For a long time now we have been wanting to honor those extraordinary individuals who have gone way above and beyond in establishing and promoting letterboxing, first mostly in our neck of the woods, and now in many different parts of North America as well! We talked it over with quite a few fellow letterboxers, came up with some guidelines to acknowledge the high standards these people have set (see message #53078 on the talk list for more information on what we are looking for in presenting this award box), and finally are ready to announce our first set of honorees! So, without further ado, our little "Oscar" this year goes to ...

For 2005:

Well, 2005 was the year we were pleased to honor our first "LA-LA" (lifetime achievement letterboxing award) "pioneers", Jay Drew and Carolyn Stearns of CT, each of whom put in a good five years commitment to letterboxing, planting over 400 and 200 boxes respectively, helping to make East Lyme and Mansfield, CT among the first "mini-Dartmoors" in the US, and beginning the spread of our hobby outwards in various other directions, as we, too, attempted to follow in their footsteps. This year, therefore, we will be celebrating the continuation of that tradition as other folks picked up the "super planter" banner and carried it along for another 5 years, both in CT, RI, and other parts of the LbNA letterboxing world.

First up, we want to note the rapid rise of letterboxing on the west coast, beginning in 2001 with what we refer as the "First Big West Coast Wave". Now, if we call Jay and Caroline the "godfather" and "godmother" of east coast letterboxing, then surely Don and Gwen of CA, making their letterboxing debut in late 2000, could be considered letterboxing's "west coast godparents". By the time we visited southern California in early 2002, about half the boxes we found there had been planted by Don and Gwen! They have continued on by now to have planted some 200 boxes throughout the west, and can also be fantastic hosts, as we discovered on our visit with them to the high desert country around Kernville, where they were to host a river-running letterbox gathering soon thereafter. Many thanks to them for their hospitality and their part in helping to get west coast letterboxing off to a good rolling start!

Hitting the west coast further north shortly before that time was a "rogue wave" in the form of early letterboxing pioneer Der Mad Stamper, transplanting from Kansas to the Columbia River Gorge with cool boxes like "Multnomah Falls" and others, which we were pleased to find on our first quick tryout of letterboxing in the Pacific Northwest in the spring of 2002. He disappeared for a while, and then resurfaced, so we weren't quite sure how to count him in, but we did want to give him an "Oscar nod" for all his early work in helping to set the stage for our fine little hobby, and for now continuing to play a part in it. Coming along soon thereafter, on what we call the second big wave of west coast letterboxing, were Amanda from Seattle, Princess Lea of CA, and Funhog of OR, all of whom began their letterboxing sprees sometime in 2001, and passed the P100 mark sometime ago! In addition to creating letterboxing "hot spots" on their home turf and helping to turn the Pacific Northwest into America's second major "Dartmoor", these folks each seemed to have a tendency to "seed" areas with boxes during their travels, literally to the four corners of the country, if not the world! So, at a time when letterboxes were still few and far between in most parts of the country, coming across an Amanda box in NC, a Funhog box in NM, or a Princess Lea box in VT was always a real treat for us. Thanks to all these folks for helping spread the contagious joy of finding small boxes in unusual places all across the country!

Meanwhile, around that same time in 2001 back in New England, Connecticut was embarking on its own "second big letterboxing wave". Building on the earlier efforts of Jay and Carolyn, several "new" CT prolific planters began to swell the ranks in late 2000 and 2001, including Bill Haalck, Butterfly, and Chuck & Molly of later "Monster Mash" fame! Bill Haalck found his niche planting boxes along rail trails converted to bike paths, and we are pleased to say we have found most of his well over 100 boxes on more miles of rail trails than we ever even imagined existed - all over the Northeast! Butterfly found her niche as our "esteemed elder", logging in many hundreds of CT hiking miles while planting whole bunches of flowers, herbs and tree leaves as birthday bonuses for her many letterboxing friends. And Chuck, who never used to go hiking anywhere without his dog Molly before she died in June 2006, covered the "Quiet Corner" of northeastern CT with his famous "In Search of...." creatures and many other interesting letterbox creations that literally kept us hopping around that part of our neighboring state for several years!

