Letterboxers enjoy unique hide-and-seek hobby

Secrecy is an important part
of letterboxing.

CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio (AP) — Kim Palmer and Sharon Matolka warned their excited children not to expect too much. It had been only a week since the children had hidden three plastic boxes along the trail in Gorge Metro Park in Cuyahoga Falls.

But 90 minutes, two miles of hiking and three skinned knees later, the children happily found that seven people had uncovered one of the boxes and three people had found the two others.

The two Hudson families are fans of an obscure hobby called letterboxing, in which they hide in a public place a plastic box that holds a personalized rubber stamp and a logbook. Clues and directions to the box then are posted on a Web site.

Eight-year-old buddies Nicky Matolka and Shaun Palmer concealed their box under a pile of rocks about a mile along the Gorge Park hiking trail.

“Our moms let us find the place to hide them,” Nicky said. “We hid ours pretty good.”

Nicky and Shaun were thrilled to see that seven people had deciphered their clues and stamped the book.

“Unless you knew what you were looking for, you would not see a letterbox,” Sharon Matolka said. “Hundreds of hikers walk right past them.”

Secrecy is part of the letterbox mystique.

Wee Walkers

Heidi Murray of Lakewood and her three children go by the codename Wee Walkers. They have found 300 boxes and buried 56 of their own all over Northeast Ohio.

“Some people are afraid that it would be spoiled if too many people find out about it,” she said of the hobby.

The hobbyists go to letterboxing.org for a virtual meeting room. The site has descriptions of letterboxes and directions.

Sometimes, the directions are very specific, while others require some skill to decipher. Directions can include looking for clues such as “bunny hills,” “chair lifts” or perhaps a “crying woody perennial” — a weeping willow tree.

Letterboxers say their hobby began in 1854 when a hiker left his business card in a bottle on a riverbank in Dartmoor in southwestern England. Others who stumbled on the bottle left their business cards. The practice grew slowly, with only a few dozen letterboxes in Dartmoor in 1970. But publicity fueled interest, and by 1998 there were thousands.

A 1998 Smithsonian magazine article is credited with bringing letterboxing to America. In less than 10 years, the hobby has blossomed, with more than 20,000 boxes hidden in parks, along walking trails and in unusual places.

Some adventurous types have expanded the hunting grounds to include places such as stores and libraries. A CD case is attached by magnets to the tops of shelves in North Royalton and Parma libraries and department stores. There is even a “microbox” hidden somewhere on the statue of Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas.