I believe that the less said about or to the National Park Service
the better. The NPS needs to maintion the right to approve or deny
anything that goes in their parks to protect them. We should stay
away from fragile, historical or especially popular parks.
Letterboxes should be hidden in quiet, safe and discrete places
anyway. However we all know a few boxes in few obscure, less visited
parks. Don't ask don't tell I say. As long as we all follow the
guidelines of the LBNA everyone will be happy. The less we attract
the attention of the NPS the better for both of us.

Letterboxes survive by being a quiet, discrete hobby. Occasional
articles catch the attention of those naturally attracted to
letterboxing but I do not think it would be good to evangelize to the
masses too much.

Scarab of the Doubtful Guests

--- In letterbox-usa@yahoogroups.com, "Sheila Stewart"
wrote:
> Hi folks.
>
> In thinking about the issues with National Parks an idea struck me.
What I'm looking for is feedback and maybe someone to approach the
NPs and see what they think about it. Unfortunately, I am just a
brainstormer and do not have the time, nor NP close by to run this up
the flagpole so to speak. If anyone wants to run with it, be my guest!
>
> This last year My husband and I were visiting the Dry Tortugas
National Park off the Florida Keys and came across a National Park
Passport that is offered by the Parks. What it is is a book giving
info about the different parks by region and so forth and has areas
for stamping just like a travel passport. I questioned the lady at
the desk about it and she said that all NPs have a date stamp with an
insignia at the desk of the park gift shop or HQ buildings and that
all you have to do is take your passport book and ask for the stamp.
Well...in thinking about it, why not see if the Park folks would be
willing to allow individuals to place hand made stamps along with
this date and insignia stamp so that people could also add that stamp
to their passports, as well as to their letterboxing stamp
collection??? Maybe the individual could also have some of the
letterboxing leaflets available so interested people could learn more
about letterboxing as an additional bonus. You could always make the
letterboxing stamp by request only if you didn't want it available to
the general public, or, you could make it available, your choice. Of
course letterboxers could also add the park date and insignia stamp
to their collection as a side benefit. (The turtle stamp from the Dry
Tortugas is AWESOME!!!) I think if someone wrote up a proposal and
showed the benefits, ie., increased traffic into the park's gift
shops, opportunity to have control over the box, etc, I think this
could be sold to the powers that be.
>
> An alternative to having the box right next to the park date stamp
would be setting up something like the Smithsonian box and have the
park folks knowing that it is located inside the gift shop or a
nature center. I honestly think they would be more receptive to the
idea plugged with increased traffic inside park buildings, rather
than increased potential damage to the park's ecosystems.
>
> I welcome all feedback on this idea!
>
>
> All the best,
>
> Sheila (puppylover)

I've been collecting the Nat'l Park passport stamps for a while now. It can be a bit like letterboxing where sometimes the directions to a visitor center are rather vague and you have to ask a ranger where the stamp is. Also, some parks have multiple stamps at different locations within the park. The other tricky thing is that there really is no single comprehensive list of all the stamps that exist - even the publisher of the passports only provides a partial list.

I think you would probably find varying degrees of support for having the visitor centers and park stations storing and providing letterboxes. In smaller parks, I think you might get more support but at more popular tourist destinations like as Alcatraz or Yellowstone I don't think they would be as likely to do this.

Just my thoughts...

vickie

p.s. there are also passport stamp programs for National Wildlife Refuges and the US Lighthouse Society!

> In smaller parks, I think you might get more support but at more
> popular tourist destinations like as Alcatraz or Yellowstone I
> don't think they would be as likely to do this.

That's probably an accurate assessment based on my experiences with
the local park service personal with parks large and small. At least
out in California where I've done volunteer work for Yosemite,
Sequoia, and Channel Islands National Park. And let me tell you, the
bigger and more popular of a tourist destination the park is, the
more red tape there is, even when you want to VOLUNTEER your work for
FREE! Heck, in Yosemite they wouldn't even let us clean out the
campfire rings in the campgrounds without an official to "watch" us,
and they couldn't find one to do even that because they were too busy
herding cattle, errr, tourists around. So those idiots ended up
having to do ALL the work themselves which just made more work for
them in the long run. Ugh. I will never, ever volunteer my efforts
in that park again. Not worth the effort.

But the Channel Islands--sheeze! Those park rangers were awesome!
They even let us drive their little rescue boats around the islands
which was a real blast. =) When there's only two
rangers/adminitration officials on the entire island (I was on Santa
Rosa island), there's not a whole lot of red tape to cut through!

-- Ryan