Today’s Treasure Hunt Gets a High-Tech Twist

Dean Portman doesn’t bury treasure just anywhere.

He scours topographical maps. He hikes for hours along parched mountain trails that snake skyward. He slips past locked gates and then doubles back over knobby-tired tracks of mountain bikes, searching for The Perfect Place.

Which clearly is not the first plateau at Castro Crest, a rocky ridge line in the Santa Monica Mountains. Portman had hoped to catch a glimpse of the ocean below. But there’s only a valley dusted with tawny chaparral and blood-red buckwheat.

“Not dramatic enough,” he decides. And keeps climbing.

Portman is a “geocacher,” one of a new breed of explorers--part pirate, part computer geek--prowling the Earth on a high-tech treasure hunt. Using hand-held electronic devices known as global positioning systems to track their steps, they hide small items outdoors and then post the coordinates on the Internet for others to find. So far, according to a Web site devoted to the game, players have stashed 8,117 caches in 75 countries.

The booty, often jammed into Tupperware bowls or other waterproof containers, is usually cheap: stuffed animals, cat toys, maybe a handful of plastic jewelry. But Portman, a 40-year-old unemployed artist whose last job was maintaining methane pipes at a landfill, takes his sport seriously. You won’t catch him planting some dogeared Danielle Steele novel under a tree.

He was up until midnight the night before, preparing his cache. Lately he’s been into metal. It started with a bronze plate he cut up with a jeweler’s saw, and now, after eight hours of carving and polishing, he has five copper-plated medallions decorated with miniature photographs. One depicts a cowgirl. Another features three little elephants.

“I’m a frustrated artist, so this is one way I know that people will look at what I do,” Portman says. “People love it, man. People love these little medals I make.”

Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) began to take off in the summer of 2000, after the U.S. government decided to stop scrambling GPS signals to allow civilian users to better pinpoint locations. Boaters, emergency rescue teams, even tourists in rental cars equipped with GPS devices could suddenly peg their latitude and longitude within 20 meters or better.

Cache Coordinates

Posted Online

To celebrate, a GPS fan outside Portland, Ore., planted a cache and posted the coordinates online. Within three days the spot had been visited twice. Web sites sprang up to document the game. Brazen geocachers took their pursuit to new heights (and depths). One cache reportedly rests at the bottom of the Red Sea, hidden inside a sunken ship.

To find their way, explorers punch the desired coordinates into their GPS units. A digital compass and other data typically flash onto the screen, pointing people in the right direction and noting how far away their destination is. The systems can also be used to determine the user’s precise location.

Jeremy Irish, a 28-year-old techie who keeps six computers in his Bellevue, Wash., home, has become the unofficial ambassador of geocaching. Irish created the game’s main Web site (www.geocaching.com), a trove of information that lists caches by ZIP Code and asks its 26,000 registered users to record each one they visit.

He got hooked on geocaching last year, after a miserable hike with no water and plenty of bugs in the middle of a scorching July. It took two hours, uphill, only to be rewarded by a meager cache containing a logbook, a disposable camera (for recording each person’s visit) and a fermented Sunny Delight drink.

“I was elated,” Irish said. “I was like, ‘Finally!’ It was definitely worth it.”

The hunt seems to tap into some primal urge, burbling within the breasts of Spanish conquistadors and Wall Street raiders alike, to seek and plunder.

“I can never get my kids to just go on a hike,” said Robert Rutter, a geocacher who belongs to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department’s search and rescue team. “But if you tell them they might find some bubble gum at the end, they’re into it.”

But geocachers aren’t the only one hunting down stashes online. Nestled deep in a cabin at Paramount Ranch, a pistol strapped to his side, Greg Jackson taps away at his keyboard.

Jackson, a burly ranger who works for the National Park Service, is less than thrilled about geocaching. It’s a nuisance, really, having to monitor Web sites to make sure no one is burying these things on federal land.

“It’s like being a referee for people who don’t play by the rules,” he grumbles.

If Jackson finds a cache--he’s unearthed three so far--he removes it. But geocaching is so new that the National Park Service has yet to explicitly forbid it. For now, many rangers rely on a policy that bars “abandoned property” in national parks.

“Someone will leave a cache and not pick it up and then someone else will come leave another one,” said Jon Dick, chief ranger for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “And pretty soon we’re walking on Tupperware.”

The 85-year-old park service generally frowns on anything that smacks of a treasure hunt. As the steward of the nation’s greatest natural and historical gems, the agency is already struggling with a shortage of rangers and a rise in resource crimes like animal poaching and artifact thefts.

The California Department of Parks and Recreation, too, has yet to draw up a policy on geocaching. But the agency forbids digging or disturbing plants in its parks. Still, rangers want people to explore the outdoors, so some suggest that geocachers should simply take photos of unique places instead of planting caches.

Many geocachers aren’t even aware of the controversy. Told that rangers will take his cache if they find it at Castro Crest, Portman just scowled. “It’s none of their business,” he says.

Modern-day prospectors seeking caches aren’t just taking off with loot. The geocaching ethic requires players to leave something behind. Logbooks in each cache record the exchanges.

“Found the cache a little before sundown so had an excellent view and scenery,” a geocacher who goes by the name BuckyB wrote at one cache hidden outside Chatsworth. “Took the Smokey antenna ball and left 2 Pokemon magnets and a Pooh Band-Aid.”

‘Travel Bugs’ Move

From Cache to Cache

Played by thousands of adventurous tech-lovers, the game is constantly evolving. Some players have sent out Beanie Babies or other toys with notes attached, saying they want to travel as far as possible. These so-called “travel bugs” make their way from cache to cache as fellow geocachers swap them for other goodies.

Irish recently released a gaggle of red plastic ducks, each bearing a set of horns. He calls them the Deadly Ducks and has named them after the seven deadly sins. One of them--Lust--has already traveled 294 miles around Arizona.

But Portman, man of the metal medallions, doesn’t bother with such gimmicks. He simply wants to lure people into the arid beauty of the Santa Monicas and reward them with handmade pendants.

After about two hours of uphill hiking, he finally settles on a rocky, 10-foot outcropping jutting off the Backbone Trail. He slips the medallions, along with some incense sticks and other treasures, into a two-gallon paint bucket, which he tucks under a bush.

“Mission accomplished,” he says happily. “I feel great.”

Just two days later, the bucket was discovered by four separate parties, according to the geocaching Web site. Four medallions were taken, replaced by an Australian teaspoon, a silver candleholder shaped like a flamingo, a Swiss army knife and a “Domestic Disturbance” baseball cap, among other gems.

The logbook has been filling up with entries from people like DredPirateRoberts and gpsdave. But no rangers, yet.