Letterboxing--A Hobby Worth Trying

James Jay · Subject: Letterboxing--A Hobby Worth Trying Fri Apr 04, 2008 4:38 pm

I posted the following on my blog, and thought I'd repost it here.

Letterboxing

Thought I’d take the time to educate folks about a hobby my family and I share called letterboxing. It’s kind of like treasure hunting, but instead of gold and silver, you track down boxes that other people have left clues for. Inside the boxes are journals and a rubber stamp, usually hand carved, relating to the area the boxes is hidden in.

Letterboxers hide these boxes just about anywhere. Chances are, you’ve walked right by one at some point in your life, and never known that it was there. They can be in a public place, along a nature trail, or even hidden online.

Here’s the breakdown: When we go somewhere, we’ll look at the letterboxing website www.atlasquest.com to see if anyone has hidden a box near our destination, or along the route. We’ll print out the clues, then hunt it down. When we’ve found it, we then stamp our family mark in the journal in the box, and use the stamp the placer left and mark our own family journal. We’ll write the name of the box, the placer, the date, and location in our own journal. Then, we put everything back the way we found it for the next person to find.

We got into this about two years ago, sort of, but just recently got real active in it. It’s a lot of fun for families, but a lot of singles are involved in it. If you like outdoors stuff, this is really for you. If you don’t, this kind of forces you to get into nature. You will also discover places you might not even think twice about. Example, on our recent road trip, we found a box at Rocky Nook Park, just up the street from the Santa Barbara Mission. The clues took us deep into a forest trail, alongside a rushing stream and we found the box buried in the hollow of a tree. It was a beautiful hike, and I posted pictures of it in the Solvang album.

If you are interested in this hobby, check out the link above, or ask me anything. It is a lot of fun.

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