Obscure little towns and backwoods Carolina counties — he’s searched them all as die-hard geocacher.

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called geocaches or caches.

Wright, an 18-year-old Cary resident, has been into the hobby for about two and a half years.

He spent many weekends doing it during his time at Southeast Raleigh High School, where he just graduated as valedictorian.

“It’s like a high-tech scavenger hunt,” Wright said recently from his Cary home.

The caches can range in size from a bullet-sized magnet to large crates, and they’re planted all around the world.

The caches often contain inexpensive trinkets that geocachers can trade for other trinkets, but the cache itself is left in place so that others can find it in the future.

Web sites like geocaching.com, which Wright uses, allow geocachers to post where they have hidden caches so that other geocachers can find them.

The Web site will give the cache’s coordinates. The coordinates are then entered into a GPS unit that leads the geocacher to the area of the cache.

Then, a little old-fashioned looking around is required. Google Earth can also be used to find the location of the cache.

Once a geocacher finds a cache they log it on the Web site.

So far Wright has found 4,786 geocaches. He’s hidden 91 of them, many in the Triangle.

He often spends Saturdays with his father looking for them and it’s his goal to visit all of the North Carolina counties to find one. So far he has been to 95 out of the 100 counties.

He wants to find 5,000 geocaches by the time he attends UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall, where he plans to study biology.

“He’ll go all day, all night,” dad Dave Wright said of his son’s hobby.

Wright has even been to other states to find them, traveling to places like West Virginia.

“I just think it’s kind of fun to go into the woods and find stuff,” Wright said, noting that he enjoys the thrill of the hunt but also the solitude of searching for the caches, often hidden in remote spots.

He’ll keep searching next year when he goes to college, he said, talking about another goal to find a cache in each of the 50 states. (He’s traveled to 38 so far.)

And wherever he goes there will indeed be more caches to find.