A good walk into a forest where it is a old forgotten German depot I spent many afternoons this autumn. As it covers a large area it wasnt every day I got any finds or even any signals at all, and doing the search with the metal detector in all metal- and max signal modes I can more or less rule out such areas for future searches. One day though, in the middle of bear season, a great signal screamed from the detector and shook me out of my daydreaming. I scanned the ground trying to estimate how large the signal was and where to start digging. The same signal stretched for several meters lenght and about a half meter width, surely a pipe or wire I thought but I couldn`t let it go without digging it seeing what it really was.
In the photo above you see my backpack up on the left side where the signal start , and shovel on the right side where it ends and I began digging. The ground was soaked after several days of raining but the soil was clay with no roots going through so it was easy enough to shovel it out , and about 30 cm down I saw what had made the detector go mad. Some German signal flares for the Leuchtpistole. I pulled them out of the clay and found they was all live and in very nice condition , but could this whole lenght in the forest floor be all flares?? I decided to get to the bottom of this.
I spent the rest of the day picking out flare after flare. They where so thightly packed that there was no use for the shovel , I could only use the bayonet and my fingers but at the end of the afternoon I had reached the bottom of the pit. The hole was about a meter deep and half meter wide and I`d never seen so many flares in my life.
All the following days I went into the forest to continue checking this place. I dug a hole a meter from the first one and one on the other end and then one in the middle of what had turned out to be a 5-6 meter long ditch filled to the brim with flares. It felt very surreal and I even dreamt about aluminum tubes at night.
I also found some orange smoke candles and one or two mortar fins together with the flares , but not the flare gun I had started hoping to find , maybe this spring. At the end I put it all back in the ground and closed it up giving the space back to the grass and bears.
One of the mornings I was up there this big bear dropping was laying half meter from the ditch...
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