Funny Thing Happened While Hiding Caches Today....

[+DragonflyTotem]

I'm sure that this will be nothing new, but it was new to me today -- I found "something."

 

Yupper....walking along with my daughter who is 8 and on this beautiful Sunday afternoon said that she wanted to go with me while I hid a couple of caches I'd been working on. Life is good!

 

So there we are, strolling along in a park looking for a best site for a new cache...when I looked over at a tree that we were passing....and I saw a rock at the base of the tree...and a few branches tossed about...and I turned to my daughter and suggested that this might be an interesting place. Bent down to move the rock and underneath that rock was a.....cache! But I know that I'd already carefully checked for other caches nearby and knew that none were listed. And from the rather beat up look of this bit of Tupperware, top covered in cammo tape I was pretty sure that this wasn't something just placed but not yet published.

 

So my daughter asked what it was and not having a good answer I went ahead and opened it up. Come to find out that it wasn't a GS geocache but instead was a letterbox cache for a different organization. I looked it all over, the log book, the stamp....and felt rather strange. A bit like I'd entered a parallel universe. Which is in itself strange because in the few weeks now that I've been doing geocaching I have become very aware that there was this hidden world going on around me and I'd had no clue. And now I was faced with learning first hand that there was more than one hidden world.

 

I went to their web site tonight, and saw that they have some caches here in my town...and quite a few of them are within a stone's throw of some of the GS caches listed -- including some that I've found. And yet I never suspected as I smuggly filled out the logbook for the GS cache just found that there was another parallel universe playing out just around the corner.

 

After finding the letterbox cache I put it back carefully covering it as it had been and then I found a new location for my cache. Fun but very strange day indeed!

[+Arrow42]

Haha... nice. I ran across a letterbox a few months ago. Relay nice cache... "small" but it was a good quality container, some nice swag, neat hand-carved stamp.

 

Relay put to shame the crappy waterlogged 35mm film canister that I was after!

[+LEGO]

There is a letterbox hidden near one of my cache hides, and you wouldn't believe the number of cachers who find it and think it is the cache. They sign the letterbox log, even though written on the outside of the container, very clearly, is "Letterbox"!.

[GOF and Bacall]

Letterboxing is nothing new. It outdates geocaching by what? Centuries?

They like to use many of the same type of places we do. Not unusual at all to find one near a cache.

[+Cache O'Plenty]

Couple of years ago I found a letterbox cache. It was an Altoids tin stuck to the bottom of a mailbox, clearly marked "Letterbox" on top. Right next to it (actually touching) was a second Altoids tin, also clearly marked "Geocache" on top. Pretty funny them being side by side.

[knowschad]

Twice now, I've found a letterbox cache within 15 feet of the geocache that I was after. Yeah, it's kind of cool stumbling into other caches like that.

[+GIDEON-X]

Yep, have found a few my self, the sport has been around for years (even before Geocaching) Check It Out

[Mr.Yuck]

Yep, have found a few my self, the sport has been around for years (even before Geocaching) Check It Out

 

Well, I've heard all the claims about Letterboxing being hundreds of years old. But that website (Letterboxing North America) didn't go online until 1998, only a couple of years before Geocaching was born. Also, it could just be my area, but I believe Atlasquest.com has surpassed LBNA in popularity.

 

P.S. I think I'm just about to the point where I can't count all the letterboxes found by mistake while Geocaching on my fingers and toes. Not that I keep track that closely.

Edited October 5, 2009 by TheWhiteUrkel

[+huskerrich2000]

http://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/

 

here is some history on letterboxing, looks like 1854 in england

Edited October 5, 2009 by huskerrich2000

[+chaosmanor]

Couple of years ago I found a letterbox cache. It was an Altoids tin stuck to the bottom of a mailbox, clearly marked "Letterbox" on top. Right next to it (actually touching) was a second Altoids tin, also clearly marked "Geocache" on top. Pretty funny them being side by side.

Now that is really funny We geocache and letterbox, often combining the two on the same hike or trip, and have found letterboxes and geocaches that were within 20 feet or so of each other, but never two literally side-by-side, obviously living in harmony Thanks for sharing this!

 

To the OP: thank you for putting that LB back where you found it, and for respecting it. Letterboxing is older than geocaching, by more than 100 years: it started in Britain. In the US, it started in the 1990s, in Connecticut. As an active player of both games, I have often found myself defending each game to some players only of the other. I won't go into some of the discussions, but a lot of them revolve around philosophy and approach.

