Our New Favorite Pastime

Warning: this activity is highly contagious. It involves ink, stamps, maps, compasses, clues, and an internet connection. It will make you look at your neighborhood differently. It will make you get on your knees a lot. You will spend time hunched down poking through bushes, counting trees, peering into hollow logs, and perhaps even debating Latin translations.

It’s called Letterboxing. It’s our latest obsession.

Though we are latecomers to it. Letterboxing began in Dartmoor, UK in 1854, though at first it involved leaving calling cards inside a bottle. At the turn of the century someone suggested that rubber stamping a logbook would be more efficient, and so Letterboxing as we largely know it today has been around for about a century.

What is it exactly? Here’s how we explained it to nearly-4-year old Sam:

Letterboxing is like a treasure hunt. People plant a small box with a rubber stamp and a logbook inside it somewhere in a publicly-accessible place, like a park or a forest. We follow clues to the box and when we find it, we open it up, read the logbook, and stamp our own rubber stamp in the book. Then we take the letterbox stamp and stamp it in our own logbook, so that we have a record of what we’ve found. Then we close the box back up and hide it carefully in its place, so that other people can find it.

A few years ago my best friend took me, AC, and my mother on a letterboxing quest in Pennsylvania. The clue was in rhyme and extremely difficult to decipher. After hours thrashing through the forest we gave up, dejected, tired, dirty. But we tried again the following weekend and, lo and behold, we found it! A buried chest of gold doubloons would not have elicited greater whooping. We were hooked.

Then we had a baby and spent the next 4 years deciphering her clues.

But now the baby is just about 4 years old and she loves traipsing about in forests, loves finding treasure, and loves stamping things with her very own rubber stamp.

For Letterboxing 2.0 we made our own stamps, carving them from rubber erasers with a craft knife. We found the instructions here.

Since then we’ve found 6 letterboxes– in forests, in neighborhoods, in parks, under rocks, inside trees, and under leaves. Three have eluded us so far, though we’re pretty sure we located the correct spots. Sometimes we need to use a compass. Sometimes we consult a map. Sometimes AC or I spots the box first and we wait until Sam sees it too. Sometimes we don’t wait because we are too excited and Sam stamps her feet and yells, “I wanna find it first!”

We always let her stamp her own stamp in the logbook, however. We’ve seen some beautiful hand-carved stamps, and they usually reflect the theme of the letterbox. Sam likes to guess what the stamp will look like based on the letterbox’s name. Many letterboxes take their theme from the historical, cultural, or botanical surroundings of their location, and the clues will often include an informational narrative.

AC and I are excited about the educational opportunities that Letterboxing will offer to Sam: problem-solving skills, map- and compass-reading, stamp artistry. Eventually we’ll start making our own letterboxes, researching locations, writing clues, tracking the finds. Building and caring for a box would be a great multi-disciplinary project for a kid.

And who am I kidding– it’s a great project for an adult too. Geeks that we are, AC and I spent 2 hours looking for a box whose clue was in Latin last weekend. While Sam pranced about and played and collected walking sticks, AC and I poured over our translation, considered landmarks and directions, had several “ah-ha!” moments, but eventually gave up the search, convinced the box had been carried off by a squirrel.

AC joined Sam in her frolicking, and climbed a tree.

I continued to think about declensions and surveyed the trees in front of us.

What could be better than being out in the woods and thinking about language?

There are hundreds of letterboxes in the Bay Area and across North America. If you care to try this yourself, check out Letterboxing.org to get started and Atlas Quest to find boxes in your area.

But, caveat letterboxer: this is a highly contagious activity.