Hunt for Goonies gold on your phone

Published 8:00 pm Wednesday, June 3, 2015

A Seattle company is helping fans of the “The Goonies” search for One-Eyed Willy’s treasure using their smartphones as a map.

Geocaching, a company based on the GPS-driven hobby, created the One-Eyed Willy Treasure Hunt for this weekend’s 30th anniversary of the movie, along with a related brewery and distillery tour of Astoria.

To access either, visit www.goonies.guide

The hunt starts at noon today and runs until 5 p.m. Sunday. Treasure hunters can win Goonies-related prizes when they find all 20 geocaches. The first 500 people at Geocaching’s information booth at the Goondocks — inside the Astoria Armory at 1636 Exchange St. — get a free tasting glass for the brewery tour.

Eric Schudiske, a spokesman for Geocaching, said there will be 20 different locations around Astoria in the hunt, including six movie shoot locations and 14 businesses with puzzles to solve for hidden codes.

“When the site goes live, you’ll see all 20 locations, and you’ll be able to click on them individually and get information,” he said.

“The treasure hunt was designed to accentuate and highlight aspects of the movie that were the most memorable.”

The geocaches all link to parts of the movie and landmarks around Astoria, with names like Jail Break, Mr. Walsh & The Museum, Police Chase, Fifty Dollar Bill, The Goonies Oath and Ye Intruders Beware.

Amy Faulkner, an events production manager for Geocaching, is behind the props and other clues hunters will look for at each geocache.

“This is my childhood dream,” she said Tuesday at Astoria Coffee Co., one of the 26 businesses she has been working with to make the treasure hunt and brewery tour a reality.

Faulkner said that with 15,000 people expected to visit Astoria for the Goonies celebration, she conservatively estimates about 10,000 people will take part in the treasure hunt.

The businesses she worked with have a connection to the movie, such as the Astoria Coffee Co. at 36th Street and U.S. Highway 30 that stood in as a convenience store in a deleted scene after the Goonies found the treasure map in the attic.

At the store, treasure hunters take a doubloon and run it over a wall-mounted treasure map like a wand over a Ouija board, looking for the code that will take them to the next geocache. When the riddle is solved, hunters get a deleted clip from the movie on their phone.

Faulkner has placed geocaches related to the movie all over town, such as the Fifty Dollar Bill level at Lucy’s Books referencing the Fratelli crime family’s counterfeit cash; and the I Smell Bubble Gum geocache at the Arc Arcade referencing Mama Fratelli’s sniffing out the Goonies.

Faulkner said Geocaching worked with Warner Bros. to provide clips and pictures from the movie for solving stages of the hunt.

“Goonies have been on our radar really since the founding of the company,” Schudiske said. “I think Goonies is in the blood of all geocachers, to an extent.”

When Geocaching’s founder Jeremy Irish accepted the Bootstrapper of the Year Award in 2014 from technology news website GeekWire, Schudiske said, he quoted Sean Austin’s character Mikey from “The Goonies” in his acceptance speech.

“Because it’s their time,” Irish said. “Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here.”

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