Sports

Fridley's Letterboxing Hobbyists Solve Clues to Find Stamps

Fridley is home to a micro-culture of letterboxers who follow clues to find hidden boxes.

Take a moment to decipher this batch of clues from the cunning hand of Tricky Troy:

    Go North of the lake that's not less, it's _ _ _ _ _.
    Near that place you will find a _ _ _ _ _.
    Look for a Man with an Ax in Hand,
    Then Wander around, Treasure's Abound!
    When the counter you pass, look for a Bass.
    Be sly as a fox, and whisper "I'm fishing for a Box"

Get it? Good. Tricky Troy’s riddles are intended to be readily solvable, and he’ll be plenty pleased with your deductive powers when you stroll into Fridley’s , tell the counter attendant, “I’m fishing for a box,” and she stands tip-toed on a stool to reach the lime-green rubber fish dangling from a ceiling hook.

“Some people like to have the really obscure mind-bender type clues, whereas I’m a little more inclined to use the standard look-for-the-large-tree-with-a-root-sticking-up directions,” Tricky Troy said. “I want mine to be found.”

“Tricky” Troy Rognrud is one of the Fridley area’s premier planters in the burgeoning sport of letterboxing. Participants follow cryptic clues in their search for small boxes containing hand-carved stamps that have been squirreled away in scenic, secret locales across the globe.

Rognrud, a graduate who runs a children's entertainment company, Half Pint Parties, with his wife, has planted boxes at eight locations around Fridley—by coffee shops, the Mississippi, and the high school. 

“I carve different stamps—I have the Fridley tiger on a box near the school—and I mount them on an interesting kind of mount,” Rognrud said. “I pick places that I think people would be interested in seeing: a particular view of Minneapolis or a park that I think is kind of cool.”

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At Ax-Man, the stamp in the box in the fish depicts a bubble-headed ghoulish figure leaning in repose on (what else?) an ax. Letterboxers have come by the dozens to stamp their personal log books with the woodsman specter and to leave their own marks in the Ax-Man journal.

Cali Barrott, the manager of Ax-Man, said that today, two years after Tricky Troy left his fishy treasure, the store’s journal is nearly full.

“Everyone makes their own hand-made rubber stamp, and then they put a stamp in this little booklet and write down the date they were here, and some people will even leave little trinkets, like one time there was a one-hump camel,” Barrott said. “It’s pretty cool, it’s fun, I thought about doing it, but I tried to find one once and couldn’t find it, so I got frustrated.”

Letterboxing dates to 1850s England when a Victorian guide placed a bottle with his calling card in the inaccessible outskirts of Dartmoor. The sport first came to the United States near the turn of the millennium as a sort of low-paranoia Trystero, and has expanded in the last decade as websites such as Letterboxing.org and Atlas Quest have sprouted up online.

Letterboxing is an older but somewhat less popular cousin of . Rognrud said there is a “friendly rivalry” between the two, with letterboxing aficionados arguing that geocaching’s imprecise latitude-longitude method of locating treasures leads to small-scale environmental destruction.

“They’re ripping more things up and tearing stuff up,” he said, “but with Letterboxing you’re pulling people in right toward the box.”


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