Back in Columbia

    We officially have moved back into Columbia and have been around less than a month. Today was our first trip out in a while and we went to check on some of my boxes from the cookie micro-series I have planted around the northwest part of town. Looks like over the two years they've been in the wild I have lost a couple to the weather or the muggles. 
    A letter-boxer by the name of The Woodshed was kind enough to plant a new box in Como this week and we were able to get out and be the first finders! Any new box in the area is a big deal since the scene is so dead around here compared to in the past. It's a nicely carved stamp if any of you want to get out there and record some finds. 

    Hopefully the rest of the summer I can crack down on this list of old boxes from 12-15 years ago and see what still is living and what has gone bye-bye. That's all the update I have for you at the moment. Keep LB'ing and staying healthy and maybe I'll see ya around sometime. 

- BedBeard 

Kingdom of Callaway Fails

After a five month hiatus of letterboxing, I am back at it, spurred on by the recent AQ mail I have received that there are people finding my micro-series in Columbia! Indeed, it is on of the better drugs to be hooked on: human interaction. 

I am now located out of Fulton and as such have started to tackle the boxes in the area, including abandoned or unknown ones. Today me and my forever LBing partner, 'lane line lover', searched for a box north of downtown Fulton called The Presbyter, which we found to no longer be in existence. 

Then we drove out past Williamsburg to look for a box by Lnd-Crzr named "Safe Cracker" in an attempt to stop the sinister Baron Von Krackhousen. We were able to crack the cipher and make it out to the field that the safe was located in. It was a very pleasant hike on this beautiful Halloween afternoon, but alas we got mixed up with the clues about 75% of the way there. We were also discouraged by the amount of bushwhacking through tall grass we would have to make to get where we needed to be. It might be a better box to do once January hits. 

Lane line lover and I would like to plant some more boxes in Fulton and find more boxes in Columbia, and we hope that anyone else in the area will join us! 

Thanks, and until i have another update, stay classy. 

Winter is here!

 Hello friends on the internet. What a time to be alive! I am back up in Kirksville for my final semester at university and there is loads of snow everywhere. 

The depressing state of the weather, combined with no chance of letterboxing for a while made me want to post once again on here, and mention a hike my fiance and I took a few weeks ago when it was nice. We went to Three Creeks Conservation area, and found the two boxes there which I had found once before on a solo boxing trip this past summer. They are Jenny J's boxes, one of which is the oldest LB in Boone county! 2002 I think! I was 3 then haha. 

THREE CREEKS BOX

I highly recommend those trails, and the past three times I have gone all the creeks have been bone dry. 

One last thing, and I hope she won't mind me mentioning it, but Jenny J informed me that her husband has recently passed. She said that although he never LB'ed himself he was always willing to hike with her to different boxes. Please send her your thoughts and prayers, as it is always sad for us to lose a member of the MidMo letterbox community. Stay safe and I'll see you all once the snow is gone!

POETS IN THE WOODS BOX

New Friends and Old Boxes

 Hello, hello, hello. 

It's me BedBeard. I have mentioned my introduction to LB'ing on my personal blog before, but I will say a little something here for those who don't know me:

I had an older sibling who was a boxer from the Boone county area. And he was involved in the community of boxing which went on between 2006 and 2008. Then he moved and his boxing slowed down (partially due to the big LB explosion among the scouts and such). However, during that period of time he was around, he took me along for some boxing and I only recently began to go on my own. (His trail name was "nugglebugs"... I'll include one of his old entries here in case you have your old stamps memorized). 

A little late, I know. But better late than never. And I actually think that the only thing I am missing out on because of my lateness is the events themselves. From the emails I have had and the old blog posts on this very page I can see that there was a very close group of LBers and lots of creativity in the area. And with the current state of the nation, there might not be a chance for a gathering of that kind for a while longer. 

I am currently at school in Kirksville until May 2021 (I will be graduating!!). After that, I will be in or around Columbia for the next year. Hopefully we will have most of Covid behind us and could have a meeting of some kind. I would love to connect more with the old timers in the area. 

But events aside, some positives come with being late to the party. One is the hilarious experiences that are a result of hunting for boxes that have been abandoned for over a decade, or boxes that haven't been hunted for since 2013. And I think that the rush of adrenaline or joy, or whatever it is you get when you find a box is even stronger if it's a box that you went to look for thinking it was lost. Another thing is that it adds to the feeling of treasure hunting, because sometimes the clues aren't updated that well and you have to try and imagine how the area has changed since the box was planted. 

