John Lyle doesn’t usually commit crimes with the help of his
three daughters while his wife snaps photos.
John Lyle doesn’t usually commit crimes with the help of his three daughters while his wife snaps photos.
That’s why the father of four was surprised when he and his family returned home one day after a long day of geocaching, an outdoor activity some have likened to a “high tech treasure hunt,” to learn from neighbors that three Sheriff’s deputies had been looking for him. Apparently, a vigilant San Martin resident observed Lyle and his three girls – Kiara, 11, Karissa, 10, and Kaitlyn, 8 – searching for a hidden cache, a small container typically containing a logbook and possibly other goodies, around an electrical box at South Valley Internet and reported them to the police. Fortunately, neighbors hid a chuckle about the Lyle family’s quirky hobby and were able to smooth over the situation with the deputies before the Lyles returned home.
“We weren’t at the house because we were still out committing crimes,” Lyle joked.
On a regular basis, the Lyle family makes a day out of searching for some of the more than one million “geocaches” hidden around the globe, in county parks, on city streets, some even at the tops of mountains. Hundreds are hidden in South County alone, including in downtown Gilroy and Morgan Hill, in the surrounding county parks and along U.S. 101. The Lyles usually stick to the Bay Area but they’ve logged hits across the United States. John Lyle’s geocaching resume even includes a few international and underwater finds.
Tuesday morning, his three girls laced up brand new hiking boots that needed to be broken in, their mother, Korinda, slung a camera over her shoulder and Lyle, who works at IBM, handed out global positioning devices. The hunt was on.
Established 10 years ago when an Oregon man hid a bucket of small prizes – books, movies, food, some money – in the woods, posted the coordinates online and challenged people to a game of hide-and-seek, geocaching has caught on like wildfire. Sam Drake, a volunteer at the Coyote Lake-Harvey Bear Ranch County Park who teaches quarterly classes on geocaching, estimated that four to five million participants geocache worldwide.
“It’s the adult version of a treasure hunt,” said Mike Wanzong, an avid Gilroy geocacher who joined in the hunt after learning that his iPhone had a geocaching application. “I downloaded the app and that’s all it took.”
“Everyone geocaches for a different reason,” Drake said, whether it’s to meet people, stay fit or explore the world.
“For him,” Drake said, gesturing to Lyle, who split his attention between supervising his excited daughters and explaining the rules of geocaching, “it’s about being the first to find. For me, it’s about getting myself outside and discovering new parks. I’ve lived out here since the ’80s and knew all these great parks were out here but never did anything about it. I learned about geocaching in 2003 when I saw an article and the light bulb went off in my head.”
On his way home from work as a software architect at Oracle, Drake bought a GPS and started planning his first excursion. Since then, he’s hiked 280 miles, lost 40 pounds and put in about 200 volunteer hours with the county parks.
“It transformed my life,” Drake said.
As the morning mist burned off, the sound of the Lyle girls’ hoots and hollers when they found a new cache echoed along the Mummy Mountain Trail, the park’s newest and only non-equestrian trail that winds along a high ridges that offers beautiful views of Gilroy below. Though their father had programmed the coordinates of each cache into their GPSes, the girls, who all attend Charter School of Morgan Hill, happily abandoned the technology once they got close and began rooting around for the hidden treasure.
“They’re shorter so they’re at a lower eye level,” said Korinda. “A lot of times they’ll find stuff because they’re smaller.”
Hidden by the geocachers themselves, the caches at Coyote Lake – Harvey Bear ranged from a rusty tin containing a rubber eraser and a single earplug to a camouflaged ammo box that held an assortment of books, Matchbox cars and other trinkets. No matter how elaborate, each elicited squeals of glee each time the girls happened upon one. Players are allowed to take some items home with them as long as they replace them with comparable items. Armed with replacements, Karissa chose a bright key chain as her prize and signed her family’s game name – the Geokashers – to the cache’s logbook.
Probably the most practiced geocacher of her siblings, Karissa had to hold back a few times to let her sisters find the cache.
“You want to give these guys a shot,” Lyle said to his middle daughter.
“But I know where it is!” Karissa said, smiling as her eyes strayed to a cluster of rocks.
After a few seconds, her older and younger sister located the cache and they descended on the treasure.
“You have to start thinking like a spy,” Drake said. “If you were going to hide something in plain sight, where would you put it? You’re just looking for anything that’s a little bit out of place.”
Like his middle daughter, Lyle has to restrain himself sometimes during a geocaching session. Not only do they have to keep from ruining the game for other participants, they have to disguise their search around non-geocachers, or Muggles – nicknamed by the caching community after the non-wizards in the popular Harry Potter series. With thousands of finds under his belt, “John is one of the best geocachers out there. He’s insane.” Wanzong said with a laugh.
Aside from the people he’s met, it’s the experience of being outdoors and exploring new territory that hooked Wanzong.
“A lot of people have never heard of it but it’s definitely blossoming,” he said. “I love it because it takes you to places you’d never know where there in your own backyard.”
To learn more about geocaching, check out www.geocaching.com. When Drake schedules a date for his next class in the fall, it will be posted to www.parkhere.org.