And now for a mid-west "LA-LA" debut, we're adding on someone else that we thought was up for Lil' Oscar next year, but turns out that he started in late 2001 as well, and planted so many boxes in Ohio (over 100 even way back then), in a healthy little bit of planting competition with geoflyfisher, that there was one point in late 2002 when we actually thought Ohio was going to overtake CT for having the highest number of planted boxes in the country! We're talking, of course, about that quiet, humble "super planter" Franzsolo, whom I was so glad to have met on my Ohio trip out to visit with Scoutdogs in June 2003.

These, then, are some of the folks that we feel deserve our special thanks and "lil' Oscars" for all their extra hard groundwork and long-term commitment to letterboxing . Several other people starting out in our hobby at about that same time may also soon be reaching that high base criterion of 100 or more traditionally planted boxes to go along with 5 years in and a combined minimum PFX500, so we'd like to give them "Oscar nods" now, too. These include Josef of E. Hartford, who recently went on a grand spree planting "Peace" in many languages before heading off on a teacher exchange program in England for the year; Dan & Melissa of CT, whose "Iditarod" series and other boxes we have enjoyed over the years; Bluebird of CT, who has co-hosted several CT gatherings over the years and solved more CT mysteries than just about anyone; and Warrior Woman of MA/RI with that vibrant enthusiasm she exhibited at her "Peace on Earth" gathering and on so many other occasions! We'd also like to mention Mountain Scorpia, doing "early-season" planting in Florida and the mountains of NC, and Gray Squirrels, covering the greater DC area of MD, VA, and WV, who did much to start the seeding process in those parts of the country when few other boxes were around. Please let us know if any other people that we may have inadvertently overlooked have already fulfilled or are close to fulfilling our "LA-LA" requirements, so that we can add their names to the list as well. _

Finally, our list would not be complete without mention of two legendary figures, who, although perhaps neither has gone out to find enough of other people's boxes to reach PFX500, have probably had a more profound subliminal impact on letterboxing than just about anyone else in the hobby. We're talking, of course, about the inscrutable mapsurfer and the incomparable legerdemaine. Not only did these two phenomenal planters from PA and ME give us some of our most memorable finds (over 100 combined), but they made 2001 the year that for us will always stand out as the epitome of the very best that letterboxing once had to offer. ("le mot juste dans le milieu juste", as legerdemaine once said, and the stamp was then just the icing on the cake!) No amount of boxes we have found since that time has ever been able to equal the pleasure we got back then from a long weekend hunt for a single mapsurfer mystery or a single branch on a magnificent mountain mandala that may no longer even exist except in a few memory banks. Much of the precise verbal, physical, and situational magic disappeared for us when the "focus" (Russian for "legerdemain") shifted primarily towards stamp art quality, with "urbans", "drive-bys", and "postals", so we have mostly just ignored those "latter day manifestations", which would most likely have spoiled our earlier wonderful memories. Some of those trends - both the good, the bad, and the ugly - have sent ripples and waves throughout the letterboxing community. However, no matter how many imitators have tried to jump on and catch those waves, very few have managed to come anywhere close to creating total letterboxing experiences with the finesse and panache of those two original masters. Our thanks, cheers, and Oscar nods to them both!

Now, unless we hear of any changes or additions that need to be made, we're calling it a wrap for this year! Next year we hope to be back with our report of letterboxing's continued expansion by adding in the efforts of the 2002 crop of "superplanters" from all "across the fruited plain"!

For 2007:

So glad in a way that things conspired to set us back a bit in writing up this year's "LA-LA" report, so that perhaps we might all have a chance to think about the various directions that letterboxing has taken on this continent of ours, and tie it in with some North American values and history - just in time for Thanksgiving! Some new letterboxers may not even know much at all about North American letterboxing history, or why the people we honor with this "LA-LA" award are so special, so a few paragraphs of "recap" before announcing this year's honorees may actually be in order.

Most of us letterboxers over here, except perhaps for the "newest generation", probably realize by now that when letterboxing in its post-Smithsonian adaptation jumped the pond from England almost 10 years ago now, it underwent some remarkable changes as North Americans sought to make it "their own". With breakthroughs as revolutionary in their own small way as the Boston Tea Party or repealing the Stamp Act, our North American letterboxing "forefathers" and "foremothers", bright folks with foresight like Eric and Susan Davis of VT, sought to keep our hobby "inclusive" and open to all with free public on-line access to clues, "so that any child could go to a computer to get a clue to take an adult out on an adventure", to echo one of my favorite of Susan's sentiments.

