People gathered Saturday at the Cape Girardeau Nature Conservation Center to learn how to hunt for treasure and leave behind some of their own.

Jordi Brostoski, a naturalist at the nature center, leads a group down a trail during the family treasure hunting class Saturday at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center. The class taught the basics of geocaching to families. (Glenn Landberg)

Geocaching is a craze that is played all over the globe, where boxes are hidden in all kinds of strange places, and using a GPS unit or tracking device, savvy adventurers track down the boxes and swap out the items inside.

Jordi Brostoski, a naturalist at the nature center, taught her first geocaching class Saturday in Cape Girardeau. Brotoski taught two courses, Geocaching Basics at 9:30 a.m. and Family Treasure Hunting at 1 p.m. The courses were small, but that allowed the instructors to work one-on-one with the students, helping them navigate their GPS units.

"[It's essentially a] modern day treasure hunt using a GPS," Brostoski said.

She explained the boxes hidden around are called "caches," which has two different meanings: a hiding place to store items temporarily, or a memory cache, which is computer storage used to quickly retrieve frequently used information. Combined with the term "geo," meaning earth, that's how geocaching came to be named.

Jordi Brostoski, a naturalist at the nature center, holds up the GPS coordinates for the next cache during a family treasure hunting class Saturday at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center. The class taught the basics of geocaching to families. (Glenn Landberg)

Brostoski said there are 2 million geocaches worldwide, and doing a search for 10 miles around Cape Girardeau there's approximately 800 geocaches in the surrounding area.

After a quick presentation on what geocaching is, and explaining the various terms and etiquette that surround geocaching, Brostoski took her group of outdoorsmen and -women outside with their GPS units to track down some of the caches she hid on the trails in the area.

Brostoski filled the caches with a variety of items, such as bandannas, magnifying glasses and travel bugs -- which is an item that has a tracking number on it and using the website geocaching.com owners can track where their item has been.

"[By using the travel bugs] I was hoping to promote them doing this on their own," she said.

A participant in the family treasure hunting class at the Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center looks at a GPS unit to help her find the next cache Saturday. (Glenn Landberg)

Brostoski has several travel bugs she keeps track of, one toy finger puppet she showed the class has traveled all across the United States, from Boston to Florida to Washington. And another, a plastic gnome she was tracking, made it all the way to South Korea before disappearing.

"Geocachers are a pretty calm group," Brostoski explained. But they're polite, and courteous of where they hide their caches. Brostoski showed her class what different trackers and travel bugs looked like, how to log in their identification codes, and then pulled up a display map showing how the item travels around.

"I'm always looking for another activity to get families outside and enjoying looking at a place in a different light," Brostoski said.

And that was her goal with the classes Saturday. Brostoski said by the end of their treasure hunt children and their families were beginning to recognize the different places that would be good to camouflage caches and just notice their surroundings more in general.

smaue@semissourian.com

388-3644

Pertinent address:

2289 County Park Drive, Cape Girardeau, Mo.