Letterboxing

We went letterboxing for the first time recently. It was awesome! We recently purchased a GPS device for geocaching, but had yet to figure out how to use it. It was a beautiful day, so we decided to try letterboxing instead. Letterboxing is similar to geocaching in that there is a hidden box at the end of the journey. A journal and stamp (typically custom or homemade) are in the box. You bring your own journal, stamp and stamp pad along. When you arrive there, you stamp yours into the letterbox journal, and write the date and your team name. Then you use its stamp in your own journal. We got our clues on how to find the letterbox from www.letterboxing.org.

We chose one in the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

The clues led us on an adventure where we found markers along the trail, such as a stairway, a trail number and a bench dedicated to a certain person.

From the bench, we had to walk 75 paces and then look for a lone pine tree in a group of oaks and elms. From there, we went west into the forest uphill 25 paces until we found an oak tree wrapped in vines.

There it was!

The letterbox was placed in 2006 and the last entry in the journal was from about a year ago.

We decided we were team "Treasure Trackers." We used Jia's chop from China as our stamp. We had it made for her there.




Stamping our journal.



We continued hiking and visited the Nature Center.


Jia's first shot of us!

We'll take some time to figure out our GPS device soon, but we'll definitely do this again as well!