Looking for Letterboxes

“It’s just like a treasure hunt!”

My 11-year-old’s description of his first letterboxing experience is right on the mark. Letterboxing is about as close as you can get to a modern day treasure hunt – minus the pirates and the chests of gold.

Letterboxing involves hunting, typically in parks, public gardens or other outdoor destinations, for “letterboxes,” small plastic boxes containing custom-made rubber stamps. When you’ve found a letterbox, you use the stamp to mark your letterboxing notebook, indicating that you’ve discovered that particular letterbox. (The notebook becomes, in essence, your letterbox passport.) Each letterbox also contains a small notebook in which the hunters can imprint their own stamps, which can be store-bought or customized. The general locations and specific clues are found at the letterbox Web site: www.letterboxing.org.

If this all sounds a little hokey to you, I have to admit that it did to me at first too. I didn’t see how scouting around for a plastic box with a rubber stamp in it could keep two adults and two kids (one of them a teenager!) interested for any length of time.

Then my family gave letterboxing a try. After printing off some clues and stocking a backpack with a small notebook, our “personalized” stamps – gleaned from a long-forgotten box of art supplies – an ink pad, compass and snacks, the four of us set out on a sunny afternoon to look for the Rocky Butte box.

We had a blast. The clues took us up to the summit of this popular viewpoint and had us counting off lamp posts, using our compass and seeking out other landmarks that were not as obvious as they first seemed in the clues.