Geocache

The Geocache geocache (GC3F) was placed on 17 June 2000, at the eastern tip of Belgium, and it is the country's oldest geocache. Only six weeks earlier, Dave Ulmer had buried the first cache of all in Oregon. Back then the game had no website, no settled name and no cache names either: this one is simply called "Geocache".

Every cache in the world fitted on a single web page kept by Mike Teague. On 21 June 2000 it listed about forty of them, spread over seven countries outside the United States, with one single line for Belgium. It appears there three days after the Swedish "Noodle Stash", near Stockholm: the second cache of continental Europe, the first of the Benelux.

The owner told the whole story on his own website: a two-litre box in a white plastic bag, slipped under the low branches of a young fir tree, with a notebook, orange juice, four AA batteries in case the visitor's GPS had eaten its own, and a disposable camera.

The first online log dates from 11 April 2001: geocaching.com did not yet exist when the cache was hidden. People came from France, Germany and the Netherlands to make it one stop of a weekend in Belgium. The cache ended up archived. The torch is carried by its neighbour, placed by the same man three weeks later on the confluence point N 50° E 5°: GC40, the oldest cache still active in continental Europe.