Geocaching and Letterboxing (or, I did something for a couple of days, and now I'm an expert)

Relevant literature

There's a bit of a lull in my PuzzleHuntContest schedule, so I decided to take my own advice and try out geocaching and, while I was at it, letterboxing.  The two are very similar, at least when you're looking in the University District. Both involve following clues to find boxes that other people have hidden in (usually) public locations.

Geocaching uses the latitude and longitude of the 'cache' as its main clue, a technique that was only made possible in 2000 when civilians were allowed to access precise latitude/longitude via Global Positioning System (GPS) devices (prior to this, GPS technology was considered classified and civilians could not buy devices that gave precise data).

Letterboxing is far older, dating back to 1854 when a guide in Dartmoor, England left a bottle out on the Moors for people to leave a visiting card in.  This grew into a practice of leaving postcards and letters, which would eventually get mailed (or letterboxed, as the Brits might say).  Nowadays, letterboxers leave a rubber stamp and a book in their boxes.  When you find a letterbox, you (having been armed with a stamp and book of your own), stamp your own stamp in the box's book, and use the box's stamp to stamp your own book.  Supposedly, this makes letterboxes more artistic (you can carve your own stamps), but there's no inherent reason why these stamps need to exist.  Geocaching caches can have collections of trinkets in their box (if you take a trinket, you're supposed to leave one as well), but they also have logs to sign.  The absence of the stamp means geocaches can be much smaller than letterboxes, which allows them to be hidden in many more places.  I would suspect these distinctions will become less important over time; there's no reason you can't leave trinkets in letterboxes (I found one that did) or stamps in geocaches, or nothing at all in either.

In an urban environment, there isn't much difference between finding a geocache and finding a letterbox.  Geocaching uses GPS coordinates, but they aren't precise enough to pinpoint an exact spot, so you can use a smartphone or just look them up on Google Maps to get the approximate location and then do a search once you get there (individual caches often have a hint to help get you to the final place, e.g., 'behind the tree').  Letterboxes, on the other hand, have no GPS constraints, so their clues can take any form from the obvious ('take the right fork, look between the boulder and the log') to a cryptic riddle.  Many geocaches also use puzzles (Sudoku, riddles, YouTube videos, whatever), but the end result is almost always a series of numbers that you turn into GPS coordinates.  Again, there is no real reason why a type of clue used for a letterbox can't be used for a geocache, and vice versa.

The chief difference I found between the two was the size of the community.  In Seattle, there are more geocaches than letterboxes (I imagine this is reversed in other locations).  This can make letterboxing more frustrating than geocaching.  There are fewer things to find and there are fewer things to find that are at the right difficultly level.  Most annoying is that caches and boxes are continually being stolen, disturbed or otherwise lost, and only get renewed/replaced when someone notices and fixes the problem, so a smaller community means a greater chance that the letterbox you go to look for just is not there.  Still, that's more of a caveat than a warning.  Find a list of letterboxes and geocaches near your location, and go out to look for both.

Getting started with Letterboxing

Letterboxing starter kit

Before you go, you should have a pen/pencil (to write your name in the letterbox log), a logbook (I just used the printout of the directions to the first box I tried to find, but after a few stamps it's getting pretty full), a rubber stamp and an inkpad, and a reasonable compass.  The inkpad can be any color or multicolored.  The stamp should be of something you think represents you (so probably not 'Final Notice'.  I dunno, maybe that works for some of you).  The compass is primarily used for clues that have bearings in them.  E.g., 'Look to 135', which means line up the red arrow with 'N' on your compass and look in the direction of '135' on your dial.  If you really don't know how to use a compass, try this.  Note that not all letterboxes use compass bearings as part of the clue, so a compass is not always necessary.  Also, with a small bit of local knowledge (Basically, which way is magnetic north?) and the ability to figure out where a bearing like 135 is (hint: magnetic SE), you can sometimes fake it.

You'll also want to think up a 'trail name', like Scooby and the Gang or Joffrey E. Baratheon, Super Genius, or q?87yrz.  Because, you know, 'Greg Barnes' is too pedestrian, or the North Koreans are going to track you down and start extorting classified letterbox information from you, or something.  Whatever, just go with it.  My advice:  register at a geocaching/letterboxing website and use your username as your trail name.

Speaking of websites, the easiest way to start is to go to a website.  I tried letterboxing.org first, but most of their Seattle boxes seemed stale (as in, they had not been visited recently).  Apparently all the cool Seattle kids are hanging out at AtlasQuest.com, possibly because it's run by a person in Seattle.  If you're just starting out in Seattle, I'd advise using AtlasQuest to look for letterboxes to find.  All the sites I found allow you to make a geographic search.  You can often tell just by the name of the letterbox whether it's close by; other times you have to read the description.

