For Christmas last month, seven members of the Koopmeiners family all got matching hats: Gray beanies with sky-blue lettering reading “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-strong Koops Crew found the Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt medallion midday Saturday at Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary in St. Paul.

The medallion was encased in a clear plastic pyramid, inside a small plastic box behind a patch of grass. This is the first time the medallion has been hidden at Bruce Vento.

This is also the first time the Koops Crew has found the medallion. Luke Koopmeiners presented a registered Treasure Hunt patch and all seven clues released so far, earning the team the full $10,000 reward.

After the official announcement of the team’s win, the brothers were swarmed with people wanting to see the unearthed object, touch it, photograph it.

“We didn’t expect this part,” Luke said. “We’re humble hunters.”

The brothers’ mom, Laurie Koopmeiners, initially started hunting as a college student in the 1970s, and she said the family’s commitment to the hunt really took off once her sister, Nancy Allen, got involved in the ’80s.

Luke and Josh Koopmeiners joined the hunt about 15 years ago, and the crew now also includes Luke’s wife, Rachelle, and Josh’s wife, Erin, and their 4-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 50 or so onlookers who assembled for the announcement. “To Nancy!”

An important part of Allen’s legacy in the Koops Crew is the “bible,” a white three-ring binder that’s the core of the family’s incredibly organized approach to the hunt.

The binder contains maps, details on previous hunts and pages of charts and statistics analyzing the past decade’s worth of clues.

At the beginning of the hunt, Rachelle Koopmeiners said, each member of the family claims a few parks to look into. But because the family knows, for example, that 19 percent of Clue 3s over the past 10 or so years have ultimately described what the medallion is hidden inside of, they can better narrow their focus.

“We don’t rule anything out,” Josh Koopmeiners said. “We keep an open mind for what anything could mean. You never know.”

For many hunters this year, Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary had not been on their radar.

As for what tipped off the Koopmeiners, Luke said: A clue linking a local county to the park suggested Wakan Tipi, also known as Carver’s Cave, and clues about beer were notable because the park is the former site of the North Star Brewery.

When Josh Koopmeiners spotted a small plastic cube with what looked suspiciously like the medallion inside, “we didn’t know if we should scream or yell or be quiet or throw up!” he said.

The Pioneer Press Treasure Hunt has been held annually since 1952.

Typically, medallion hunters dig through massive amounts of snow in hopes of unearthing the small object. This year, though, significantly warmer-than-normal temperatures made for a largely snowless hunt. Like many hunters, the Koopmeiners traded their shovels for garden rakes.

Concluding after seven clues, this year’s hunt was the quickest since 2015, when Steve Worthman, a devoted hunter who published a hunters’ guidebook with maps of Ramsey County’s parks, found the medallion in just five days.

Last year’s hunt wrapped up after 10 clues, when Ken Soles and Tony Honkomp uncovered the medallion inside 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.

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