On Thursday me and the Girlfriend went out for Chaga hunting, but I managed to talk her into a short stop at the German camp for some searching before going further. I ran around with the detector for a while but didn`t have much luck. I got a big signal which had to be dug, but it was just a whole lot of smaller horseshoes. Nine of them. Next I found a spring for the gasmask, the ones used inside the mask to keep its shape, and also an eyelet from a gasmask. Then I found a small dumping ditch which I just did a little test-opening of. I pulled out a bottle, some horse strap buckles and a porcelain cream jar, and left the ditch for another day, probably next season. 
Now we went back to the car and drove into another valley where we earlier on a stroll had spotted Chaga mushroom growing on some trees. We climbed the hill and to our big surprise we saw rests of buildings and earthen dug outs. Between some trees old German barbed wire had grown into the trunks and was stretched out. So here had definately been a German camp. This is a place to check out further if I can get the permission to search there, a project for wintertime. We found some Chaga and kept looking for more when Girlfriend called out to me and said she had found a bunker. She had discovered a shelter built into the side of the slope, and it had survived all these years since the war! Very interesting! 

On Friday we had to be in the city, but we made it safely back to nature in the evening. This morning I wanted to go searching again, but I was gutted when I looked out the windows. There were snow. Lots of it. King Winter had arrived and he had been busy during the night. The morning was spent changing car tyres and shopping but when that was done I decided I just had to get out there, snow or no snow. The frost hasn`t made the ground into concrete yet so technically the season is still on. Girlfriend had to work so I went out to the Gebirgsjäger camp alone for a few hours of digging. There were more snow in the forest than around the farm, but the detector doesn`t notice a few cm of winter so it kept showing me where metals were buried. The first signal was one of the aluminum food tins, but the next one was a "day-saver". A helmet liner in very nice condition,even with the leather chin strap intact. I hoped there would be a helmet around but I couldn`t find it. I guess I have found my fair share of helmets for a few seasons anyway :D Next up I dug up a field shovel, and a few meters away a small pit filled with horseshoe tools, a whole hoard of them, nine in total! 
The detector kept screaming and I dug out three vehicle fire extinguishers and two brackets for them. None of the extinguishers were complete but prehaps I`ll find the rest of them someday. Then I had a very interesting signal, the detector indicated gold or bling or something like it, foil prehaps, so I sat down in the snow again, starting to feel the needles from the cold going through my skin. I was of course all soaking wet by now but in a second I didn`t notice that anymore. I removed some snow and opened up the forest floor and I saw something yellow. Yellow like gold. That was exciting! I carefully dug out several parts of a broken tray of some sort and I am pretty sure it is gold plated silver. Very nicely ornamented. I found it in the middle of what seemed to be a burn pit so it was difficult to be sure if I had gotten all the bits for the tray. I searched what I could before I had to begin my trip back home, but made sure to mark the place so I can easily find back to it to try locate any missing bits. 
I am not sure if this is the final dig of the season, but if it is it was certainly a good one!! But I hope there will be a few more chances before the ground is block frozen :)
​Have a great weekend everyone:)

As I had no other projects on the table today I grabbed Girlfriends car, since she was at work and my car is currently at the workshop, and rushed off towards the mountain really early. Here and there the night frost was still covering the road and after a short drive I found out that the forest was also frozen. The weather report says King Winter will make his entry this  Friday so the season might sadly come to a halt very soon, but we ll keep searching until the fingertips gets too cold and wanna stay home instead.
I spent most of the day in the edge of the tree line where it some 80 years ago stood a large German Heer camp. One can clearly see barrack and hut foundations and here and there ovens and other bits of metals are peeking out from moss and undergrowth. The metal detector is giving off signals nearly everywhere so it is a real luxury problem to choose which signal to dig. I haven`t found any Erkennungsmärke this season, and I also would love to find a aluminum belt buckle so I kept digging such signals but I only landed food tins and a canteen screw cork. Of course I also dug some other good, and some crappy signals and between a lot of rubbish I got a few very nice finds today. One of those was a long, black metal bottle of some sort. I know I have seen one somewhere before but I cannot remember where or what it was for, prehaps some hunters sneaky alco bottle, maybe someone knows and will tell me, the pics are further below.
Two of the crappy signals I dug was surprisingly good finds, two empty M24 hand grenade heads. One of them had one of its sides rotted away but it ll make a nice diorama bas I think. Nearby I found the handle for one of the heads, but it was in two pieces and in a sad state. I kept searching around that place and found a handfull of PPSh casings, a few stripper clips and some screwcorks for the M24s. Then I had a bit of a stronger signal I had to check, and the result of that surprised me even more. It was the tube of a Panzerfaust 30, in great condition. Some oxalic acid on that I belive will do wonders!! I swept the detector across the place again and there was still a strong signal. Diagonal to where the Panzerfaust had been was another tube under the moss!! This time the smaller Panzerfaust Klein!! Unbelivable!! This one also in very good condition. The next hour I grid searched the area but I only got a few more PPSh casings, some rifle bullets and rubbish.
I had a small lunchbreak and when moving around again I found a small dumping pit. In it was mostly trash and rotted food tins but I scored two nice thoothbrushes, a coin, and a nice looking gasmask cannister with some color still showing, another candidate for the oxalic bath when winter has set.  
I had to be back home before dinnertime so I could prepare something for Girlfriend who was coming back from work soon so I began my stroll back to the car. Not far from the parking place the detector told me to check what laid beneath a small and crooked mountain birch. I located it with the pinpointer and pulled out a trigger part for a Panzerfaust 60/100! Man,what a last find of the day. I did spend another twenty minutes checking around for its tube but it was nowhere to be found..prehaps it ll want to be found next time, which hopefully is tomorrow or Thursday:)

