By Caroline Kettlewell
Friday, July 12, 2002; Page WE28
We were on a forest trail, following clues written by a stranger we knew only by a code name, and things weren't going very well. We couldn't seem to locate a key landmark identified by the cryptic phrase, "Stop at the 'bat tree/J + B heart.' " Was it a tree that looked like a bat? An ash, from which baseball bats are made? Not, I would have to admit, that I'd know an ash from an oak from a maple. We presumed "J + B heart" was a romantic gesture unkindly carved into a tree, but we didn't see anything like that either.
We retraced our steps, turned around in circles a few times, stared furrow-browed at the clue as though it might yield further hints, and finally felt our way almost by instinct to a nondescript forked tree. I took a quick look; in a hollow between the forks, well disguised against casual discovery, the box was there.
"We found it!" I called out, enjoying a happy, triumphant thrill.
Two people came around the bend toward us on the pathway, but they passed by, too engrossed in conversation to notice us only 30 feet away. I pulled the box out. It was grimy and weathered, but the contents appeared safe. We crouched down. I unpacked my supplies.
It took us only a few minutes to accomplish what we came for. We restored the box carefully to its hiding place and slipped back onto the pathway.
This is letterboxing, a hybrid of art, orienteering and cerebral treasure hunt, a whimsical quest that can reward you with the discovery of beautiful places you never knew before. It's a British import that has caught on quickly in the past four years in the United States. Letterboxing, unembellished, is this: Armed with an unruled notebook, an ink pad, and a rubber stamp (preferably one you've carved yourself -- but we'll get to that in a minute), off you go hunting for a letterbox.
A letterbox is a small, waterproof container holding another rubber stamp and paper pad. It has been hidden somewhere -- generally, but not always, in a park or other public outdoor location -- by a fellow letterboxer, whose clues you will attempt to follow to find the box. Should you succeed in your quest, you mark your victory by inking your stamp onto the letterbox notepad and the letterbox stamp onto your own notepad. Then you replace and carefully conceal the box just where you found it.
That's it.
Letterboxing's roots are in England, where it is generally confined to the environs of Dartmoor National Park in Devon and traces its history to a 19th-century gentleman who left his card in a bottle in a remote part thereof. On this side of the pond, you can hunt letterboxes in every state as well as in Canada, Central America, Mexico, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia -- so far -- and almost all of those boxes have been placed since 1998. To try it for yourself, all you need is Internet access, an afternoon, a spirit of adventure and a handful of supplies you can easily acquire for under $30.
In the course of two agreeable days recently, my husband, son and I carved two stamps, hunted for six boxes, collected five stamps, discovered four parks we'd never before visited and picked up three deer ticks. We trod warily through verdant poison ivy and downwind of at least one discomfited skunk, and tallied sightings of all manner of wildlife, all within a half-hour's drive (okay, maybe not during rush hour) of Capitol Hill.
To start our quest, we went online to Letterboxing North America (LbNA) at www.letterboxing.org. LbNA is a true virtual community; it was born as a Web site, it has helped forge enduring friendships among people who never have met in person, and its history exists almost entirely in e-mail format, "in three hard drives scattered around my house," LbNA co-founder Erik Davis says.
In April 1998, Smithsonian magazine ran a story about a quirky British pastime called letterboxing and the passionate devotees who would happily tramp endless miles through Dartmoor in execrable weather in pursuit of hidden stamps.
Davis, a self-described "urban refugee" who escaped to Vermont in the 1970s, says of the article, "It just hit me. It's so great -- it involves families out hiking with their kids, the mystery of the hunt and the search and the clues, and it involves an art form in terms of the stamp you make and how it relates to where you hide the box. I thought 'There's got to be a way to do this.' So I got on the Internet."
He found his way to a couple of Dartmoor letterboxing Web sites and e-mailed to ask if they knew of anybody letterboxing in the states. They didn't. But a week later, Davis got an e-mail from a Minnesotan named Dan Servatius, another Smithsonian reader intrigued by the letterboxing story. "I just talked to these people from Dartmoor and they gave me your name," Servatius said.
Within little more than a week, Servatius and Davis had hatched Letterboxing North America with "a very modest sort of page" on the Web, a place where clues and information could be shared to help inspire letterboxing in the United States. Davis hid the first LbNA box that same month, at Prayer Rock, near Bristol, Vt. (where you can still find it).
According to Davis, "Our founding principle was that any child could go on any public access computer and find their way in and find the clues to take their family on an adventure." Although the LbNA site has greatly expanded, and there is a "talk list" with 500 subscribers and new clues added almost daily, it's still all maintained by a small volunteer group, is determinedly nonprofit and has a friendly, come-one-and-all spirit.
The first stop you'll want to make at Letterboxing.org is the FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) page. Here you can find everything you need to know to begin letterboxing yourself, from obtaining supplies to interpreting clues to following good letterboxing etiquette. When you're ready to try your first hunt, return to the home page and click on the image of the book to go to the list of letterboxing clues, organized by location.
