2024 St. Paul Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion found at Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary – Twin Cities
For Christmas last month, seven members of the Koopmeiners family all received matching hats: gray caps emblazoned with sky-blue lettering “Koops Crew,” the name of the family’s medallion hunting group.
Talk about a well-timed gift.
Luke Koopmeiners, his brother Josh and the three-generation Koops crew found the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion at noon Saturday at the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul.
The medallion was in a clear plastic pyramid in a small plastic box behind a patch of grass. This is the first time the medallion was hidden at Bruce Vento’s house.
UPDATE: The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary is closed to future treasure hunts
This is also the first time the Koops crew finds the medallion. Luke Koopmeiners presented a registered treasure hunt patch and all seven clues released to date, earning the team the full $10,000 reward.
After the team’s victory was officially announced, the brothers flocked to crowds wanting to see, touch and photograph the unearthed object.
“We didn’t expect this part,” Luke said. “We are humble hunters.”
The brothers’ mother, Laurie Koopmeiners, started hunting as a student in the 1970s, and she said the family’s involvement in hunting really took off when her sister Nancy Allen started hunting in the ’80s .
Luke and Josh Koopmeiners joined the hunt about 15 years ago, and the crew now includes Luke’s wife Rachelle and Josh’s wife Erin, as well as their four-year-old son Elijah. Luke Koopmeiners’ family currently lives in Blaine and Josh’s family lives in Glencoe.
Allen died in February 2020.
“We want to dedicate this hunt to her,” Luke Koopmeiners told the crowd of about 50 spectators who gathered for the announcement. “To Nancy!”
An important part of Allen’s legacy on the Koops crew is the “Bible,” a white three-ring binder that represents the core of the family’s incredibly organized approach to hunting.
The binder contains maps, details of previous hunts, and pages of charts and statistics analyzing the last decade’s worth of clues.
At the start of the hunt, Rachelle Koopmeiners said, each family member claimed a few parks to check out. But because the family knows, for example, that 19 percent of Clue 3 fans in the last decade or so have ultimately described what the medallion is hidden in, they can better narrow their focus.
“We’re not ruling anything out,” said Josh Koopmeiners. “We are open to what anything could mean. You never know.”
For many hunters, Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary was not on their radar this year.
What gave the Koopmeiners the tip, Luke said: A clue linking a local county to the park pointed to Wakan Tipi, also known as Carver’s Cave, and references to beer were notable since the park was the former site of the North Star Brewery is.
When Josh Koopmeiners discovered a small plastic cube with something inside that looked suspiciously like the medallion, “we didn’t know whether to scream or scream or be quiet or throw up!” he said.
The Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt has been held annually since 1952.
Typically, medallion hunters dig through huge amounts of snow in hopes of finding the small object. This year, however, significantly warmer than normal temperatures meant hunting was largely snow-free. Like many hunters, the Koopmeiners swapped their shovels for garden rakes.
After seven leads, it was concluded that this year’s hunt was the fastest since 2015, when Steve Worthman, an avid hunter who published a hunter’s guide with maps of Ramsey County parks, found the medallion in just five days.
Last year’s hunt ended after 10 tips when Ken Soles and Tony Honkomp discovered the medallion in a crushed can of Asian-style baby corn at Phalen Regional Park in St. Paul.
Take a look at all of this year’s Pioneer Press treasure hunt clues and what they mean.
