My face is buried in my GPS because I don’t want to talk to my girlfriend. She’s not talking to me either. We’re geocaching and we’re supposed to be having fun, but like all excursions that involve navigation, this trip has caused some tension. We’re looking for treasure, or booty, as pirates and the Beastie Boys call it.

Geocaching is like an Easter egg hunt for adults. Basically, someone hides a box of goodies, called a cache, in the woods, shares the cache’s location coordinates on the Web and then other geocachers use their GPS systems to find it. Hide and seek. All you need is a GPS and a latent desire to be Indiana Jones.

I know, it’s a little geekish. Take one look at the user names on geocaching.com (Whiteknight, Porkking, Captkirk, Tombracer) and you can see that geocaching is the Dungeons and Dragons of the outdoor world. But that’s okay. Geeks are in. Read any fashion magazine and they’ll tell you the same. And it’s not just geeks that are into this new “sport.” It’s completely egalitarian, attracting hardcore outdoor enthusiasts and computer wizards alike. Plus it gives us a reason to actually use our GPS, since most of us have only used it once to track the route to the grocery store.

Bert Carter, founder of the North Carolina Geocachers Association, says people get into the sport for all kinds of reasons. “At 55, I can’t do the things I used to do,” Carter says, reminiscing about his days as a jogger and soccer player. “Geocaching is an extension of the outdoor experience I used to thrive on. And the adventure of going some place I’ve never been and looking for ‘treasure’ drives me, too.”

Carter claims to be the most experienced geocacher in North Carolina, logging over 2,000 caches during his two years in the sport. He’s hiked over 1,000 miles during his career. “I’m beyond obsessed,” he says. “Every chance I get, I’ll go out and search.”

Carter speaks about geocaching with the same passion born-again Christians speak about Jesus…or Trekkies speak about Spock. He’s not the only one. It’s hard to determine how many geocachers there are in the world, but geocaching.com has over 120,000 active caches in 210 countries listed on their Web site. Read geocaching.com’s online forum and you can see that Carter’s enthusiasm is par for the course.

Some people put nothing but a logbook in the cache, which you’re supposed to sign and hide again. Others put books, CDs, toys, even money. There are rumors in the geocaching world about extremely rich benefactors that fill their caches with jewels and gold. Naturally, this is what I’m hoping for on my first geochaching expedition. The thrill of the hunt, the chance to discover new territory, the cardiovascular training…geocaching offers all of these things. But I’m not experiencing any of them. I’m just pissed because I’ve been lost for about half an hour trying to find a cache supposedly hidden in a neighborhood park.

The park is about 10 total acres, so getting lost is a huge embarrassment. My girlfriend says we should just email the guy who hid the cache and ask him where it is. I tell her that’s cheating. These are the first words we’ve spoken in 20 minutes.

Bert Carter warned me about my first cache: “People take a lot of pride in hiding their caches, so there’s no dishonor in not finding one. It’s hard. But the real attraction to geocaching is not just finding the cache, but also in discovering parts of the woods that you never would have found otherwise.”

And it’s true. Between the fits of anger, I did notice a small spring that I had never seen before, even though I’d visited this park a dozen times. There’s also a small canyon hidden in the recesses of the park that I didn’t know about. And, if I can indulge in my inner Trekkie for a moment, maybe the true treasure of geocaching is that it forces you to “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Still, I’d rather find a chest of gold.

–Graham Averill