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The next morning I was back on site to continue. I cut away some of the edge of the pit and out fell the relic which made the week. A beautifully preserved SA Sportsabzeichen! With its needle intact I think it is the best one of these badges I have ever found. Happy with the find I continued to pull relics out of the soil. Göffels in both aluminum and steel, esbit burners, a mess kit, an aluminum coffee mug and a field kitchen dinner plate, different tools

From the lidar I had indications of more dumping pits, but didn`t manage to locate them. Instead I found a few 2cm casings, a heater for a vehicle, and I met a big otter. He came running in my direction, not noticing the humanoid in front of him, so I said out loud - Hey! Mr. Otter!. He stopped instantly, smelled the air and squinted a bit before he made an 180 degree turn and disappeared back into the undergrowth.

In the camp I searched the first day I roamed around randomly the first few hours not finding very much at all. I was trying to only dig the cleanest and best signals which I have done most of the season, contrary to what I have usually done, dug on everything. The strategy didn`t really pay off this time though. The only things to surface were cream tubes, food tins, unmarked cutlery, stove parts and rather uninteresting bits of field equipment.

Two days ago I ventured back to the gebirgsjäger forest to look for more helmets and such. As I parked the car I noticed that the ground was white of ice. The frost had arrived. But as the sun rose, ( yes, maybe the fifth day with sun since june ) the ice crystals melted. The ground stayed quite cold troughout the day though. The finds during the first few hours was crappy. Food tins, large bolts, bits of sheet metal and other boring stuff. Then I came across a small ravin

Quite instantly the detector picked up on something in the ground. With barely any roots or rocks the ground opened up easily and presented to me a small dumping pit. Leaning towards the sidewall of the hole was a triangular vehicle pennant made from a celluloid covered metal frame. Inside it was a hint of cloth left. Imagine having found it fifteen - twenty years ago, the flag would probably still be recognizable.

Some relics came out together with the stones. A pair of Maskenbrillen, a primus, a rifle cleaning kit, a pair of tent pegs and a five kilo weight. Broken bits of porcelain plates and an intact, but sooted civillian tea cup hinted that better and more interesting stuff could have survived. A little deeper underground I thought I found several TNT blocks. They had the same shape, size and color, but I spotted the logo of a well known norwegian soap maker on one of them.

For once the weather was sunny, but it wasn`t that warm, only 13-13 Celsius. Enough to get the insects interested once I had worked up a sweat. The Nokta showed me a good signal and I believed I was off to a great start with an Edelweiss badge, but as soon as I got the small item out from the soil I saw it wasn`t the gebirgsjäger badge. It had similar size and shape,and was of same type of alloy, but the badge ( if that is what it is ) was in form of a pine branch with two pi

I tried to shelter from the rain by searching around trees but soon had entageled myself into shrubbery and sapplings which just made me more wet. Here I got the first "good" find. A very damaged and partly melted EKM. Later when I was home and could clean it up it was fun to discover that it belonged together with another half tag I dug up earlier this season.

In one part of the camp I had many small aluminum signals, so I hoped for a bunch of tags. Instead they were tiny bits from some kind of trench-art production. A few of the bits had patterns or letters engraved. Like if the artist had done tests before applying it to his project. A brass signal stood out in that spot and I let out a ghasp when I dug it out.

In the early days of the week I went out to cross a few spots off my list. On the end of a long day searching on the end of last season I had picked up a few interesting signals that I suspected could be dumping pits. I made a note of them in my notebook until now when I found the time to go back there. I was eager to check what could be hiding underground there so I wasn`t discouraged by the watery clouds hanging just above the roof of my car

The following day the rain came in sideways but I had to get out there to try find at least one treasure, and I had to test my new boots. For the last ten years I have been on my second pair of M77 boots from the Norwegian Army, but lately they had been taking in water faster than a torpedoed convoy ship. The last time I wore them on a wet day my feet were soaked within the first ten minutes. My new footwear was a pair of Haix boots with the fancy name Black Eagle Athletic

Three meters away from the Blendax pit I struck upon another little garbage dump. This one was filled with broken glass from bottles and windows. Tons of it. But also a few other relics. It had the third rifle cleaning kit of the day, another gas mask canister, a very interesting bottle I have never seen before, a half rotted K98 ammo pouch and a pair of goggles. And a to me very interesting find.

Last summer we had localized a slope full of garbage. An old landfill with German stuff from the large camp on the bottom and gradually more modern stuff up until the early nineties had been dumped on the top. A slope one can read like a history book. It was our plan to open up a section of this slope, but as we were walking around with the detectors warming up on some single signals Baard discovered a large burn site full of relics just below the vegetation.

Early last winter I was looking for some miniature ww2 bunkers to use in a few diorama projects. By chance I came across this company which was shutting down operations and I ended up buying several of the silicon molds from their 1/35 scale bunker range. After recieving the molds a few weeks later I mixed up Plaster of Paris and poured a test batch. The bits for the bunkers came out from the forms looking very good so I began playing around with some of the ideas I had f

I had begun walking back to the base camp to collect my stuff and go home when I dug a good signal. It was a fragment of a Nahkampfspange! The needle was twisted, so force had been used to break it in parts. I spent the next hour trawling the spot, piling any finds onto a rock so as to not dig them twice, but the rest of the badge was nowhere to be found.

Most of this week the weather was wet and nasty and I had to work a bit, so the only summery day I spent searching in the gebirgsjäger camp. I usually dig on most of the beeps given by the metal detector, and have found many treasures checking bad signals, it is an exhausting strategy though. Having found so many erkennungsmarken on my last searches I decided to go exclusively after good ones on this trip.

A little bit later the detector presented me with another strong and good signal. I cut open a piece of the ground and made eyecontact with half of an Erkennunksmarke. That was a surprise! It was dirty and looked a bit deteriorated so I couldn`t read it other than that I could spell `Geb`. I stuck the pinpointer into the ground and

Signals everywhere. Crate parts, creamtubes and food tins seemed to litter the place, but the best find I had before my allotted time for detecting was up I spotted with my eyes even before the detector came near it. A metal pipe stuck out from the ground near the edge of the marsh. I grabbed it and pulled it straight out. A rifle!