G'day!

I was staying in a hotel earlier this week and found a copy of Thursday's USA Today on my doorstep. In it was an article about The Degree Confluence Project. It overlaps a little with what we do, and may provide an interesting opportunity for siting some special letterboxes.

I checked the archive for the Letterbox-USA list and found only one tangential reference to this project in a forward Eoghan made from the geocaching list, so I'll risk redundancy and describe the project here.

The Degree Confluence Project has as its aim collecting photographs from/of the intersections of all the world's lines of latitude and longitude. (I assume they won't want most of the offshore marine ones documented, though. "This is some water. This is some more water, etc.") Obviously a GPS receiver is a valuable tool for this kind of work.

The idea all this suggests to a letterboxer, of course, is planting boxes at points of confluence, either in the course of documenting them, if the letterboxer wants to contribute to the Degree Confluence Project, or as a new challenge after someone else has recorded the photos. To me, it's most useful just as a way of figuring out where to plant my next box!

You can visit the confluence site at www.confluence.org and see what's up in your area. Note that the full list of confluences is huge and takes forever to dowload. More efficient is to go to your state directly. U.S. state sites take the form www.confluence.org/us/mt where the last two characters are the two-letter USPS abbreviation for your state (Montana in the example).

I plan to go bag 46N, 111W later this spring. It's just up the road in the Gallatin National Forest, where I have gotten permission to plant letterboxes previously.

-Mark
P8 F1 X0