Most of this weeks chances for searching the old Wehrmacht camps got ruined by having to go to work on the nice sunny days and having rain pouring down on the days off.  One of the days I was going to try to beat the rain to it and was out in the forest pretty early.  I quickly noticed that it had been a while since I polished my boots, coz they were taking in water from the damp forest floor. Very comfortable..
 From where I left off last week I continued the search and it didn`t take long before I had found some spoons and forks. Perhaps this was a spot a soldier had emptied his crate or backpack before going home after the war, I thought. It would for sure be worth investigating the surrounding area a bit. I dug another good signal I was hoping to be coins, but it was a chain from a rifle cleaning kit, and together with it the tool to eject a stuck rifle casing. I swung the detector again, and it still gave off a mix of signals. I took out the pin pointer and found a tent peg and a close combat knife, and then some nails, hinges and other crate parts, a perfume bottle and two beer bottles.
 Two meters away another interesting find was a full rifle cleaning kit. Of course the usual rubbish got me up and down ever so often until I struck upon a large signal. Was it finally going to be a crate of Sturmgewehrs??!! No, it was the top of a detroyed stove.

The next signal was also a strong, interesting one. After taking away the moss it looked like a dumping pit, I could see rocks and broken glass. Under the rocks were rusted food tins, more broken glass and a few intact bottles. I am taking all the bottles I can find this season coz I wanna make something cool with them at some point. Integrate them in a wall or something.
 I lifted away a rusted metal sheet and from under it rained gaming pieces and burnt paper. It took a while to collect them but it looked like the fire had eaten a whole lot of them, probably a whole pile of games. Some of the paper had cyrillic text. A harmonica had partly survived the flames and so had a magazine for a MP38/40. 
 One relic I was a bit sad to see hadn`t survived very well was a small alarm clock. Its body was from bakelite but it was badly damaged by the fire, brittle and broken. I do love items made from these early plastic like materials, and in this small dumping pit were also a couple of toothbrushes, a yellow teaspoon and a small green button. The teaspoon had a makers logo, "Nobit".

In the end of the ditch it looked like a couple of buckets had been thrown. I reached out to grab one of them when I felt something sharp dig into my fingertip. I had stabbed myself on a piece of glass, the cut was deep and had a couple of angles to it. I rinsed it and taped it up as good as I could and stuck and extra glove on the hand.
 I tried grabbing the bucket again, a bit more careful this time. It was only one bucket and inside it was a small salt shaker, the other "bucket" was a helmet!! The back of the helmet looked like it had been in the fire, but on the front wintercamo was visible! A very welcome surprise! 
I filled the bucket with my finds and carried on with the searching. 

 Only a signal or two later the first drops of rain fell. I picked up speed and in the next half hour I found a pocketwatch holder, a bottle with a silver looking metal top and a field shovel. The last signal I dug was prehaps the most surprising find of the day. It was a medical bottle with a perfectly preserved brush from a rifle cleaning kit inside. Very funny to find.
 
The rain came down in a tropical style so I nearly ran to the car, but was of course soaked to the skin before getting there. 
Going through the finds when unloading the car I noticed a relic that had gone nearly unnoticed into the finds bag. A small rusted ashtray. It looked like it had a piece of rust fused to it, but when I tried to pull it out I saw it was attached to the ashtray and just folded. I bent it to the original position and realized it was my favorite find of the day. A trench-art ashtray with a squirrell standing on the side!

The coming week looks like it is going to be wet, and my finger needs to heal, but as always I hope to get some trips done. For sure it ll be more days off now as the tourist season is calming down a bit so that ll free up more time for expeditions :)

​Thanks for reading and I hope you ll have a great week :)


 
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 The late summer is beginning to look a lot like autumn in the valleys here north now. We have had some beautiful sunny  and warm days in the start of the week, which without much warning turned into rainy, cold, windy ones. Lots of leaves are transforming from green into red and yellow, and berries and  the gardens are ripe. ​This, plus work, resulted in only one trip out with the metal detector this week.
 I got up extra early, because the weather report promised huge amounts of rain a little later on the afternoon, and I wanted to get some digging done before the terribleness arrived. I had left a few good signals last time I was searching in the gebirgsjäger camp, so that felt like a good place to spend as much of the day as possible.
 After digging up a few rifle casings, stripper clips and modern garbage I found something more interesting. I thought it was a lid from a paint can, but it was an ashtray. It had a small image embossed in the middle, a horse in a norse looking style. Pretty cool, and one can never have too many ashtrays. But it was not all. After checking with the pinpointer I tore away more of the moss, and charcoal and blobs of melted glass appeared. A small fireplace. 
 It must have looked awesome back in the late summer months of 1945 when hundreds of small fires were burning in the camps down through the valley, as soldiers got rid of stuff they didn`t feel like carrying back to Germany. In this particular fireplace it looked like some stuff were burnt, but that other rubbish had been thrown in it after the flames had died out. That rubbish got fresh air again now as small treasures, or for most, probably still junk :D Some of this were early plastic items such as toothbrushes, a butterdish, a fountain pen and a ping pong ball! Also a very interesting instructional sheet regarding gun powder charges-temperature-range-angle instructions for artillery guns. 
 Another item that was lovely to find was a coffee mug, although the markings on the bottom of it were a bit weak. Before I had to refill the fireplace I also found two metal dishes from the field kitchen kit and some bakelite. A lid for a jar, a small powder charge box and a large powder charge box. As I was closing the hole I noticed a small piece of wood in the scrap. It was square and had the size of a typical luggage tag and it had a hole with a small piece of rope. I turned it over and it had writing on it! It was a luggage tag! Initials, roll number, unit and feldpostnummer! An amazing find! Worth saving from the burnt metal in the little rubbish pit were  only a handfull of cooked off 7.92 rounds, exploded and turned into nice metal flowers.
 
