Geocachers’ hobby has enthusiasts roaming state armed with GPS devices

Jeb Brant and Brian Palser are getting a lot of strange looks from passersby.

They're crawling around a rusted water pipe at a park in Grand Island, looking for what turns out to be a camouflaged old mint tin and rejoicing once they find it.

Their friend, Marc Rowan, knows exactly what those passersby are thinking.

"Yes, geocachers are nerds," Rowan says.

"It's true," Palser agrees, laughing. "We're all extreme nerds."

Their nerdy obsession -- geocaching -- involves using GPS devices to help locate creatively hidden items, or "caches," in parks, fields, trees, cemeteries, yards or historic sites -- a sort of 21st-century, worldwide scavenger hunt.

Their hobby has only existed for eight years, but it's catching on quickly, and it has several groups in the state hoping to tap into its tourism potential.

Geocaching has taken Rowan, Brant and Palser from their hometown of Hastings to virtually every corner of the state -- including, at least this week, to Grand Island. (They asked that the location of their finds not be detailed too closely, for fear of spoiling the caches' hiding places.)

Like those three, Dave and Gayle Luton of Grand Island didn't travel the state much before they took up geocaching five years ago. Now, they've crisscrossed the state several times while finding more than 1,200 caches, and they're 35 counties away from finding a cache in every county in the state.

"It takes you to places you would never, ever go without it," Gayle Luton said.

At its core, geocaching is something simple: a high-tech hide-and-seek. It began in 2000, when President Bill Clinton opened GPS signals to the public. Just two days after Clinton's announcement, the first geocache was hidden, its coordinates posted online.

Now, the coordinates and clues to all official geocaches are posted at www.geocaching.com. Most GPS devices can bring geocachers within about a dozen feet of a hidden cache -- after that, they have only the hiders' clues and their own problem-solving skills to lead them to the cache.

That's not always easy. Caches can be smaller than a button, and they have to be hidden well enough that no one who isn't looking for it could stumble across it.

They're often hidden as a means to get visitors to places of local interest, such as historic sites, public parks or beautiful vistas.

That's what Dick Kloke does. The Harvard resident and history buff hides caches near interesting pieces of local history or architecture, like a nearby B-17 memorial.

"I've found things that I didn't know existed," Kloke said. "And I like to put a cache there to draw other people to that spot."

The Highway 14 Association, a collaboration of communities to boost tourism along the highway that includes Aurora, Central City, Fullerton and Albion, had a similar idea.

Julie Dickerson of Albion, a member of the association, placed 14 geocaches with a friend along the highway last year.

So far, 135 people have found the caches and logged their finds online, Dickerson said. The group will begin a two-month promotion called Highway 14 Discover Geocaching next week to draw more attention to the caches -- and bring more visitors to the area.

"We just want people to get here," Dickerson said. "We just want people to come, and it sounds like they are."

The Adams County Convention and Visitors Bureau in Hastings links to a listing of all the area's caches and even has a cache on its own property that visitors can redeem for a packet of Kool-Aid.

The geocaching community isn't a huge one. But with its propensity to travel, it's one that makes sense to plug into, said Kaleena Fong, the group's executive director.

"It allows us to tap into the audience flying by on the interstate," Fong said.

And Adams County has a major asset in that effort -- more than 300 caches, the most of any county in the state. (As of Friday, there were 3,360 caches in the state as a whole.)

Much of that concentration is thanks to Rowan, who has hidden more than 300 caches himself -- far more than anyone else in Nebraska.

And of course, this whole trove of hidden treasures exists right under John and Jane Q. Public's nose.

"We can drive down the road and say, ’There's a cache there, there's a cache there, there's a cache there ... '" said Dave Luton.

Like many others, the Lutons got hooked on geocaching as an excuse to get outdoors and see things they've never seen. They also love the community it has given them: They meet with fellow geocachers each month for breakfast, and next weekend, they'll meet more than 100 at an annual picnic in Kearney.

"We've made more friends geocaching than ever before," Gayle Luton said.

Others, like Kloke and Rowan, often cache with their kids, but the Lutons' two teenagers still think they're nuts, Gayle said.

"It's all right," she said, smiling. "They'd probably think we were really lame no matter what we did."