What we’re about
Welcome to the letterboxing meetup!
Letterboxing started in the 1850s in England, in the Dartmoor area. It combines a scavenger hunt with hiking with some art thrown in on the side. In the 1990s Smithsonian Magazine ran a story about Dartmoor, a lot of people in the US read it and thought it sounded like fun, and letterboxing in the US was born. The basics are someone hides a letterbox which will be a container with a logbook and a rubber stamp in it and post the clues for the box. You as a letterboxer come up with your trail name and go look for the box. You have your personal logbook and your personal stamp and an inkpad and usually markers. When you find the box, you sign into it with your stamp and trail name and the date. You stamp an image from the boxes stamp into your logbook, rehide the box where you find it, and continue on to the next adventure. The only other equipment you might need is a compass for following directions.
Almost every letterbox has a hand carved stamp, this is where the art comes in. If you are like me, these are very basic, I have many talents, but art is not one of them. There are a number of boxers who create serious artwork. I've often heard people talk about needing to travel to get a box because the person who planted it always has fabulous carves. There are boxes that are drive ups, where the box is just feet away from your car. There is one in Lapham Peak Park that is a 5-7 mile hike. Sometimes during bad weather, a drive up is a way to still get out and letterbox. Some boxes have very straight forward clues, go here, park here, follow this trail, find the box. Some boxes have clues that need to be decrypted or have mysteries to be solved to figure out the directions.
Now there is a confession to our ulterior motive for starting this group. There are over 1000 letterboxes in southeast Wisconsin and the friends I letterbox with have found almost all of them. If we take someone out letterboxing, it tends to be addictive and they are hooked into the hobby. Frequently after you find some letterboxes, you want to try your hand at planting some and putting your own works out into the wild. So our plan is, we start a group, introduce people to letterboxing, you get addicted to the hobby, and eventually plant new letterboxes for us to find!
The meetups will all be set up to find a letterbox or a series of boxes. We will bring along supplies and help people get started. We'll talk about where to find clues, common letterboxing lingo, and share tips. One of the great things about the hobby is that it takes you out to explore places you never knew about, especially getting out and hiking.