All summer we had been talking about making this trip but it wasn`t before yesterday we actually managed to do it. We got up early and prepared our stuff, made coffee and some fresh baked sandwiches, and set off for a short drive, ready to make a bit of a stroll. We began in the bottom of a valley and our goal was a small section of the German defence system called the "Lyngen Line". The walk took us along the route where the Germans brought equipment up to the mountain using horses, reindeers, an aerial tramway they constructed, and of course slave labour. Half hour into the stroll we found the second POW camp along this route (we missed the first one by the very bottom of the valley) "Lager Mallnitz". This camp was erected towards Christmas in 1944 and held ca 160 Soviets from the Vlassov army until 16.April 1945. From then on the camp were filled up with Red Army prisoners of war from other camps, and the camp turned into hell on earth and a true extermination camp. Now it housed 272 men of which only 67 survived until the liberation, and 25 more died in the hospital through the early summer. The slaves died of starvation, sickness, medical injections, beatings and shootings, and the situation had for the prisoners become so bad that cannibalism occured.  After the liberation three massgraves were uncovered and later a fourth  was discovered and it is still unsure if there are more graves hidden in the terrain around the camp. Today there are still traces of the camp to be seen. One can see the dug outs of the earthen huts where a few ovens still stand, barbed wire being dragged up from the ground by younger birch trees and ironically some rusted food buckets can be seen in the undergrowth. We paid our respects to the ones who lost their lives here before we continued up towards the mountain.
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A bit further we walked past the remnants of Lager Gastein, another POW camp. Here one can clearly see where many of its huts stood. There is little information to find about this camp. No bodies or graves were found here after the liberation but POWs loosing their life here might have been buried in the massgraves of camp Mallnitz.
Now we were about half way to our destination and a light rain and a chilly wind came over us, but as an old Norwegian saying goes "there is always a shame to turn back" we continued up the rocky path.
When the terrain flattened out after ca two hours walk, we had in front of us two small lakes and two small hills and a wonderful view. We took cover from the wind behind a shelter built up from rocks, and had lunch and coffee before we climbed the small hill covered with the remains of German bunkers made from prefabricated wooden frames, corrugated iron and rocks. The German fighting positions on top of the hill had been replaced by Norwegian/Nato bunkers during the cold war, but it clearly showed what great difficulties any attacker would face.
In the middle of the small mountain pass we were in we found the last POW camp in this section of the Lyngen Line, Lager Kitzbühl. There is also little information to find about this camp and its prisoners but one can see the foundations of several of the POW huts. This camp was the end station for the aerial tramway so the prisoners here probably worked with dragging  equipment to different positions being constructed in the area. After the liberation the graves of 6 prisoners were uncovered and it is possible there is more of them hidden away.
We strolled around in the area for a while looking at the camp and the rusted metals and broken bottles littering the place before we realised darkness would soon fall and we had a long way down. Next year we ll get up here again earlier in the summer and then with a tent so we can spend some more time looking around as there is positions, shelters and bunkers all over the place.
We reached back to the car with the last bit of daylight, tired from a good long walk and filled with impressions of today and the dark past, and looked forward to be back home for a long shower and a big dinner :)

Enjoy the autumn my friends :)

Today was so nice weather that we decided to drop all other things we really had to do and spend the day outside instead. For all we know there will be snow next weekend so such a day needs to be taken advantage of. We packed the bags with our gear and added a thermos of coffee and a bag of food and took off towards one of the many mountains surrounding us. On place we found ourselves in an old German camp for a little relic hunt. While I roamed around with the detector, Girlfriend alternated between taking photos of bugs and fauna, and sitting in a tree reading.
My first find today was something I have found hundreds of while searching in Latvia, but only a few of here in Norway, a Soviet PPSh round. The next find was a really nice one, an empty M24 handgrenade head, one can never find enough of those, and they are easily missed if one is searching such an area as today, a place filled with food cans, as the next hours would prove. Few times have I been in forests with so many signals all over as today. The soldiers here must have been very well fed as more than 90% of what I dug today was different kind of food tins and oven parts. I did find a few other things too though, a gasmask cannister, a deactivated k98 round, and of course lots of fired and unfired ones. One signal was a compass,probably from the 80`s. I found a Wehrmacht axe, a medical tray, a couple of signal flares, one of which a brass Kriegsmarine type, a cap from a Soviet canteen and in a small dumping pit I found a bunch of medical ampoules, a few of them containing medicine against Tetanus :D 
After a coffee break and some more searching we decided to call it quits and relax the rest of the day, so we found an idyllic spot and made a fire where we cooked hot dogs for dinner while we enjoyed a spectacular view of the autumn clad mountain forest :)
​Happy autumn my friends:)