Geocaching gets gearheads enjoying the great outdoors

Hidden containers filled with random treasures are stashed in East Valley parks and desert trails.

Tempe resident Brad Bannach, armed with a global positioning system and a list of clues printed off the Internet, is on a mission to find them.

“They are literally everywhere,” Bannach says, peering across the mountain tops of Papago Park. “I can usually find them pretty quickly. I look for rocks that are stacked up or something that looks out of place.”

Bannach, 24, is a modern-day scavenger hunter in the game known as geocaching, in which players use global positioning systems to uncover caches left by other players.

Geocaching has had an underground following since it began in 2000, but more recently its appeal has broadened from techies to anyone who enjoys the outdoors with a high-tech twist.

“You get to get outside and something fun to do,” says Bannach, who’s been geocaching for about a year. “This spot is pretty close to my house, but I would have never ventured over here if not for (geocaching).”

Caches can be stored in a variety of items — Tupperware containers, canisters, metal boxes. They’re buried by individuals all over the world and contain everything from seashells to kids’ toys. A logbook is also placed inside so hunters can record their name and the date they uncovered it.

Jeanette Lucas of Gilbert goes geocaching with her husband and two sons regularly and estimates they’ve found nearly two dozen caches in the past year and a half.

“It’s a fun, inexpensive way to spend time with the boys,” she says.

Before she goes geocaching, Lucas says, she stops by the 99-cent store to pick up toys such as rubber bugs or balls. To keep the cache active, players take an item from the cache only if they leave a new item in exchange.

“It’s not about what’s in the cache,” she says. “It’s about the adventure of finding it.”

When a player hides a cache, they record its coordinates and post it on geocaching Web sites such as geocaching.com and azgeocaching.com.

The hand-held global positioning systems direct players within 6 to 20 feet of where the item is hidden. Once near the cache, a list of clues, also posted on the Internet, directs them exactly where to look.

“Sometimes people get pretty creative,” says Mesa geocacher Matthew Gonzalez. “I’ve spent the whole day looking for one cache before, and still never found it.”

Still, Gonzalez, who’s been geocaching for five years, says Arizona is a great place to geocache because of its variety of terrain.

“I’ve found caches on mountaintops and at the bottom of lakes,” he says. “It’s great here. The area has a real strong geocaching community.”

The sport began in May 2000 when sanctions were lifted on GPS devices, giving the public more exact GPS readings. Two days later the first geocache was buried in the woods of Portland, Ore. Since then the sport has grown in popularity primarily through word of mouth and the Internet.

Today there are about 6,000 caches hidden throughout the state and about 410,000 geocaches worldwide, according to Geocaching.com, the world’s first and largest geocaching organization.

It shows no sign of slowing down, Gonzalez says.

“When I first started and I used to tell people I was going geocaching, they were like, 'What’s that?’ ” he says. “Now they’re like, 'Can I come?’ ”