 

The bottom line, for all geocachers, is to treat a letterbox as someone else's property, just as we treat (or should!) a geocache. The stamp and logbook inside must stay inside the box, just as a logbook must stay inside a cache. If you want to sign your name in the LB log, you may; please add a nice comment about how you found it and how much you appreciate the hider's effort. Who knows? Maybe you'll decide to join that game, too. One can never play too many games

[Mr.Yuck]

http://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/

 

here is some history on letterboxing, looks like 1854 in england

 

Well, OK, I'll give them 1854 in England, with all the letterboxes in the world concentrated in SW England for the first 144 years. But 1998 in North America, along with an online website similar to ours.

[Luckless]

I find a lot of letterboxes when trying to place caches or just looking for a cache. Some day I'm going to get a stamp made so I can stamp those. That might be a fun project for you and your daughter. Either make a stamp or have her pick out one to buy so you can stamp them when you find them. There are geocache/letterbox hybrids out there, which are a letterbox stamp in a geocache so you can do either(geocache or letterbox) or both.

[+L0ne.R]

http://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/

 

here is some history on letterboxing, looks like 1854 in england

 

Yes, but.....it was a hide n seek game, but quite different then what we now know as letterboxing. Back then someone hid a business card in a jar and invited his friends to go look for it and leave their business card.

 

"Forty years would pass from when that first ['card in a jar'] was planted by James Perrott until a second one made its way into letterboxing history at Belstone Tor. Another 44 years (84 years) would pass before a third letterbox was planted at Ducks Pool. After 122 years, fifteen letterboxes dotted Dartmoor."

 

It wasn't until 1976 when Tom Gant created a guidebook to the few boxes on Dartmoor that the game took off. In the 70s, in Dartmoor, letterboxing evolved into self-addressed postcards in the box, to be mailed back to the box owner to show that you had visited the box. And so the name "letterboxing" was coined. In the 80s until today, in Dartmoor, custom made commercial rubberstamps were placed in the box as proof of the visit. It wasn't until the 90s that the game skipped over the Big Pond and landed in the United States.

 

In 1998 it was introduced to the United States via an article in the Smithsonian magazine in 1998. (That's when I heard about it via a eraser carving online discussion group). Instead of a guidebook, clues were posted on a letterboxing-usa yahoo group. Instead of custom made commercial rubberstamps, hand-carved eraser stamps were/are mostly used in North America.

 

Two years later geocaching was born.

[+L0ne.R]

http://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/

 

here is some history on letterboxing, looks like 1854 in england

 

Well, OK, I'll give them 1854 in England, with all the letterboxes in the world concentrated in SW England for the first 144 years. But 1998 in North America, along with an online website similar to ours.

 

Ahh, you got to it before me. And managed to sum it up in 2 sentences.

[Mr.Yuck]

http://www.atlasquest.com/about/history/

 

here is some history on letterboxing, looks like 1854 in england

 

Well, OK, I'll give them 1854 in England, with all the letterboxes in the world concentrated in SW England for the first 144 years. But 1998 in North America, along with an online website similar to ours.

 

Ahh, you got to it before me. And managed to sum it up in 2 sentences.

 

Not trying to disrespect the history of letterboxing, but their oldest website, along with letterboxes being hidden all over the world and being listed on it, is really only 11 years old. LBNA's history page also talks about some Valley Quest treasure hunts in New England starting in 1989; I see nothing though indicating it had any connection to (or knowledge of) letterboxing in SW England.

[Pajaholic]

Not trying to disrespect the history of letterboxing, but their oldest website, along with letterboxes being hidden all over the world and being listed on it, is really only 11 years old. LBNA's history page also talks about some Valley Quest treasure hunts in New England starting in 1989; I see nothing though indicating it had any connection to (or knowledge of) letterboxing in SW England.

Forget websites - Dartmoor Letterboxing pre-dates electronic bulletin boards, let alone the Web. The Dartmoor Letterboxing websites are merely a veneer to the hard-copy-based activity it was and still is. It seems inconceivable to me that "letterboxing" would have that name in the US if it developed independently there in the 1980s and 1990s since "letterbox" is very much a UK term and it would have been called something else (e.g. "mailboxing" or "treasurecaching") if the US version was truly independent of the much older Dartmoor activity. It seems strange also that the essential elements of US letterboxing are the rubber stamp and logbook of the Dartmoor activity.

 

I strongly suspect that the history given at Atlas Quest is incorrect on at least one point. They say, "In 1976, Tom Gant created a guide map pinpointing the fifteen letterboxes in existence, at which point letterboxing began to boom in a big way." At about that time I was a semi-pro musician who used to play regularly at the Plume of Feathers in Princetown in the middle of Dartmoor. It was there I first heard about letterboxing from a group huddled in a corner of that pub. One of them had logged over thirty (showed me his logbook) and said there were a lot more. Then you could only find out about most of the letterboxes from the clues placed in other letterboxes. So nobody actually knew how many there were. There were probably about fifteen "starter boxes". The Plume of Feathers held clues to three and there aren't many public establishments in Princetown, so that number makes sense. Thus I suspect those "starter boxes", rather than a complete list, are what Tom Grant's guide portrayed.

 

FWIW, even Dartmoor Letterboxing might owe something to a prior practice. Local lore tells that long before James Perrott placed his famous bottle, the people of Dartmoor had a method of delivering letters that some say is the true origin of letterboxing. Boxes were placed on boundaries between properties into which letters would be placed. Families periodically visited each box on their boundaries and retrieved any letters it contained. They retained any addressed to themselves and added the remainder to their own outgoing letters, which they placed in the most appropriate box on their boundary to help it on its way. (A bit like TBs) It seems inconceivable that similar systems weren't in place in the colonies - especially given the proximity of Plymouth to the Southern edge of Dartmoor (less than ten miles!)

 

Geoff

[Mr.Yuck]

Not trying to disrespect the history of letterboxing, but their oldest website, along with letterboxes being hidden all over the world and being listed on it, is really only 11 years old. LBNA's history page also talks about some Valley Quest treasure hunts in New England starting in 1989; I see nothing though indicating it had any connection to (or knowledge of) letterboxing in SW England.

Forget websites - Dartmoor Letterboxing pre-dates electronic bulletin boards, let alone the Web. The Dartmoor Letterboxing websites are merely a veneer to the hard-copy-based activity it was and still is. It seems inconceivable to me that "letterboxing" would have that name in the US if it developed independently there in the 1980s and 1990s since "letterbox" is very much a UK term and it would have been called something else (e.g. "mailboxing" or "treasurecaching") if the US version was truly independent of the much older Dartmoor activity. It seems strange also that the essential elements of US letterboxing are the rubber stamp and logbook of the Dartmoor activity.

 

I strongly suspect that the history given at Atlas Quest is incorrect on at least one point. They say, "In 1976, Tom Gant created a guide map pinpointing the fifteen letterboxes in existence, at which point letterboxing began to boom in a big way." At about that time I was a semi-pro musician who used to play regularly at the Plume of Feathers in Princetown in the middle of Dartmoor. It was there I first heard about letterboxing from a group huddled in a corner of that pub. One of them had logged over thirty (showed me his logbook) and said there were a lot more. Then you could only find out about most of the letterboxes from the clues placed in other letterboxes. So nobody actually knew how many there were. There were probably about fifteen "starter boxes". The Plume of Feathers held clues to three and there aren't many public establishments in Princetown, so that number makes sense. Thus I suspect those "starter boxes", rather than a complete list, are what Tom Grant's guide portrayed.

 

FWIW, even Dartmoor Letterboxing might owe something to a prior practice. Local lore tells that long before James Perrott placed his famous bottle, the people of Dartmoor had a method of delivering letters that some say is the true origin of letterboxing. Boxes were placed on boundaries between properties into which letters would be placed. Families periodically visited each box on their boundaries and retrieved any letters it contained. They retained any addressed to themselves and added the remainder to their own outgoing letters, which they placed in the most appropriate box on their boundary to help it on its way. (A bit like TBs) It seems inconceivable that similar systems weren't in place in the colonies - especially given the proximity of Plymouth to the Southern edge of Dartmoor (less than ten miles!)

 

Geoff

 

Excellent information! I knew there would be someone who could set the record straight. So would we consider Atlas Quest to be the world-wide letterboxing online resource? I notice they list them all over the world, including 178 in the UK.

[+simpler1773]

Oh man! I really didn't need another hobby...lol. Found my first one today, now off to buy an ink pad and decide on a stamp

[Pajaholic]

So would we consider Atlas Quest to be the world-wide letterboxing online resource? I notice they list them all over the world, including 178 in the UK.

Each letterboxing site can only be considered an online resource for the letterboxes in its catalogue. I can't say for sure whether Atlas Quest is "the" resource Stateside, but I suspect that letterboxing.org might be "up there".

 

What I can say is that for Dartmoor Letterboxing, Atlas Quest is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. They list only 178 for the whole of UK. Yet there are several hundred (probably over a thousand) letterboxes on Dartmoor alone. FWIW, I searched Atlas Quest for a radius of 50 miles from my home. This includes the whole of Dartmoor and about half of Devon and Cornwall, but the search returned a mere 22 results.

 

Letterboxing seems much more fragmented than geocaching and some fragments (e.g. Dartmoor Letterboxing) don't even post clues on the Web. Thus IMO no website can be considered the world-wide letterboxing online resource.

 

Geoff