This was a far cry from the old British model of making folks scavenge 100 boxes out in the wild - something that rings absolutely revolting to ecologically sensitive North American ears - before being allowed to purchase official clue pamphlets, or from that early American PhD-proposed model that would have allowed individual "entrepreneurs" to plump their egos (or bank accounts) utilizing other people's clues and creative efforts, had it not been boo-ed out of the arena at that time as being considered tacky and undemocratic!

Yes, North American-style letterboxing did indeed come to quickly distinguish itself from its English parent in several distinct ways. While the British model, besides the first couple of time-honored moorish clod hops, had had people for decades scrounging and serving up large quantities of pre-processed stamps in pubs, prisons, piles of rock and plugs of poop-covered peat, the early LbNA model came to focus almost immediately on sharing our natural wonders, combined with the ethics of good stewardship of the land, and leading folks on healthy creative outdoor adventure trips, from pristine pine forests to lofty mountain tops! It seems no accident, given our North American heritage, that the first post-Smithsonian letterbox was placed by members of the Sewanee Orienteering Club, "winging it" by planting a little tiny bought stamp near the top of Max Patch Mountain, a lovely Southern Bald that I'd visited in fog, rain, snow, sleet, and sunshine while hiking five times from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail in the 1980's and '90's, but which is now forever linked in my mind with a gorgeous spacious skies spring letterboxing day full of birds on the wing! Nor does it seem an accident that, just days later, another letterbox was placed by the Davises near a special spiritual rock by a rippling stream at the foot of the Green Mountains in Vermont! So, as I sometimes like to say, sort of like the pilgrims, it seems that letterboxing on this continent began with "a wing and a prayer", and took off from there!

And take off it did, thanks in large part to some of the "LA-LA" recipients we noted in the past and many others. They have led us from the Native American paths and piney woods of the original "letterboxing colonies" to the palms of Southern California and the firs of the Pacific Northwest! Before Amanda and Ryan ever even stepped out on their first Appalachian Trail adventure in 2003 and attempted to add a few more, there were already dozens of wonderful letterboxes planted along the way (I even went back up to Maine in 2002 and backpacked 100 miles for one of them!), and other boxes, thanks to folks like Jay Drew and Don & Gwen, near the Continental Divide and Pacific Crest Trails, bringing me back great memories of my four long treks from Mexico to Canada along those marvelous paths! Ah, those were the days when what mattered was the quality of the experience, not the quality of the stamp - bought, primitive, American folkloric, whatever - just to have something extra to look for on our adventures was more than enough! Indeed, if North American letterboxing back then had been more about the stamp and less about the hunt, merely following the models of scavenging and accumulating huge quantities of stamp images in the British manner, many of us over here in those days would never even have gotten interested in it in the first place! (not that we're turning up our noses at the Brits, fine folks I'm sure, but we had our own wild and colorful letterboxing style to develop, and we certainly had much vaster, more varied lands to cover!)

Fortunately, in 2002, we also still had the right breed of letterboxing pioneers and explorers over here to help cover these lands. It would be years yet before letterboxing's deck would be swamped by newbie bloggers and "SWOH" promoters, i.e. those folks who have encouraged others to produce and pass around vast quantities of "Stamps Without Hikes or Hunts"! These newer folks, perhaps in ignorance of North American letterboxing traditions or perhaps purely out of self promotion or "stamp greed", have in recent years managed to turn the fine adventure hobby developed here before their times into a poor imitation of British-style stamp collecting, with far too many personal travelers, scavenging contests, drive-by parties, indoor gaming, pub crawls, postals, virtuals, cooties, and other such imports and innovations never meant to exist in the hobby as originally conceived over here! (For the past few years, I could still continue to figuratively "thumb my nose" at their goings-on, because no matter how much they tried to flood the "gaming rooms" with "SWOH"(stamps without hikes or hunts), I could still work very hard to do enough "real North American-style letterboxing" both before and after any of those stamp gathers to make their "SWOH" count pale by comparison, and always keep my my own percentage of "SWOH" less than 5% of my total count, too. However, when one little girl recently showed me the 251 stamps she had collected in a single short afternoon of "gaming" up in Maine - without ever even stepping foot out of one room! - I figured that was the end of North American-style letterboxing as we once knew it, unless some of these newer folks, and even a few misguided "old timers", wake up and realize they are doing a disservice to the hobby as their North American forefathers had conceived of it, and are turning it instead into something cheap and frivolous!