I actually went to look for an old box this week. It was the Ace of Diamonds box by McMonkey Mom. I think it was planted in '07. I found the spot, and dug a bit for the box. I hit plastic and thought for sure I had found it, though the previous two boxers had failed. I managed to loosen the plastic object only to find that it was a concession stand cup that someone had shoved in the hole. Actually, it turned out that there were two of these cups in there! But there was no box to be seen. 

I will continue to LB in the area, and I am slowly crossing off the list of over 200 boxes in the mid-missouri area that I can access on both LBNA and Atlasquest. I have no idea what I am going to get when I go to look for a box because I seem to be the first one looking for them this decade (hence, I have about a 40% find rate). So if you have any boxes that are still out there or if you know you have boxes listed which have been since picked up please help me out. 

Stay safe and healthy, my friends.

BedBeard 

Return of Letterboxing to Mid-Missouri

 Letterboxing in Mid-Missouri went into dormancy a few years ago -- about the same time that the hobby was overrun as a "fad." Boxes were taken or abused and groups of scouts and others tromped clear paths to otherwise hidden boxes. The final blow was the rise in popularity of geocaching when that sport no longer required expensive GPS devices.  Now anyone can find a cache with a smartphone. It's clueless.

The sport had lost its uniqueness and appeal. Most of the oldtimers simply put their logbooks and stamps on the shelf.

But there is hope

Hugh Keene (BedBeard) of Kirksville is reviving letterboxing in Mid-Missouri. For the past several months he has sniffed out the old boxes still out in the field and planted several of his own. We are happy to welcome him to the group and encourage him to start the letterboxing conversation anew.

Who knows? Perhaps with BedBeard's enthusiasm, Letterboxing will make a comeback here. Good luck, Hugh.

C2B2

New letterboxers

I've had some reports recently from several new letterboxers in the Columbia area about the status of my letterboxes. It seems that most are still intact and in good shape. I am quite pleased that many of them have been in the wild for 5-7 years. Now that the summer heat has died down, it might be a good time to think about a Gathering...I know several local folks are itnerested...the trick is just picking a place, a time a theme and getting the word out (perhaps in November, a Thanksgiving theme? or a Yule party in December?) It would be a great way to maintain Columbia's tradition of letterbox survival due to proper re-hideation (thanks to Lnd-Crzr for coining that word).

Fox-fyr

New use for carving tools

I was carving jack-0-lanterns with those cheap little saws that come with pumpkin carving kits and was thinking,,,geez, I wish had some better carving tools.
and then it hit me...I have an entire arsenal of carving tools for stamps....pumpkins are soft enough that it should work on them just fine.

I manage to carve out quite a nice pumpkin this year using those tools. Will post pics as soon as I've had a chance to download them.

I would love to see pics of other people's pumpkin carves this year!

Fox-fyr

Boxing again!

I took advantage of the beautiful weather and headed out for a while today. Took a new trail buddy along. We started at the Mid-Mo Hicthchiker Hostel to drop a HH from Wisconsin. Picked up a new one. Boy, it's still pretty overgrown out there. More skeeters than I expected this time of year. Next we headed to Capen Park and had some success there. I think Forget Me Not is gone. We did look around at some suspicious piles of rocks at the foot of some trees and found a box without clues! It was a lot of fun to be out today. If you haven't been out for a long time, give it a try! It's as much fun as you remembered!

The little box that could

The rash of emails from new boxers and  the story about letterboxing in Columbia Homes rekindled my interest in our sport this month.  I've decided to check the condition of my stable of neglected boxes.  Tonight I stopped at Saarinen Microletterbox with low expectations.  It is, after all, in a very public place.

To my amazement, it was not only there but in fairly good shape.  The book was wet but in one piece and the stamp was still in its felt case.

That little box has done me in.  I've got the bug again.  I'll repair and replace the box and make the rounds of the others. ( It's been so long I'll have to read my own clues to find them, I'm afraid.)  I'm also in for Ron's suggested late summer gathering.

By the way, I spruced up the site a bit.  Let me know if the design works for you.