As the FAQ's page warns, "Clues come in all shapes and styles, from the simple to the cryptic to the poetic to the bizarre." The variety is endlessly imaginative, with new variations cropping up regularly. In addition to "traditional" letterboxes, there are coveted Hitchhikers (a stamp and pad without an official home, placed in an existing box to be picked up and moved along to another box by the next letterboxer to find them) and Mystery Boxes (the mystery is where to begin looking for them; sometimes the clue gives you the state, but sometimes all you know is that the box is somewhere on planet Earth). One of the most recent innovations is "virtual letterboxing," a hunt that takes place entirely online.
For our first letterboxing attempt, we decided to go looking for several boxes hidden in the Accotink Bay Wildlife Refuge by an avid Virginia-based letterboxer known as the "Jolly G-Man." (Adopting a pseudonymous "nom de stamp" -- as Erik Davis, aka the "Vermont Viking," calls it -- is an English letterboxing tradition, a lighthearted cloak-and-dagger touch taken up by many U.S. enthusiasts.) The G-Man has hidden nearly 60 boxes around the country, and his clues run the gamut from simple and straightforward to downright dastardly. We opted for the former.
The Accotink Bay Wildlife Refuge is on the grounds of the Fort Belvoir Army base in Virginia. A very nice MP with a very serious M-16 directed us to the refuge's parking lot, where we paused for an instructive visit to the spare but clean composting restrooms; picked up a map to the 1,856-acre refuge at the small kiosk at the edge of the parking lot; and then plunged into the woods.
The trail threaded first through low-lying woods that in wetter times would probably be boggy; we were immediately besieged by a cloud of iridescent green flies incessantly buzzing around our heads like a pack of joyriding hoodlums. Because letterboxing usually takes place in the great outdoors, a realm notorious for harboring all manner of unpredictable elements, animal, vegetable and otherwise, you will find that things that slither, bite, and itch figure regularly in letterboxing discussions. If you are not fond of nature unfettered, letterboxing is possibly not for you. For others, a measure of suffering is half the fun; after all, do we not go into the wilderness to be tested and emerge stronger? Do we not go in order to regale our sofa-bound friends with tales of epic travails that are generally almost true? I think so.
Perhaps a half-hour's walk took us within range of the first box. The traffic noise from nearby Route 1 faded as we moved deeper into the refuge, and presently we emerged in a meadow leading to a hilltop where the last step called for a compass reading (a common feature in many letterboxing clues). We read. We proceeded. A grove of scruffy, largely indistinguishable trees presented itself to us. We stepped up smartly to the tree to which our compass pointed us, and there, amazingly, behind that very tree, was our very first letterbox.
It is when you find that first box that you discover how ridiculously fun this delightfully pointless adventure of letterboxing really is.
"It is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment," says Amanda "Amanda from Seattle" Arkebauer, a flight attendant and prolific letterboxer. She has "stamped into" 250 boxes and placed about 30 in the United States, Canada and Central America. After her first find, on a Seattle mountaintop, she says, she was hooked.
Virginian Robin Russ, of Norfolk, says that when her family tried its first letterboxing hunt, "It took us an hour or two, but when we found the little box, we screamed. It was so much fun. The joy of discovery is intoxicating."
Giddy with surprise and satisfaction at our own first success, we set about putting the inaugural stamp in our logbook. I also marked the G-Man's log with my personal stamp, which I'd carved only the day before (see story at right).
We collected all three of the Jolly G-Man's "McCarty Farm" stamps that afternoon, on an extended circuit hike through a hardwood forest and by the water's edge of Accotink Bay. Along the way we sighted herons and egrets, a large box turtle, several camouflaged toads hopping along the forest floor and one wild turkey scurrying off into the underbrush at our approach. Nearly back where we had started, we made a short detour for a fourth G-Man box, this one placed along a wheelchair-accessible paved pathway.
"Hey look," I said, thumbing through the logbook. " 'Amanda from Seattle' was here!"
Each of the Jolly G-Man's boxes was well concealed by some combination of rocks, deadwood and fallen leaves, but easily retrieved once we'd found the correct spot. Letterboxers point out that you should never dig holes or in any way damage the surrounding landscape to hide or hunt for boxes, and Letterboxing.org advocates Leave No Trace principles (see them at www.lnt.org) for respectful stewardship of outdoor resources. A number of letterboxers I spoke with also thought it was a good idea to obtain permission and even work together with land owners and managers to develop letterboxing activities appropriately within their parks and properties.
"This doesn't want to be a nuisance," Davis stresses.
As letterboxing has grown, debate has arisen about whether the act of planting a human artifact in a wild place actually contradicts the essence of the Leave No Trace philosophy; the prevailing letterboxing sentiment seems to be that a small container, invisible to anyone not expressly searching for it, is acceptable. And the truth is that a letterbox isn't necessarily easy to find even when you think you know where you're supposed to be looking; with the third G-Man box, we spent several minutes peering behind various oaks to locate the particular one indicated in the clues.