Anyway, 2002 was a year when there were still real "adventurers" on the North American letterboxing scene, and these folks who started out then are those we wish to honor here now. These are not, as "newbies" might expect, the people who currently post the most to blogs and talk lists, add on the most icons, or put on the best parties, but rather those who have done the real foundation work of North American-style letterboxing by planting over 100 traditional boxes and sticking with the hobby for over 5 years, and these are people deserving of our recognition. They are our "Lewis and Clarks", our "Sacagaweas", our "Pathfinders", and our fabulous "CT Colonial Crew"! So, can you guess who they are?

Well, "Lewis and Clark" are, of course, those two preeminent traveling brothers from Texas, Silver Eagle and Baby Bear, who did indeed begin charting unfamiliar letterboxing territories back in 2002, when there were still so few boxes in certain parts of America that they were literally planting boxes for each other on their earliest letterboxing adventure trips! They also literally planted boxes along the Lewis and Clark Trail, and I still remember how exciting it was to find their pairs of boxes on my way out to do trail work along the Continental Divide in 2003, when there was still not much else out there. Since then, I've found Baby Bear boxes from Nebraska to New Mexico, while Silver Eagle has been spreading his wings from coast to coast, and still holds our bet for first person likely to have a box planted in every state - and he's getting mighty close to doing just that! We still like to joke about their "Texas-size boxes" (microbox film canisters), which we, too, have found to be quite practical for planting on our travels or even in our own "Lil' Rhody", but mostly we just admire their "Texas-sized spirits" for planting so many boxes all around the country, showing us so many different places, and helping make Texas, and the Houston area especially, a major letterboxing destination!

As for whom we call the "Sacagawea Sisters", that honor just has to go to another set of siblings, A-Bear and Dvn2rckr, who, like Sacagawea, have led us down many paths between Idaho and the Columbia River! A-Bear, along with her husband J-Bear, made their home the "Star" of our Idaho trip a few years back, as we explored their plants from the Boise "banana belt" to the high peaks of the Sawtooths, while Dvn2rckr, after throwing a "mystery guest gathering" just as we flew into Sea-Tac, had us scrambling, among other things, to trace the actual historical route of outlaw Tracy on his trajectory through the state of Washington (now how "American" is that!), before changing her name to Daelphinus, and moving to somewhere near that "other Washington"(DC). We still like to think of them both as quite the "adventure seekers", though, and are thankful for the many boxes they set out, even when other letterboxers were few and far between!

Letterboxers were still rather few and far between in the Midwest at this time, too, but one in particular was breathing new fire into the hobby, and that is, of course, "The Dragon"! A math teacher in Wisconsin, not only did he adopt many of the earlier "orphaned" boxes in his state, but he used letterboxing as a wonderful tool for his students and others to explore their environments, inspiring the upcoming generations of letterboxers with his remarkable store of hidden "dragon treasures", which we, too, hope someday to have an opportunity to come out and sample!

Now, for our "Pathfinder" we really didn't need another honorary name, because she already has one very well suited to her, and that is, of course, Scout of Endwell, NY. Like a character out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel, she has tracked many of the forests near her home turf, along the Finger Lakes Trail, and from her other travels, leaving behind many "mementos" to mark the miles, as well as contributing much towards making the greater Binghamton area another major letterboxing destination that is quite manageable, even for those of us not at all "urbanly inclined"! We'd also like to give "Oscar nods" to a couple of other "scouts": Scoutdogs, who built on the letterboxing foundation that Franzsolo had started a bit earlier in the Cincinnati area, and extended it graciously to her home turf in Indiana, which had previously been rather lacking in tupperware; and Silent Doug, who basically got things rolling in the Poconos of PA, and whose name, even today, is synonymous with early PA plants, since later boxers of the area still refer to his old blue-rimmed boxes as "Douggerware", even though he himself has long since moved away to CT, the "land of letterboxing plenty"!

