Margot Anne Kelley first came to Asheville to photograph for a book about a new high-tech pastime called geocaching. She came back because, in a nation-spanning tour, Asheville was the place that left her astonished at its natural beauty.

“I was awestruck,” Kelley said. “I wanted to show my husband. Asheville was actually the only place that I said, ‘You’ve got to come see this.’ ”

Geocaching is a high-tech outdoor scavenger hunt using clues containing GPS coordinates. It served as the subject of Kelley’s 2006 book of photography and her traveling photographic exhibit at UNC Asheville last summer.

Using a handheld GPS receiver not much bigger than a cell phone, geocachers search landscapes both urban and rural for the coordinate that holds a well-hidden waterproof container that might have a prize inside.

The pastime’s most popular Web site lists almost 3,000 caches in the Asheville area.

Local geocaching enthusiast Graeme McGufficke said the natural beauty that so impressed Kelley is part of what makes Asheville such a cache-dense area. McGufficke maintains and refills the prize hidden at the end of one of Asheville’s most popular geocaches, “God Kissed the Earth and Called It Asheville.” The cache draws players to another aspect of Asheville’s geocache appeal: its colorful and pedestrian-friendly downtown.

Sarah Beth Jones, a Greensboro geocacher, said the prize she took home from her urban geocache adventure around downtown was a $60 nylon camp hammock built for two.

“What we particularly appreciated about the experience was that it took us to places in Asheville and the surrounding areas that we likely wouldn’t have found on our first visit, like the River District studios and Lake Louise Park,” Jones said.

The fun of geocaching lies in seeing an area through new eyes and exploring even a known place in creative and unexpected ways, she said.

“My husband is a photographer, so our travels often include detours down dirty alleys and other spots that are great photographic fodder but are not in any tour guides,” Jones said. “Geocaching is much the same way. It exposes you to areas you might just walk by otherwise, which makes it an interesting way to learn a new place and an even more interesting way to get a fresh perspective on a known place.”

Kelley saw geocaching as providing something even more important than a fresh perspective.

As she traveled America, visiting and photographing scenic geocache sites, she said she perceived something interesting as strangers from all over America left each other souvenirs hidden in plastic bins stuffed into rock crevices and hidden under overpass bridges.

“Geocaching was giving people a way to connect their love of cool technology to a life that included genuinely being present in the physical, natural world,” Kelley said. “The more I found out about the game and the more I did it, the more I thought that it could genuinely help people create new connections to each other and to the land.”

For geocachers, connections to the land come not just from leaving little presents secreted in the landscape but from sharing places they love and from cleaning up litter as they play, a practice geocachers call “Cache In Trash Out,” according to Kelley.

Quirky trinkets collected from the geocache adventures of Jeff Lynch of Asheville include a playing card from a vintage Scooby Doo deck and an old CB radio. Since geocaching custom dictates if one takes a prize, he leaves one of his own, Lynch leaves custom dog tags with his geocaching handle and contact information imprinted on them.

Jones said the act of someone leaving something of his own for someone else to find creates connections between people.

“It’s an interesting way to connect with strangers,” she said. “The trinket itself doesn’t matter and generally isn’t spectacular, but it is a form of communication between strangers. I think as we have become increasingly Web-based as a society, this kind of tangible human connection becomes even more appealing and reassuring.”

Explore geocaching both worldwide and in WNC at geocaching.com.