Beginning

This blog will be entirely dedicated to the letterboxes I have planted under my Rydes with Eagles trail name. I have only planted 14 letterboxes so far, but have many more waiting to be planted. I went over to Boise this weekend for a letterboxing event and planted two boxes for my poem series. I have already planted two in this series, and plan to change the listings to this blog so that I can add the poem/picture to the clues. This is not a letterboxing series in the technical term, as all the boxes will be planted in different areas.

So, to begin, I will explain about the names, why we have the trail names that I picked, and why it might be confusing.

Original Crazy Mountain Woman Logo Colored

My sister, nephew and I moved to the mountains above Boise in 1992. We found out that life can be a little more complicated there. I designed a logo and came up with a name for a business that we wanted to create. The name I came up with was Crazy Mountain Women, LLC. I drew a logo that represented Carma and I with our (then) baby horses, Mistidawn and Tess. We became the Crazy Mountain Women.

I also came up with a secondary logo for another part of the business we were planning with a horse running and an eagle flying above. I called it Rydes With Eagles. I spelled Rydes with a "Y" because that is actually the Native American name my nephew (Ryder) used in kindergarten and we wanted him to be included in our business venture.

I came across the hobby of letterboxing in Disney's Family Fun magazine, but it wasn't until a year after I had read about it that I actually found my first box. Carma and I needed to go to Tennessee and move her son back to Idaho. We decided to make a vacation out of it and invited our parents to join us on the trip. I like to collect souvenirs whenever I travel and this particular year I didn't have much money. I remembered the article in Family Fun and decided that would be a good way to document our trip, by collecting stamped images. Without telling my sister, I had two custom stamps made with our two logos. I chose the Rydes With Eagles image as my trail name and gave Carma the logo stamp for Crazy Mountain Women as a birthday present to use as her trail name.

Rydes With Eagles Logo embroidered

We missed the exit for the first clue I had downloaded, but stopped in Evanston, Wyoming, at a rest area where there were two letterboxes. We found the first box planted by CW Sunseeker. Inside the container was a clue for a bonus box! We were hooked. Carma has since changed her name to Crazy Mountain Woman, and I changed the logo to design her new stamp so that it was just her and Mistidawn.

Now, here comes the confusing part. I have written some short stories, poems, and songs; and the titles for each of these compilations are as follows:  Tales of a Crazy Mountain Woman, Poems of a Crazy Mountain Woman, and Songs of a Crazy Mountain Woman. I planted two letterboxes last year that relate to my poems, and started calling it the CMW poem series because of the titles of my notebooks and CD.

Now...on to the planting!