Below is an article from a weekly paper in Richmond, VA,
called "Style Weekly" about letterboxing. (Incidentally, this is how
I first heard about letterboxing.)


Letter Perfect
Letterbox enthusiasts enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
by Earl Swift
July 24, 2002

They find the treasure in a fallen tree: a small, waterproof box
wedged deep in the log's hollow core, the hole capped with a river
jack, the rock obscured with the forest's leafy mulch.

"I got it," Rhett announces, an arm elbow-deep inside. They have
hiked a half-hour to the spot, across a footbridge spanning the James
in downtown Richmond, up a sharp rise and into the woods, their
course planned with the help of clues they carried: "Go up the trail
no car can travel," and "At the four-way fork, take the path at 320
degrees," and "At the next intersection go right down the `Jurassic
Park'-looking trail. You should be able to hear the river."


They have followed the clues, all 15 of them, carefully. They have
little doubt that their quarry lies inside the log. Even so, as 12-
year-old Rhett pulls the Belle Isle letterbox from its hiding place,
Amy utters a gasp: "Oh my God."

"Whoa," the Mer-man murmurs.

"Look at it," Nature Barbie says.

It is an almost mystical instant, the sort of shared revelation at
the heart of an old English pastime, "letterboxing," that combines
the scavenger hunt, visual art and orienteering, and now promises to
become an outdoors craze throughout the United States.

Thousands of waterproof boxes are hidden in public places in all 50
states places like Richmond's Belle Isle, St. Paul's Church in
downtown Norfolk, and the summit of Virginia's highest peak.

In each is a small log book and a rubber stamp, the latter usually
homemade and designed to evoke the box's location. The hobby's
faithful carry ink pads, their own logbooks and stamps they carve
with their personal marks. Following clues posted on the Web, they
hunt down the hidden caches, stamping their own books with the
letterbox stamp and the box's book with their own.

Over time, the letterbox logbooks become records of the intrepid
souls who've trod through the woods and worked out the clues to find
them, and a letterboxer's book: a catalog of his travels, a passport
bearing the stamps of places he might otherwise not have ventured.

Letterboxing is said to have started at Southwest England's Dartmoor
National Park in 1854. Over the decades that followed, boxes were
hidden by the hundreds in the park, and a small army of enthusiasts
sprang up to find them.

It didn't cross the Atlantic in any large-scale sense for 144 years
not until April 1998, when Smithsonian magazine ran a feature on
Dartmoor's latter-day letterboxers. Within weeks of the story's
appearance the hobby had gained a foothold in a half-dozen, far-flung
American towns.That April 26, a box appeared atop Max Patch on the
Appalachian Trail near Hot Springs, N.C.,.

Max Patch is a majestic, windswept place an hour's drive from
Asheville, and so became a model for the settings that followed it:
Hiding places tend to be difficult to reach, points of great beauty,
or both. They're almost always worth visiting.

Within a year, letterboxes were drawing people off the beaten path to
90 more such places. At last count, the number of boxes with Web-
posted clues had grown to 2,312. Ninety-three clues lead to sites in
Virginia.

Those clues can make the hunt a mental, as well as physical, exercise.

Some are straightforward directions. Some require the use of a
compass. Some, like the Russ Clan's clues to the St. Paul's
Cannonball letterbox, are sheer poetry:

Find sweet John who was only seven,

he's next to Fredrick, they are both in heaven.

Next to the two, grows an unusual tree

and there inside is the gift from me.

Likewise, the hand-carved stamps stashed inside the boxes range from
florid to stick-figure. The Belle Isle stamp discovered by Rhett and
company was a Confederate battle flag. The St. Paul's box is
represented by a headstone, a church's rose window and the lodged
cannonball. The Ovals of Cassini stamp, hidden in the woods at First
Landing/Seashore State Park, is a minimalist combination of arcs and
lines.

Many letterboxers jot observations about locale, weather or mood in a
box's logbook, but most remain anonymous, adopting a nom de plume or
letting their stamps serve as their signatures.

So they devote great care to designing and carving the stamps that
will speak for them. Itty Bitty Kitty, a 43-year-old Norfolk
corporate vice president, marks her visits with the hand-carved image
of a curled cat. Nature Barbie, a Virginia Beach 8-year-old, is
represented by a smirking platypus. Rhett leaves behind a wriggling
diamondback.

With a little practice, carving even a complicated design isn't hard.
And among the hobby's many attractions along with its mystery, the
rush of discovery, nature's sounds and smells is that it's cheap.
To get started, a letterboxer needs only a notebook, ink pad, and the
tools and rubber-carving medium needed to make his or her stamp a
one-time outlay of less than $15.

Then, one need only log on to the Letterboxing North America Web
site, the country's readiest source of clues, at
www.letterboxing.org. Clues are organized by states and regions
within each, making it easy for families planning auto trips to
incorporate letterboxing into their travels.

"It seemed like an adventurous thing to do with the kids," says Itty
Bitty Kitty, who learned of the hobby from friends. "When I went on
the Web site, I was excited by the fact that enough people thought it
was cool that there were a lot of boxes hidden locally."

On Belle Isle, the foursome ink their stamps and press them into the
pages of the letterbox log the snake, the platypus, Amy's steaming
cup of coffee, the Mer-man's primitive sea creature they take turns
stamping the flag into their own books.

Then they carefully repack the letterbox's contents into Baggies and
seal them inside the plastic storage container. Rhett eases the box
back into the log. Nature Barbie replaces the rock.

They leave no hint of treasure.

But carry away proof that they'd found it. S

-- M. Gainey
Richmond, VA
0F0P0X (Gimme a break, I just heard about LBing last week!)