Creating Great Letterboxes

Location! Location! Location!

A great location depends partly on your audience. For a kid-friendly series, a nearby park with short, level hikes is ideal. And make sure the place has a playground! For my long-distance hikers, I needed to find remote areas that few people would dare to visit. Lemony Snicket plants his letterboxes in places called Cape Disappointment and Devils Fork (near a town called Salem, no less). I planted an Orville Redenbacher and Jimmy Hoffa letterbox near their hometown of Brasil, IN.

Outside of that, there are certain places that rarely (if ever) make good hiding places. Below an overpass littered with broken bottles and smells like urine doesn’t get most people too excited. Behind the trash bin of the local McDonalds won’t win many awards. An airport—inside or out—probably isn’t a good idea due to security concerns. If a guard finds it, they may try blowing up your box! Under a boulder completely surrounded by poison oak may have people cursing your name for years to come.

This is mostly common sense, but I have found boxes in butt-ugly parts of towns before where I wondered if my safety was at stake. I’ve even been guilty of inadvertently hiding a box during the winter, that—come spring—I discovered was smack in the middle of an army of poison oak. It seemed like a perfect location at the time I hid it, but now the clue has huge warnings to let people know of the potential risk in acquiring the box!

Keep in mind seasonal changes while placing your box. Boxes that are well-hidden in the summer foliage may suddenly stand out like naked ducks without their feathers in the winter. A nice, calm babbling creek in the fall may become a raging river in the spring washing your letterbox away. A hiding place is only good if it works well all year!

Sometimes, you’ll find a park or trail with a name that’s begging for a letterbox. The Paisley Orca found the Dogwood Trail, and hid that clever series named Who Let the Dog’s Out? with stamps of Skip, Rover, Fido, and Spot hidden along the trail.

Matt the Rat emailed me this particular suggestion regarding how to choose a great location which I agree with whole-heartedly!

For finding a location, one way to think about letterboxing is to think of yourself as a tour guide entertaining friends from out of town. What fun and interesting out of the way places do only the locals know about and want to share with other enthusiasts? I think some people have the idea that letterboxes should be hidden near the major attractions and “official” landmarks (hence the disappointment over being shut out of national parks), but usually these areas are high-traffic, over-used areas anyway. What smaller, less-trafficked, parks are there nearby? These places make for better hiding spots and often introduce visiting letterboxers to some of the really unique hidden places that show the true character of your area.

The location can make a letterbox famous or infamous, and you want to make sure it matches up with your intended audience. For safety’s sake, I always like to include information about how long and difficult a trail is so people know what to expect, and so they can decide if that’s the right box for them. Not just subjective measure like easy or hard, but objective measure such as “the trail is 1.2 miles with 530 feet elevation gain.” In most cases, your audience will appreciate the extra information.