Treasure Hunting: Geocaching and Letterboxing

Some visiting friends introduced my children to the wonderful new “sport” of Geocaching. The word “Geocaching” comes from Geo (geography) and Cache (an old pirate word that refers to a hidden treasure or stash). They followed clues which led them to different landmarks around town until they found a hidden treasure. Along the way, the clues taught them some facts about the history of our town.

Geocaching began in May 2000 when GPS technology was declassified and made available to civilian users. All of a sudden, anyone could pinpoint an exact location of anything, anywhere on the earth, using GPS. The next day, an Oregon man placed a hidden stash and posted the coordinates online. He wanted to test the accuracy of GPS. The rule was that you could only find the box using GPS coordinates, and that if you took any of the items he hid in the box, you should leave an item behind for the next person. Within a few days, two people had found his stash and posted about it on the internet. The excitement spread quickly, and other GPS enthusiasts began hiding stashes. Today there are over 750,000 active geocaches around the world.

I thought it would be fun to try geocaching on our own last week. We went to the official Geocaching site and did a search for a large nature park in our part of the state. We printed out clues for four different geocaches in that area. There were many more, but I selected ones that had easy terrain and which were marked easy on the difficulty scale.

Unfortunately, our friends are gone, and they took their GPS unit with them! Many geocaches include scrambled clues to translate, so I thought we didn’t need a GPS. We set out with our clues to find the hidden stashes. How wrong I was! We found absolutely nothing that day, and our experience was basically a wild goose chase. We learned that to successfully geocache, you must have a GPS unit!

We learned that if you want to treasure hunt without a GPS unit, it is a different game entirely. This is what is known as Letterboxing.

According to Letterboxing North America, “Letterboxing is said to have started in England in 1854 when a Dartmoor National Park guide, James Perrott of Chagford, left a bottle by Cranmere Pool with his calling card in it an an invitation to those who found the bottle to add theirs. Eventually, visitors began leaving a self-addressed post card or note in the jar, hoping for them to be returned by mail by the next visitor (thus the origin of the term “letterboxing;” “letterbox” is a British term for a mailbox). This practice ended in time, however, and the current custom of using rubber stamps and visitor’s log books came into use.” It caught on in 1998 after an article in Smithsonian magazine, and there are now over 20,000 letterboxes in North America alone.

Letterboxing is older than geocaching, and not as technically sophisticated. All you need for letterboxing is your list of clues and a compass to point you in the right direction. You’ll also need a log book of your own and a rubber stamp and ink pad. Most stashes have a log book and a rubber stamp in them. You place an imprint of your stamp in the letterbox logbook, and place an imprint of the stamp contained in the box on a page in your own log. Letterboxing North America has a search engine where you can look for boxes. We found out there is one hidden in our own town, and many others around our state!

In God’s gracious providence, the day we got home from our unsuccessful geocaching, there was an email in my inbox. A friend had organized a field trip to go to an area state park this week to learn how to geocache! I immediately signed up. The ranger would teach us what we needed to know, and loan our group some GPS units for the afternoon. Our group was able to find one geocache, and the ranger offered my boys the chance to stay longer and search out another cache. We happily programmed in the GPS coordinates and traipsed along a nearby trail until we came to the right coordinates.

The clue gave us some ideas about where to look and soon we had found another geocache!

The boys were excited to open it up and see what was inside. There was a bag of fake pirates gold, some dollar store necklaces, stickers, rubber balls and other little toys. We didn’t take anything, because we didn’t have anything to leave behind. Next time, we’ll know to be more prepared. We did sign the log book, and when we got home, we logged onto the geocache site and marked that we had found this cache.

We still don’t have our own GPS unit, but the boys are talking about saving some money to buy one. We are all excited about the potential to add a new, exciting element of treasure hunting to our normal out-of-town field trips and to our vacations. There are even several caches hidden in and around our own town. I’m excited that this activity is something we can all enjoy together, outdoors. The opportunity to choose caches that teach some history through the clues is appealing to me, as well! We live in the south, and I noticed on the geocache site that there are many Civil War related caches hidden in our area.

Once we get a handheld GSP unit and get some experience finding caches, we are excited to begin hiding our own caches. It will be fun to plan some educational treasure hunts of our own and post them on the site for others to find!