By Sydney Ochoa
If you’re like me, you may not have heard of letterboxing or geocaching before. And if you’re really like me, you’re about to be hooked! Letterboxing and geocaching are hobbies enjoyed by everyone from the outdoorsy, adventurous type, to techies, artists, and everyone in between. These activities are essentially a real-life scavenger hunt where players use GPS coordinates to navigate to a location and follow clues to find a hidden surprise.
Letterboxing, the older and more analog of the two hobbies, has been embraced by adventurists and artists in the United States for over a decade, but the history of letterboxing dates back all the way to 1854 in Dartmoor, England, when a local guide hid a glass bottle with his calling card in a difficult to find spot. Letterboxing was an extremely slow hobby to take off. It took 122 years after the first box was placed for there to be a total of 15 boxes in Dartmoor. In 1976, a map was published pinpointing the location of these 15 boxes and just like that the hobby exploded in popularity in that area. Letterboxing was mostly confined to Dartmoor until 1998, when a short article was published in the Smithsonian magazine in the United States, then within three years there were over a thousand letterboxes across the US.
To play, letterboxers gather a set of coordinates from an online database that lead to the starting point of a set of clues to locate a small, weatherproof box called a letterbox. Each letterbox contains a logbook and a rubber stamp that is often hand carved by the player who planted the box. For the search, players come equipped with a journal, ink pad, pen, and their own personal stamp, which is also often hand carved. Once a box is located, the finder will stamp and sign the enclosed logbook with their personal stamp and use their ink pad to stamp the hand-carved stamp from the box inside their own journal. The intricacy of these hand-carved stamps is incredible; it’s no wonder this hobby continues to captivate artists around the world.
I recently went on the hunt for a few letterboxes located in and around Holly Springs and was immediately hooked on this hobby. A friend and I were able to locate a letterbox that hadn’t been found for four years. It took some digging and a short hike into the woods, but we emerged successful—with a custom stamp in our journals as proof. It’s important to note that not all searches will end in success; we were only able to find four of the first seven local letterboxes we searched for. Some boxes may have been damaged by the elements, like one we found in Ting Park that is now just the lid of the box hanging from a tree. Other boxes may have been found by a “muggle,” which is a term borrowed from “Harry Potter” that is used in both letterboxing and geocaching to describe those who are not playing or aware of these hobbies. To prevent this from happening, it’s important to remain stealthy in your search – that way the muggles don’t see where you have found the cache.
Geocaching is essentially the tech-savvy grandchild of letterboxing who’s less concerned with the artistic side of things and much more willing to take risks for the joy of a good find. Geocaching came about when President Bill Clinton made the decision to discontinue the use of selective availability on public GPS signals in the United States. Selective availability was put in place for national security reasons and intentionally limited the accuracy of GPS signals that were publicly accessible. Once this limitation was removed, GPS technology became dramatically more precise, and GPS enthusiasts were thrilled. It wasn’t long before online message boards were teeming with ideas for using such an accurate GPS signal. In May of 2000, the first cache was hidden in Oregon, and the rules to play were simple—the GPS coordinates would be posted online, and you could only use your GPS receiver to guide you there. Unlike letterboxing, geocaching exploded in popularity extremely quickly (mostly thanks to the internet). Within two days, that first cache had been found twice, and just 4 months later there were over 75 caches hidden worldwide that were now tracked on a new website created for the hobby. Geocaching continued to grow, and, with the invention of GPS-enabled cell phones, the hobby could now be enjoyed by adventure seekers who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as a “GPS enthusiast.”
Starting geocaching is simple: download the app on your phone, find a nearby cache and navigate to it. Once you find the cache, sign the enclosed logbook, put everything back the way you found it, and log your find in the app. Each cache is unique, so you typically don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, but you have the precise location to start your search. Caches range in sizes from a micro-cache, which is around the size of a tube of Chapstick, to a large cache, which can be as big as a railroad train car. Each cache will contain a logbook for finders to sign, and some of the larger caches will also contain “swag,” or little toys and trinkets that the finders can trade. (In fact, caching etiquette states that one must always leave something of equal or greater value of the swag they take.) One of the coolest things you can find in a cache is a trackable.
Trackables are items that have a unique code used to track their location. When a cacher finds a trackable, they can take it with them and move it to the next cache they visit, making sure to log their travels by updating the trackable’s page along the way. One of the more popular trackable types is called a “travel bug,” which is a silver dog tag stamped with its unique code. Being that there are millions of caches around the world, these little bugs can really get around—there are travel bugs that have traveled over 300 thousand miles and are still on the move.
I was recently browsing the app for cache locations in Holly Springs when I came across a travel bug named the “Penngrove Bug.” And boy did it have an impressive history—traveling 54,863.3 miles to land here, in Holly Springs. Here’s a quick overview of the places the Penngrove Bug has traveled: After starting in California in 2017, it took a quick trip to Hawaii, then headed back east to Texas, up to Wyoming, then Nebraska, hopped around the Midwest for a while before crossing the ocean to Europe. It made stops in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, then returned to the States and back to Germany (twice). From Germany, it headed south for a few stops in Marrakesh, Morocco, and then traveled over ten thousand miles to Victoria, Australia, where it spent the pandemic. In early 2022, it headed down to Melbourne, Australia, for a few months before being moved all the way to Pasquotank County, North Carolina. And now it’s here, in beautiful Holly Springs, waiting to be picked up for its next adventure.
I spoke to the owner of the Penngrove Bug to see if he ever imagined it would travel this far. He let me know that he began geocaching with his two sons, and they released a few travel bugs together. He went on to say, “We did have high hopes that our trackables would travel far and wide and they did! Of course, some more than others. Our big dream is to get one or more back, so please do move the Penngrove Bug back our way if you get a chance!”
Both hobbies are perfect for the adventure-loving family, providing opportunities to get outside and explore. And lucky for us there are letterboxes and geocaches all around Holly Springs. Head to geocaching.com for a map of local geocaches, then take a walk around Bass Lake to log your first find. For double the fun, search atlasquest.com for the coordinates of the letterboxes located around Bass Lake before you go. You should be able to add three stamps to your logbook by finding Hoppip, Skiploom, and Jumpluff as you walk along the trail. New geocaches and letterboxes are being added every day, so you and your family can keep searching and exploring for years to come.
Adventure awaits! Always remember to be safe, have fun, and explore!
Incidentally, I went on the hunt to find the Penngrove Bug and kick off its journey home. When I reached the cache where it was last checked in, I was sad to find out that it had been “muggled,” as they say. It looks like some kids found the cache, and not knowing what it was, left the paper log and took the more interesting contents—the travel bug dog tags. I reached out to the owner of the Penngrove Bug to break the news, and this was his response: “Oh no! Well, that’s kind of how it goes. Most of our trackables have gone silent, and perhaps they had the same fate. But thanks for trying, and thanks for letting me know. It’s actually kind of better to know than to just wonder and hope they pop up again. I imagine this one will spend the rest of its life in a shoebox in some kid’s closet.”
