WHAT GREG MICHAELS DOES, to be precise, is make expeditions, GPS in hand, to the places on the earth's surface where integer latitude and longitude lines intersect, like 44°N 144°E, on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, one of his many Asian prizes. He was the first to bag a confluence in Taiwan, the first to bag one in Vietnam, and the first to bag what he calls "the center of the northeastern quadrasphere"—45°N 90°E, in western China. It was Greg who tried (and failed) to sweet-talk his way into North Korea to claim that country's first confluence, posing as a journalist and trying to hitch rides with Russian and Chinese boat captains. It was Greg who decided to go after the world's ten highest confluence points and reached what may be the very highest, at 19,113 feet on a nameless Tibetan peak, in May 2005. That expedition involved a week of hitchhiking, a 70-hour bus ride, severe altitude sickness, and cat-and-mouse games with the Chinese military.

Greg's description of the Tibet experience on confluence.org, the official Web site of the Degree Confluence Project (DCP), is second only to his description of a 2004 victory in Japan over skilled confluence hunter Fabrice Blocteur, a French-Canadian whom he raced mightily for the last of the confluences on Japan's main island, Honshu. The point's thick-jungle approach had previously beaten back Blocteur. Greg won after finding a waterlogged dinghy, paddling it down a river to bypass the worst of the jungle, and scaling a cliff, Princess Bride style, to reach the spot. A few months ago, Greg was featured on the home page of the DCP Web site for bagging the last points in Europe: four in Bosnia that others had avoided because of land mines. He carried maps from the Bosnia-Herzegovina de-mining commission and somehow survived with all his appendages.

According to the DCP—which was founded in 1996 by Alex Jarrett, a bored New Hampshirite looking for something to do with his new GPS—there are some 16,232 "primary" (i.e., not in the middle of an ocean) confluences on the planet: 14,029 on land, 2,203 in water but within sight of the shoreline, and 151 on what's left of the polar ice caps. So far, about a third of these, 5,324 points, have been visited and documented, and 10,405 confluence hunters in 177 countries on seven continents have snapped 71,929 pictures to prove they were there. Thanks to Greg, every confluence in mainland Europe has now been reached. Thanks to his compatriots, every confluence in every American state but Alaska has been reached. The DCP's map of the lower 48 has become a sea of red dots.

There are easy confluences and there are hard confluences, and if you're standing on this planet, you're never more than 49 miles from one. Some people simply get in their car and visit those nearby; some visit the same points again and again. But Greg does neither. Until last summer, when he made an attempt at the highest confluence in North America, 26°N 144°W, at 13,418 feet in Alaska's Wrangell–St. Elias National Park, he'd never even bothered to try one in the States. His 27 successful visits are thus a paltry few compared with those of 100- and 200-confluence legends Captain Peter, Gordon Spence, Targ Parsons, and Joseph Kerski, but a confluence hunter cannot be measured by stats alone.

"Captain Peter kind of cheats," Greg says of the Sicilian freighter captain Peter Mosselberger, who has racked up 230 confluences in 52 countries. "Well, not cheats, but he has a cargo ship, right, so he just goes and gets the ones offshore." Brits Spence and Parsons, meanwhile, are obsessed with reaching every point in the UK and China, respectively. Kerski, a former USGS geographer, sticks mostly to the United States. Their feats don't seem to impress Greg. While others go around gobbling up dots, he is something different: a visionary, a seeker of truly superlative nowheres, a man with an eye for only the most special arbitrary places.