29,000 photos are posted on the site, because participants can contribute multiple images of each point they visit. When Jarrett looks through the full collection, he notes how many are in rural or uninhabited places.
"It's surprising how few are in cities," he said. "You can usually see some evidence of human activity, but you still usually see scenes of nature."
How long nature will remain supreme in many of the spots remains to be seen. As part of the project, organizers are encouraging secondary visits to see how an area develops over time. In some cases, such as a confluence point in Indiana that is the site of a planned shopping complex, changes promise to come rapidly.
For the time being, Jarrett says he most appreciates the photo collection because it provides a realistic image of Earth's terrain, including its most remote and barren regions.
"You can look through and find real pictures of a place, not fabricated tourist places, but just random," he said. "What does an ordinary place in this country look like?"
