Their only clues were a set of coordinates and instructions to look for a “suspicious pile of sticks.” Hundreds of yards into the woods near Jordan Lake, that wasn’t much help.

“OK guys, I found a pile of sticks,” Patrick Kelly called out.

“Well, is it suspicious, Dad?” Patrick Jr. replied.

“No, keep looking.”

Kelly and his sons, Patrick Jr., 13, and Lance, 4, have spent many a day with GPS unit in hand rooting out not-so-long-lost treasures. Their weekend hobby is called geocaching.

First, Kelly downloads sets of coordinates and clues from the Internet. Then he, his family and the occasional friend set out into the woods, or the fields, or even downtown Clayton and Smithfield with a set of coordinates and clues.

With the help of a Garmin 60CSX global positioning system unit, Kelly and the boys hone in on secret troves of trinkets and prizes that have been hidden by other “cachers” from around the county and beyond.

“They see you crawling around in the bushes,” Kelly said. “I’ve turned a lot of heads.”

The clues come from the Internet, but geocaching is all about getting down and dirty.

“It takes me to locations I didn’t even know existed,” Kelly said. “BMX tracks, parks we never would have taken the opportunity to go to if there wasn’t a geocache.”

Hidden treasure

One of the stashes, hidden in front of the Clayton library, is so well camouflaged that a passing “muggle” — noncacher — would never find it.

Many caches are deep in the woods, forcing searchers to bushwhack.

“Well, somebody’s tried this way before,” Kelly said as he led Patrick Jr. and his son’s friend, Josh Redding, 13, through a thick patch of brambles. He paused and glanced at the color screen of the GPS, then pointed deeper into the woods. “That way!”

Kelly downloads the cache coordinates from geocaching.com onto his GPS unit; the Web site lists more than 700 caches in Johnston County and more than 800,000 worldwide.

“My 4-year-old is convinced it’s pirates,” wrote Laura Kelly, Patrick’s wife, in an e-mail.

It is hard to tell how many ‘cachers there are in Johnston County, but the hobby has a strong following in North Carolina. The North Carolina Geocachers Organization has more than 2,300 members and has had more than 4 million page hits since August 2005. “It’s surprisingly popular around here,” Kelly said. “You’ll be at a location and see cars pulling up.” An early start Kelly got his first taste of orienteering while serving in the Army in the late 1980s. “I enjoyed doing land navigation, just with a compass and your pace count, the old-fashioned way,” he said. “I was pretty good at it.” The military also introduced him to the global positioning system, a Space Age tool developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and still managed by the Air Force’s 50th Space Wing. GPS receiver units can determine their own location by tracking the constellation of satellites. So far, Kelly and the boys have used their GPS units to log 82 “finds” at geocaching.com. Assorted prizes For Lance, 4, most of the fun comes from the prize at the end of the hunt. One cache had 30 different kinds of ink pens, while another was filled with rubber bugs rigged to fly out when the top was opened.

“You take something and leave something,” he said. “They’ve all got some story to tell.”

Kelly has also found “travel bugs,” special items that are meant to travel from cache to cache.

Right now, he’s holding on to a fireman’s helmet that is circulating caches around the country in remembrance of Sept. 11, 2001. Kelly found it near the Cleveland community after it had already circled from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., and back; this month, he will drop it off at a cache in Chicago.

Since the first GPS cache was placed in 2000, geocachers have built a huge network of stashes and log books across more than 100 countries and every continent.

The one that got away

Kelly has found caches across the United States, but one back home in Carolina still bedevils him.

“There’s one in Cary,” he said with a slight shake of the head. “I’m going to find it one day.” He knows the exact cedar tree it’s hidden in, even, but has never found it.

“You can see it from the right angle,” says the geocaching.com entry for Cedar Tribute, “but you probably aren’t looking at things that way.”