Gale Zucker, a professional photographer and letterboxer from Connecticut, recalls, "Once we had no compass and had a set of clues that included looking for a boulder that resembled 'Wimpy's favorite food.' Talk about frustrating -- almost every boulder looks a little like a hamburger if you squint at it the right way."
The Jolly G-Man says that unpredictability is all part of the game. "You can read directions wrong or the letterbox can have moved or disappeared. Things can change in the environment too." And of course, he notes with a jolly laugh, "Some people's abilities to give you directions are . . . better than others."
On our second hunt, a week later, we discovered the unpredictability factor for ourselves. We were searching for two boxes placed in Huntley Meadows Park in Alexandria by a letterboxer known as "Two Gray Squirrels." The park is a delightful, tranquil spot, a pocket of woods and wetlands in the middle of suburbia. Here we saw a black rat snake, dark as jet, long and languid, sunning on a weathered gray branch, as well as ducks, geese and other birds, turtles, one very small woodland toad and fat, emerald green frogs plopping happily through the silty muck of the marsh.
What we didn't find was the second box. Because I'd forgotten the compass, I cannot say for certain that we were looking in exactly the right clump of trees, and we weren't altogether certain we had even followed the clues correctly that far. But our failure was a momentary vexation; it was hard to complain about a pleasant walk in the outdoors just because we didn't get a stamp at the end.
Ultimately, that's what letterboxing is all about -- the fun of the hunt, the pleasure of the outdoors, experiencing, as the Jolly G-Man says, "other people's favorite places."
"Letterboxing has provided for some of the best moments we've had as a family in the past months," Zucker says. "It has caused us to head out together and explore wonderful trails and breathtakingly beautiful spots that we'd never have heard of -- much less found or made the time to look for -- were we not in search of a little plastic box with a stamper."
"People are participating from all over the country," Davis says. "Where it has gone has totally amazed me."
Stamps of Approval
It would be difficult to underestimate my artistic talents, as several art teachers over the years have pointedly observed. And when it comes to projects, I'm strictly from the measure-once-and-cut-twice school, short on patience and inclined to start itching to skip to the end somewhere around Step 2. So to be honest, the stamp-carving part wasn't what first drew me to letterboxing. But it's the art part that makes letterboxing more than just a walk in the woods, and as you begin collecting stamps in your logbook, you see why.
When you make the stamp yourself, it can be utterly unique, carved to reflect your personality or the setting or the theme of a particular letterbox. "I really encourage people to take the time to carve their own stamps," says Erik Davis, and many other letterboxers feel the same way.
In the interest of full journalistic inquiry, then, I tried my hand at carving. The Letterboxing North America FAQ's page at www.letterboxing.org includes ample information on stamping materials and a link to the very helpful "How to make a rubber stamp" by Mitch "Der Mad Stamper" Klink, an Oregon graphic designer and letterboxer. (His directions can be found via hyperlink from the letterboxing FAQ's page, or directly at members.aol.com/Letterboxr/carving.html.) You can find stamping materials at art supply stores; at the Jolly G-Man's recommendation, I went to Pearl Discount Art & Craft at 5695 Telegraph Road in Alexandria (at Lenore Avenue, just off I-95/495; 703/960-3900), which has a range of carving media, ink pads in a broad spectrum of colors, and acid-free pads and notebooks for your logbook.
If you want to get fancy about carving, there are all kinds of tools and techniques and Internet groups and whatnot, but I kept it simple. (A links page and stamping information provided by the Carving Consortium can be found at www.negia.net/~ unity/newbie.htm.) I followed Der Mad Stamper's directions and used a small, rectangular, white vinyl Factis eraser; an X-Acto knife; and a design guaranteed not to raise my standing among those former art teachers. I sketched the outline on a piece of paper, blacked it in heavily with a No. 2 pencil, then pressed the darkened side against the eraser and rubbed vigorously with a blunt object, thus transferring the image in reverse onto the eraser. Cut away the parts where the design isn't and voila! You've got your stamp.
Whittling away at that eraser turned out to be much more entertaining than I had expected -- and not nearly as difficult. But apparently I'd gotten a little carried away with my slicing and dicing, as by week two, letterbox five, my stamp had disintegrated into a small pile of white vinyl chunks.
No matter; I'd already carved my second.
-- Caroline Kettlewell
Hitching a Ride
Ready to give letterboxing a try? Then how about a little extra incentive to get out there and go searching? There's a new hitchhiker in town, a footloose rambler with no permanent address, looking to see the world. I've named it "District Voyager," and I launched it in an existing letterbox somewhere in the greater Washington area. I won't tell you what's on the stamp -- after all, that's part of the surprise -- but if you find it, you'll know by its name and a small accompanying note. I'm hoping the District Voyager will travel around the Beltway for a while, getting to know the locals before heading further afield; if you give it a ride, drop it off in another local letterbox.
-- Caroline Kettlewell
© 2002 The Washington Post Company