And speaking of CT, that marvelous state with over 800 miles of blue-blazed forest trails and even more blue-rimmed boxes to go along with all the other colors of trails available even back then in "pre-lock-and-lock times", well... CT was just about to embark on its "third big wave", and had a great crew ready to negotiate the oncoming groundswells! Fortunately, too, these folks were rather well spaced out across the state, so they were able to create nicely interlocking little "spheres of influence" that complemented the earlier letterboxing centers of Mansfield, East Lyme, etc. established by our previous LA-LA recipients. (Please see the 2005 and 2006 listings if you don't know their names.)This is why we call them the "Colonial Crew", not because they're really into early American history, but because they helped "colonize" the rest of the state!

Of all the folks who started out in 2002, RTRW of West Hartford was the first I remember to spearhead an effort to plant so many boxes at one time that Hartford County would take the lead over the other CT counties, and so many postings occurred on one day that they actually "crashed" the system! RTRW has also been generous in allowing us and others to plant her carvings - as well as carving our "sig stamp" of the past few years! - so examples of her work can be seen not only near her "homebases" in CT, NH, and KS, but in quite a few other places across the country besides!

Other folks carving out their CT niches include: Music Woman, who covered the Manchester area with Disney Villains and other characters, and gave us ample opportunities for picnicking around the state; Sadie and Russ, who led us back to the crags of the New Haven region, and sometimes kept us smiling with cryptic surprises, identities, and such; and Rubaduc, who has kept us hiking all over CT, from the Appalachian Trail to Box Mountain, on her hikes of typically 3 miles or more! (although she has relented for non-hikers and planted a few drive-bys... in Vermont! :-)

We'd also like to give "Oscar nods" to a few other folks who started around this same time in CT, created some nice little letterboxing "colonies", but have now mostly disappeared from the letterboxing scene. These include Alan (Letterboxer 2002), who largely covered the Norwalk and Milford areas of CT's southwestern coastline, and was the first of the "CT crowd" to go to Dartmoor in 2003, and tell us what things were like over there; The Engraver, who helped cover the formerly sparsely planted parts of western CT around Torrington with her original designs, and Irishtinker, the NeeDeeps and Teach & Preach, all of whom kept CT's notheastern corner humming for several years before things began to quiet down up there in the "Quiet Corner"... and that's how it goes. What we used to call "mini Dartmoors" (but which we don't wish for anyone to confuse with "scavenging"!) rise and fall as new ones come to take their places, but we hope that no one forgets these original North American ones we have given thought to chronicling over the years, and the people who created them in keeping with the North American spirit of adventure.

And, yes, we really are thrilled that so many people have decided to continue in the original style of our wonderful North American letterboxing heritage, even while others have jumped on the bandwagon presented by the later log-in instigators and promulgators of "SWOH", folks seemingly satisfied with getting their dosage of "adventure" packaged in a mailbox, a pub, or by figuring out the name of someone's favorite cootie or TV show! Not that those things can't be fun for some people, I'm sure, but we just do not feel that those other things should fall under the same title as North American letterboxing. If that were the case, then we would probably want to change the name of what we "old timers" do to something like "adventure questing"(which certainly has good roots in the Valley Quest and other programs which actually predate North American post-Smithsonian letterboxing), and leave the now trivialized appellation of "letterboxing" to the newbie postal and trading card-type folks (since it does seem to fit what they do, anyway, "letterbox", being the British word for "mailbox"!) However, since our predecessors on this continent chose the rubric "Letterboxing" to denote our adventure hobby, all we can do is give everything else we come across in our travels the label of "stamp collecting", get on with the adventure, and, of course, give our thanks to everyone who continues to make it the wonderful adventure that it is! We hope to be honoring more "giants of the North American letterboxing tradition" in years to come, so if there is anyone else who fits the high standards we have set for this "lifetime achievement award", but whose region or starting date we're not familiar with, please feel free to let us know! Congratulations to this year's honorees, and we'll get you your "Lil' Oscar"("SWOH", to be sure, but you've really earned it!:-) whenever we next see you! Cheers!!!

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