Match Stash

The Match Stash geocache (GC4D) is the oldest still active cache in Sweden: placed on 11 August 2000 on a wooded hillock south-west of Stockholm. Its name preserves the vocabulary of the earliest months: the game was GPS stash hunt, renamed geocaching on 30 May 2000 because "stash" carried unfortunate connotations. This one owes its own name to the matches it contained.

Its owner, Tobias Radeskog, followed the Usenet forum where the idea of geocaching had just been born. Two months earlier he had hidden the first geocache in Sweden, Noodle Stash (GC4C): barely covered with foliage, it took nearly a year to find its first visitor and did not survive. His second box, though, has lasted - including through seven years of slumber, from 2003 to 2010. He still maintains it, a quarter of a century later.

August 2000 is one of the rarest squares on the Jasmer Challenge grid, which calls for a find in every month elapsed since May 2000: Match Stash is the only one in Europe bearing that date, and the easiest to reach, twenty minutes from the centre of Stockholm. The place is worth the detour: the Sätraskogen nature reserve, its trails along Lake Mälaren, and the café of the neighbouring riding club, where you take fika before the short off-trail climb.