September 2006

Out & About - Letterboxing: Finding Hidden Treasures (Almost) In Your Backyard

By Breanne Boland

What story would interest media as disparate as Fox News, Smithsonian, National Public Radio and Backpacker? The history and fun of a century-and-a-half-old hobby that turns the world into a treasure hunt, that spices up hikes, and that unites orienteering and art.

Letterboxing began in the 1850s in Devon, in southwest England, and since the 1970s has grown into a worldwide hobby. It involves a hider, who places a logbook, a carved rubber stamp and perhaps other items in a waterproof box, and a hunter, who follows clues to find the box in a nearby or remote location. When he finds it, the hunter stamps the logbook in the box with his own personal stamp and stamps his own logbook with the stamp he finds in the box.

Devon’s Dartmoor National Park remains letterboxing’s Mecca with 10,000 to 40,000 boxes hidden under rocks, in the roots of trees and in other small, protected spaces. Clues were originally distributed by catalog or from one hunter to another, and people who planted boxes prided themselves on making their clues deliberately obtuse.

While the hobby has existed in the United States for decades, the generally acknowledged start of modern American letterboxing was an article published in Smithsonian magazine in April 1998. After that, letterboxing snowballed, first in Oregon, Vermont and Tennessee, and then, slowly, across the rest of the country. Today there are thousands of letterboxes in the United States.

Hunting for Treasure

Some letterboxers are coy about their clues, distributing them only in person, but over all, the hobby is much more open than it is in Britain. The directions for most boxes – many of which are available online – give enough details about the location that you can tell what kind of journey to expect. On sites like letterboxing.com and AtlasQuest.com, boxes are rated by kid-friendliness, mental and physical difficulty, and the kinds of stamps you should expect to find.

Ryan Carpenter, AtlasQuest.com’s Pacific Northwest-based Webmaster, explains, “I wanted to develop more into a community, so I added message boards and a place to list letterboxing events. With the fast-growing number of letterboxes out there, I really wanted to ensure it was easy for people to sort through all the boxes and find exactly the ones that would most interest them.”

People who find letterboxes often plant them as well, and the wide variety of people involved ensure boxes appropriate for every skill level and attention span. There are boxes in places that are wheelchair-accessible, and there are boxes that require boats, horses or even scuba gear to get to.

Plenty of people look forward to an hours-long search, with clues only making sense once you can see the tree with three limbs or the boulder that looks like a meteor, but there will be ample warning if that’s the case with a particular box. Even on sites without organized rating systems, clues usually include details on what difficulties to expect – or eagerly anticipate.

Marie McAllister, a Snohomish County mother, regularly takes her three daughters out to plant and find letterboxes. Her oldest is 7 and her youngest are 2-year-old twins, and she keeps her kids’ abilities and interests in mind. “If we know we’re going somewhere with a box, we’ll print the clues and go treasure hunting,” she says. The prospect of a walk in the park is incentive enough to keep them interested. Once she determines that the terrain is appropriate for small children, she goes for boxes with a story. “We enjoy the creativity of some of the placers,” she says. “If it sounds fun, it will be fun!”

She uses the same rules when creating a box. “If we place a box, it’s either an easy, short hike – less than a mile – or a place where strollers can go,” Rydberg explains. “The latest boxes we placed have the seekers following the stories of two special characters and bringing them together.”

The family was turned on to letterboxing last Christmas by a sister-in-law from Oregon, where the hobby is popular. “After we found our first letterboxes, we were so anxious to place one that we did it right away,” McAllister says. “We purchased a stamp and built our box, took it out and placed it, and formulated our story and clues and posted it on the letterbox Web site.”

This year, they’ve found a few more letterboxes and placed five, all of which have homemade stamps. One box has been lost or taken, but the others are “alive and well.”

The Artistic Aspect

Along with directions, stamps are key to letterboxing. While some people simply sign a box’s logbook, leaving the date and a short message, most people have a personal stamp. It’s possible to buy a readymade stamp from a craft store, but part of the fun and culture of letterboxing is having your own personal image, made yourself so that it’s unique.

Making a stamp involves linoleum cutting supplies (available at most art stores) or a sharp knife and erasers. While sharp blades are involved, many kids are able to do this safely and with striking results.

There are also safe, easy ways younger kids can make their own stamp. Letterboxing.org has tutorials for a couple of methods that work well for kids of any age: One involves cutting art gum erasers with butter knives, and the other shows how to make designs by using safety scissors to cut foam pads sold as foot cushions. McAllister’s children use a piece of plastic for the base of the stamp and then stick on scraps of stamping rubber that their mother has saved over the years from trimming unassembled stamp sets.

Some letterboxers willingly share their stamps, showing them to fellow enthusiasts and even posting them online. However, many are secretive, leaving their mark only in logbooks. Opinions vary on how enigmatic one should be with a stamp, but almost everyone agrees that you should never post someone else’s stamp, be it their personal one or the one they carved for a box. Showing other people your logbook is acceptable; putting the stamps you’ve collected online is not.

Letterboxers form a community that’s both far-flung and tightly knit. They live all over the world, but online message boards and occasional gatherings and conventions bring them together, a sharp contrast to the solitary quests that characterized the early Dartmoor days. While there aren’t official organizations, you can get bumper stickers and patches with the insignias of different groups, and some people make patches for finding certain numbers of boxes, like 100 or 500.

If there’s a park or wooded area near you, there’s a good chance that a letterboxer has made a stop there. In Seattle, there are boxes in Carkeek, Discovery and numerous other parks and sites. In King County, you can find them in dozens of places from Bellevue to Kent, Issaquah to Enumclaw. In Kitsap County, there are several on Bainbridge Island, Bremerton and nearby areas. There are boxes in Snohomish, Edmonds and Monroe, several in Puyallup, and lots in Tacoma, Lacey, and Olympia. Boxes are most often found in more remote places, such as parks, as boxes planted in high-traffic areas go missing more often.

We’re adding one more letterbox in the Puget Sound area. We’ve planted a special Seattle’s Child/Puget Sound Parent box – why not start there? To see the clues, click here.

Breanne Boland is a Seattle freelance writer who has been letterboxing for four years.

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