Next spring, Calgary adventurer Stan Grist plans to lead an expedition into the jungles of Ecuador in search of a lost, pre-Incan underground city. It's nothing new for Mr. Grist, who flew to the South American country last week to do some preliminary scouting for the project. The 42-year-old native of Detroit has been hooked on treasure-hunting since age 12, when he used a metal detector to turn up quarters buried under the grass in his local park. The real-life Indiana Jones, a gold mining geologist, was transfixed by stories of lost cities and civilizations while doing survey work in the Amazon rainforest in the early 1980s. He has since devoted himself to proving the tales true. In 1986, in Honduras, he discovered the site of a Spanish gold mining centre destroyed by an earthquake in 1611. He hatched his latest project after stumbling across a 1965 account by an Argentinean adventurer who claimed to have found a library of books, written on an unknown metal, in a network of tunnels deep in Ecuador's jungles. To help finance the expedition, he has teamed up with the Calgary multimedia publishing firm Digital Explorer, which will produce a film and CD-ROM documenting the search. Two years ago, Mr. Grist produced a CD-ROM called Lost Treasures of the World that PC Magazine named one of the year's best. "Some people hear these old stories and just scoff," says Mr. Grist. "But I think there's an element of truth to them."