I didn`t find any more burn- or dumping pits, but I strolled around and got a good excersise getting up and down checking signals. Some treasures slowly trickled into the finds bag as well. A german coin, pair of ski goggles, cream tins and Doramad toothpaste and an entrenching tool. I picked up some food tins and a couple of bottles as well. 
 Walking back to the parking place to head home I found a wallet with a few Finnish coins in and around it.
​ But I ended the day with a mega find! The signal was iron so my guess was horseshoe, but no. It was a revovler!! Wohoo! Unbelivable! I don`t know yet what type it is, but it wouldn`t surprise me if it is a Russian Nagant. It ll be fun figuring out. 
​I made it to the car before the rain really came pouring down. Nearly so that I would be better off with a boat. I made it safe home and a little bit later when I checked the news I was happy I hadn`t gone to some other camps I had thought to visit. In that direction a large mudslide had closed the roads for many hours and I would have had to overnight in a cold van.

Weather for the upcoming week looks allright so unless there will be a ton of work I ll try do get back in the woods asap :)

Thanks for reading. Enjoy your week, and keep smiling  :)
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On my first trip out with the detector this week I went to the Luftwaffe field hospital for some searching and digging. A button, a few rifle casings and a glass syringe were the only items that didn`t directly fall in the `garbage`category after four hours of searching. The luck had totally evaded me on this trip, but I was in good spirits, the weather was nice and I had enjoyed digging up every signal.

The next day I wanted to visit the camp with the marsh where lots of leather items and helmets had been dumped. The last couple of months have been warm and dry so I was hoping the water level would be lower than usual.
 I was glad I hadn`t forgotten the bug repellent in the car, coz I was going to need it. The marsh seemed to have shrunk a bit, but the air above it was vibrating from tiny flying biters.
 I stuck my arm into the marsh to the depth of my elbow when I had contact with relics. It was a bunch of k98 leather frogs. Other than that the stitching had rotted away they were in great condition. I fished out an intact gebirgsjäger boot and several bits of helmet liner leather, chin straps and some k98 ammo pouches.
 Checking around a little for iron signals resulted in three or four fragments of german helmets. The conditions aren`t exactly healthy for metal on this site.
 Around the marsh I picked up another few not-so-good signals and dug up three more helmet wrecks. They are only fragments but I think some of them can be made into some cool displays.
 Some of the better signals around were a handfull of helmet liner bands made with high quality aluminum. 
Heavy loaded on route back to the car I found a gigantic bike pedal. Looks like an ordinary truppenfahrrad pedal, but is far thicker and heavier. Did some wartime motorcycles have such as starters?
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A few days later I made another trip. This time to the gebirgsjäger camp where I found the three badges a few weeks back. This time I was just almost that lucky again. 
 Hours had went by, it was pretty warm, the bugs tried to drain me, and every signal I dug were rubbish. Not even a rifle casing. I was walking around, searching and checking, and writing a report in my mind about such trips, where nothing remotely interesting surfaces and how not to loose motivation. At that moment the detector delivered a clear and steady signal. Directly under the grass, in the fine sand was a monogrammed silver ring staring back at me. "E.T" was engraved on it. A bit of the band was broken and missing, but the detector couldn`t pick it up anywhere, so prehaps it had broken before being tossed away. 
 That find got the motivation back in place for sure. I kept going for another couple of hours but after who-knows how many signals the only other relic I brought home that day was a Norwegian coin, a few parts from a crate and a modern VW logo for a car.
 
Yesterday I wanted to re-visit a place I hadn`t been to for a few seasons. Many people have searched this forest, but still I managed to find a couple of helmets and some good stuff on my previous trips.
 It took a little while before I found back to the place, but when I stood there it was like being home again. I knew my way around these trees.
 The only difference it felt like it was emptier, farther between good signals, and I saw fresh traces of other diggers. Again I didn`t have much luck with finds, but a few cream tubes, casings and coins were tucked into the backpack. I also dug up an old timber axe, a large padlock, the solex from an engine, a horse shoe with a plate mounted on it, maybe a trench-art project, and the lid for a field kitchen pan or pot.

