The Boxes of Codorus

Once I made the decision to head to York County to box, I decided to visit Codorus State Park, one of the parks of my younger days. I have made several letterboxing forages to this park in the past so most of what I had left to find were boxes by newer boxers. I wasn't sure what to expect after my really disappointing experiences with new boxers in north central PA a few months ago but decided to try to keep an open mind. I am here to report that the state of boxing by newer boxers in York County is excellent. I had already found several boxes by the relatively new York County boxer, Royal Fish and company, and had been happy with the quality of those. This day's adventures dealt mostly with boxes by the Beach Buddies and two by a brand new planter, the Freaky 4.

In total, I found eight boxes and I have to say that there wasn't a bad one in the bunch. They were scattered throughout this very large park, some were drivebys, some were hikes of one to one and a half miles but all were very well done. All but one had a hand carved stamp and even the store bought stamp was very relevant to the theme of the box. There was a hitchhiker hostel with very definite instructions in the clues and in the box about how to deal with a HHH but, of course, someone didn't play by the rules, and the hostel was one HH short.

If I had one complaint about the day, it wasn't with the planters but with the finders. The last two finders on the boxes had personal stamps that were black and black must have been the only color that they possessed. All of the stamps that I found were covered with a thick coating of black ink so I spent a lot of time cleaning some of them up before I could apply the correct colors to the stamps. When I looked at the profiles of these finders on AQ, I see that they appeared to be entranced with the hobby for one day and haven't signed on since they found these boxes so hopefully, they won't cause so much work for the next finders on any more boxes.

It appears that boxing in southern York County is definitely taking off and if the quality of the boxes remains as good as those I found this week, it will be a really fun area to box.

The Sights in Codorus

After spending the weekend hiking and camping in the beautiful central Pennsylvania mountains, I wanted to spend my vacation day in a less strenuous manner so I chose to drive over to my home town and do some boxing in Codorus State Park. I knew that this park has some hills but I was also confident that it had no mountains to climb. I knew also that the trails here are a lot less demanding than some of the rocky trails that I was on this past weekend. I figured it was a good way to "cool down" from my exercise of the weekend.

I was fortunate that the day was absolutely flawless, cool and sunny and crystal clear. In spite of feeling a lot like autumn, it looked a lot more like summer. I was amazed at the number of wild flowers that were still in full bloom and took a ton of pictures. Unfortunately, it appears that my camera may be on its last legs and the beautiful colors that I saw didn't come across as strongly as I would have liked but I decided to include the best here.