Planting letterboxes.

Planting a letterbox involves selecting a great location and a special hiding place, writing the clues, providing a letterbox stamp and journal, packaging the stamp and journal in a weatherproof container, and sharing the clues with others. Finding letterboxes seems to be more popular than planting them. 58.3% of the letterboxers in my survey had planted 10 or fewer letterboxes - this includes those who had just started letterboxing and those who had been involved for 5 or more years. There was a handful - 9 of the 355 - of really ambitious letterboxers who had planted over 100 letterboxes.

Stamps - More than 80% prefer to carve their letterbox stamps and 3.4% do the designing, but have someone else carve for them. Purchased stamps were clearly in the minority - 5.9%.

Clues - More than 60% of the study participants provided map and/or compass directions, 39.4% used riddles, 39.1% used some type of mystery clues, and 48.6% used poetry or literary references. Math clues are used by 20.2% of the participants. Cryptograms accounted for 6.9% of the responses.

Even more interesting were the 105 letterboxers who said they used:

anagrams,
art history,
binary code,
Braille,
crossword puzzles,
counting steps,
famous peoples’ birthdays,
historical references,
humor,
hieroglyphics,
horticultural references,
landmarks,
metaphors,
Morse code,
movie quotes and trivia,
native American mythology,
narratives,
obscure languages,
photographs,
pop culture references,
quizzes,
rebus clues,
scientific knowledge,
songs,
specific step by step directions,
true/false questions,
virtual clues, and
word searches.

The picture above shows a trail description marker that I used when creating clues for the "Potato Creek Letterbox." Letterbox hunters were encouraged to read and remember details from that description that later asked them to calculate the bearing of the box's hiding place by working some math using the year mentioned in the description.