I started out with a box that was inside the University Heights Center, because I could easily go there over lunch, it seemed easy to find, and it had been found recently, so it was probably still there.  It was velcroed under a bench in a hallway where a bunch of kids at a private school were passing by on the way to and from recess, so this presented a bit of a problem, as you're supposed to retrieve and replace the box without anyone else seeing, lest they decide to investigate and end up taking the box home to keep.  I used the oh-so-clever "I dropped something on the floor" trick and it seemed to work fine.  I didn't employ any caution once I had the box in my hands, since I figured someone sitting down, looking at a book and making a few stamps is fairly unremarkable behavior in the U-District (the old "I'm an art student" trick).  And then I dropped something on the floor again, reattached the box, got up and left.  And then proceeded to worry for the next 10 minutes that I hadn't sealed the container properly or got enough velcro attached, and it would all come spilling out.  Still, Success!

Armed with my newfound expertise, I decided to go out after work to get a few more letterboxes and my first geocaches.

Geocaching without a GPS

From the UN-mandated Office of Geocaching

Theoretically, you need a GPS device to find geocaches, but Google Maps works pretty well in the city where there are plenty of landmarks.  Find the coordinates, plug them into Google Maps, make yourself a crude little map as to where it is (corner of 43rd and 17th, east sidewalk, lined up with the end of the fence).  As I said above, the GPS coordinates used in geocaching are not exact enough to pinpoint the exact spot, so you're going to have to search around anyway.  However, if I were in a more rural or wilderness setting, I'd insist on having a GPS-enabled device at hand while searching; they are typically not as exact as Google Maps, but it's a lot harder to pick out landmarks from a satellite view of the middle of the woods or a grassy meadow, so you'll need GPS on the spot to find the best place to start searching.

Geocaching.com calls itself the 'official' site of Geocaching, which seems a little grandiose to me.  But they are also run by people in Seattle and seem very popular, so you should start there.  They have a zipcode search and a distance search, which is good, because a citywide search of Seattle would probably yield an absurdly large number of caches.  Their search listings also (by default) highlight in green the caches that are best suited to beginners.  I'd start with these, but I'd also tackle a puzzle cache as well (this is a PuzzleHuntContest blog you know. I'll get to the Contest part later.).  A puzzle cache, as a rule, has  GPS coordinates that are bogus but close enough so that the website's geographic search gives you the right general area.  You solve a puzzle that yields the series of numbers that allow you to determine the real coordinates.  For example, the first cache I found started with a Sudoku puzzle where some of the squares were lettered A through F.  Once you solved the puzzle, you plugged the corresponding number into this formula to yield the coordinates:  

N 47° 39.AB(C+4)
W 122° 18.D(E-1)(F+5)

Puzzles can range from the simple to the extremely difficult, and come in a wide variety of formats, but almost always yield numerical answers.  Try a few out and you'll get the feel for it.

If you're heading out without a smartphone or some other way to surf the net, you're going to want to get a hardcopy of the page for the cache.  First, because you'll want to read the description if you can't easily find it, to make sure you think you're in the right place.  But also because the GPS coordinates are too crude, and you'll frequently need a hint.  Geocaching.com puts the hints in rot13 on the cache page, along with the key to deciphering them, so you'll have the hint available but basically unreadable unless you need it.  You probably don't want to print out the logs (the notes people leave on the website when they find the cache), as they can give it all away and you can end up going through reams of paper if you print out the pages for a few popular caches.

Finally, for both geocaches and letterboxes, pay attention to when the item was last found.  If it was a few days ago, you can probably assume it's still there, but if it's been over a year, you might not want to spend a lot of time looking for it.  The first time you go out, you probably only want to look for things that have been found in the last month or so, unless fruitless searching is one of your favorite things.

Eureka!

I blame David "Seattle mayoral candidate" Stern

I went searching after work, and the first stop was the geocache with the Sudoku clue.  Google Maps put the GPS coordinates in the middle of a walkway, and that seemed very unlikely, so I deciphered the hint.  After examining a few of the more prominent signposts and plants near that section of the walkway, I knew what the hint meant, but still didn't know where to look.  It took about 15 minutes to find the object the hint indicated, and it was about 40 feet from the coordinates, so there was something a bit screwy going on.  And still, I had not found the object.

As I've said before, I'm not very good at finding things hidden in plain sight; it took me 10 minutes to find a Canlis menu when I knew exactly which plane it was near in the Museum of Flight.  I walked right by the rather obvious Emerald City Search medallion last month (too busy looking at the ground).  So I considered this good training for future PuzzleHuntContests.  The cache was definitely in some plants, and I knew it was 'micro' sized (the size is listed on the geocaching.com entry for the cache; another reason to print out the webpage), so I guessed it would be a tiny plastic or metal tube.  After groping around in a few piles of wet leaves, I found what is known as a Bison Tube.  It looks a little bit like a miniature Kleen Kanteen:

Geocaching containers, not bovine anatomical parts

They come in larger sizes, by the way, and are named after the company that builds them.  Inside was a rolled up piece of paper to record your name, and nothing else.  I put my trail name and date on the next spot on the log, resealed it, then hid it back under the same wet leaves.

