Letterboxing!

On Monday the Metcalfs joined us in driving to Boulder for a morning of hiking along the South Boulder Creek Trail. Other than the fairly strong winds, the weather was just about perfect for hiking.

I think the wildfire must have started shortly after we began hiking. It was odd to see clear sky looking one direction, and look the other way and see the smoke piling up.

At any rate, I was excited to finally get to do some letterboxing! This is something I've been hearing about for a couple of years, but I don't think there's a whole lot of letterboxing going on in Switzerland. The day after reading this blog post on Dim Sum, Bagels, and Crawfish, I raced out and bought all the supplies needed to do our own letterboxing. There are a bunch of letterboxes around Loveland, and I'd been meaning to get the kids out to do some hunting every weekend since Lucia's post, but it just hadn't happened.

We hadn't set out on Monday with letterboxing in mind, but I grabbed the bag on the way out the door, figuring that Boulder of all places was sure to have quite a few letterboxes scattered around. And sure enough, after consulting Clue Tracker on the drive down, I saw that there were several letterboxes on the very trail we were going to be hiking. Finding the letterboxes with their handcarved stamps was a lot of fun. And we actually found every letterbox we searched for, unlike all of our attempts at geocaching which have failed miserably.

Another highlight of the hike was playing in the creek on our way back. The water was crystal clear, and shallow enough that the kids could wade from bank to bank without worry. It seems like, in hiking with children, having a water element along the trail always helps to cut down on the whining.

What a great way to spend our first Labor Day back in the States!