We can see the early signs of fall here now, and the forests are overflowing of berries. The GirlfriendWife and I picked lots of blueberries, strawberries and rasberry this weekend, so now the entire house is smelling of fresh jam :)

​Thanks for reading, and here is to a better week !! :)
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On tuesday Baard was being expelled from the cabin because it was going to be cleaned and organized since their holiday was about to end and they were heading home the following day. Luckily I had no work lined up so this meant that we had one more day to search the Heer camp we found good stuff in last time.
 We met up at the usual spot and headed directly to the forest where a dumping pit could be waiting. On the side of the dug out stood a large enamel lid from a field kitchen kettle, and the ground seemed to be full of metal. After removing a couple of buckets, porcelain insulators and a steel net for making concrete foundations we had to double check with both detectors. There were no more metal, no porcelain, nothing. 
Luckily the ground in the birch forest was full of different signals so we would be able to make the day pass. A few steps away from the dug out I opened up two signals. An ashtray with a vikingship and "Norge", and a letter opener formed as a sword where the handle is a miniature of the Olav Tryggvasson statue standing on the main square in Trondheim. 
 Next to the barely visible old camp road the detector rang out again. This time a small spill of relics was the cause. I found handles and parts from a crate, different cream tubes and perfume bottles, a bakelite drinking cup, metal dishes, a couple of coins and a luggage tag made from steel, but the name and feldpostnummer still readable. 
 Across the road I had to open up the ground again because of a good signal. A food tin and a toothpaste tube surrounded by gaming pieces. I sat on my knees there for a long time scraping through the soil trying to catch all the small chess bits made of glass. The pile grew and in the end I must have found more than two hundred of them.
 After putting the moss back in place I didn`t get many meters. The detector stopped me again and now it showed me a small ditch full of metal, and some glass. The ditch had been set fire to and it had burnt out destroying almost everything that had been thrown in it. Only a few bottles and food tins had survived in the middle of the ditch,plus a trench art candle holder which was pretty cool. In one of the ends of it two more items had just gotten a licking from the flames, a belt buckle and a bracelet. 
 The day had flown and we had to collect our belongings and head back to the car. Baard hadn`t had any luck with finds except a trench art ashtray, but he had climbed up the mountainside and found more of the tunnels the germans had carved. Naturally his camera was in his backpack down in the forest where I was digging so there is no pics of the complex there :D He had also met the landowner and was armed with some more hints and info for future expeditions.
 

The rest of the week I had to work, but yesterday was Saturday and with it came perfect weather for digging. I wanted to search some more in the area that had housed an artillery unit, which I detected a bit in last week. It is a little bit of a drive ,and then a walk, but when I got there the Fisher F5 which is the detector I use, picked up a good signal. A belt buckle! Aluminum. In very nice condition. A rare find in my book. I cleaned it up a little and enjoyed the moment before I continued the search. Centimeters away lay a belt support hook and a few Finnish coins, and soon the detector screamed out again. A large mixed signal. I hoped for a dumping pit as I was chopping my way through the roots. The shovel scraped along a piece of metal. It was two-three metal dishes from a field kitchen. A pair of scissors and ski goggles under there again. It was most definitely a small dumping pit I had found. 
 Lots of the usual rubbish and relics came out of the ditch, rusted and some partly burnt. A couple of alco bottles in different shades of green landed in the pile for relics to save, and so did some rusted field torches, colorful soap boxes, cream tubes, a bakelite drinking cup and several toothbrushes. 
 Together with the toothbrushes were a few bakelite powder charge tins. One of them had initials engraved and three of them had leftovers inside of what looked like toothpowder. So I wonder if the soldiers had taken these boxes and used for their hygienic products.
 The dumping pit wasn`t very large but it held a lot of items, and for once almost no rocks, broken glass or heavy bits of metal. I found two mugs, one beer mug of glass, and a porcelain coffee mug decorated with football players. A pair of sunglasses was fairly intact, it only missed one of the lenses. An item made from some kind of clear plastic caused some wonder and mystery, but we have landed on that it is a stand for a mirror. Another clear piece of plastic had been made into a luggage tag and had a soldiers name carved into it. 
A beautiful blue perfume bottle fell out from the side of the ditch. It had an interesting decor and on the bottom "czechoslovakia" with very small letters. Two shoulderboards, one with silver along the edge for an unteroffizier was in very good condition and will make a great addition to a display. 
Under the shoulderboards was my new favorite relic. A single cigarett ashtray. Barely three centimeters across and cut from crystal. A beautiful little conversation starter. 
 On the bottom was a coal fed iron, the type to make nicely pressed uniforms. Also on the bottom was a canteen with its screwcork and drinking cup, the cloth cover on it was even partly intact. One of the last finds in the ditch was quite interesting. Also directly linked to the artillery unit. Several plastic sheets with info and grids regarding the F.H18 cannon and powder charges vs wind direction. If someone with more knowledge about them would like to share info I would appreciate it :)

I still don`t know how the coming week will be with work, but I hope I get some days off to roam in the woods. The berrypicking season is here as well so it ll be double busy with picking them and relics. Nothing is better than a freezer well stocked with good local berries to enjoy through the dark winter.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your week :)