The next cache I found was also in a bison tube, although it had a strong magnet attached to it (so it could be stuck to a piece of metal).  My last geocache of the day was in a large Tupperware container behind a tree, on a somewhat busy road with no sidewalk.  3 for 3.

I moved on to a letterbox near the Ronald McDonald House on 40th Ave NE, where I found something interesting.  In addition to the stamp and logbook, there was a tiny film cannister labeled "P-Patch Hitchhiker Series", containing its own little rubber stamp (of a beet) and logbook.  I guessed that this was a letterbox that was supposed to 'hitchhike' from one letterbox to the next, so I took it with me.  I was right, but even if I hadn't been, it would have been simple for me to put it back the next day.  Both letterboxes and geocaches have various twists like this, and the websites have pages that explain the proper thing to do with them.  I'd say if you come across anything strange, look on the website for guidance.  If you don't have Internet access, don't do anything you can't undo.  If you think you're supposed to take something with you, and you can put it back easily if it turns out you're wrong, go ahead and take it.  But be sure to look it up when you get home and fix your error if you're wrong.  A number of items are supposed to be rehidden under certain conditions, so if you aren't prepared to rehide the item under these conditions, you should put the item back ASAP.

Summary

If you like Hunting and Puzzling, you should try geocaching and letterboxing.  They're easy to get into, and can be tried anytime and almost anywhere.  Lack of GPS should not deter you, especially in an urban setting.  Also, if you have a smartphone, it probably has good enough GPS, and there are a number of apps you can get to make the whole experience even more seamless and fun.  For example, there's an app that uses your phone's position to tell you geocaches that are nearby, and can keep track of which ones you've already found.

If you have kids, you should definitely try these activities, as a number of caches and boxes were hidden with  kids in mind, and as a rule kids like searching for 'treasure'.

If you have dreams of finding a Canlis menu or Emerald City Search medallion, searching for caches/boxes is probably the best practice you can get for the actual 'finding'.

Use the websites to communicate with your fellow searchers.  You don't need to chat with them endlessly, but they will tell you if a cache/box is missing or lost, and you should return the favor if you can't find one.

If you want the Contest aspect of a PuzzleHuntContest as well, and are in Seattle, your best bet is to use geocaching.com.  For each contest, there is the FTF (first-to-find) contest, won by the first person to find a cache.  There are other achievements to unlock as well, such as caches that you can't officially log (find) until you have logged other caches.   See for example, the Peace Sign Series.  The prizes are basically only fame in the geocaching.com community, but these are definitely contests.

Finally, if you want to design your own puzzle/hunt, placing a geocache or letterbox is probably the next step up from making a treasure hunt for your kids.

Coming up next...

PuzzleHuntContests in the next month or so.

• Port Gamble Rogaine - May 12, Port Gamble.  I think it's too late to register now.  Look at that weather forecast, and weep at your lack of planning.
• BEAST race #2 - May 17, Lynnwood.  Adventure race in Lynnwood.  Hint:  If you go down to the Puget Sound, you're gonna have to make your way up eventually.  Hint 2:  You're gonna have to go down to the Sound.
• Dumpster Champ - May 19.  Dumpster diving and bike racing.  Two great tastes that go great together.
• Seattle Challenge - May 19.  The first of the 'Amazing Race' style events of the year.  The prize:  Real Cash Moniez!
• Battle for Seattle - May 19.   Photo Scavenger Hunt, UW Students only.  With only 2 weeks of classes left, this is a prime opportunity to avoid studying.
• Evening Orienteering - Wednesday, May 23, Robinswood Park, Bellevue.  Orienteering + free food.  The only thing that will stop me attending this is another presidential visit.
• Gig Harbor Street Scramble - May 26, free.  Once you've made it to Gig Harbor on the Saturday morning of a 3-day weekend, you're legally obligated to go camping somewhere.  Just warning you.
• Hood Hunt Moses Lake - June 2.  Speaking of camping...
• Long O - June 2, Moses Lake.  Sand Dunes!  Bring extra socks.
• Kid and Goat O - June 3, Fishtrap Lake.  This area (channeled scablands) is amazing, and you should go there.
• First Thursday Adventure Run - June 7, Green Lake.  Seriously, all you have to do is walk a block and you're entered to win thousands of dollars in prizes.  Why aren't you doing this?
• Evening Orienteering - Wednesday, June 13, Kelsey Creek Park, Bellevue.  This may have been moved to the 20th.