I had a couple of long days at work this week but also a few longer days searching the forests, so it was good that today was "hammock-day" with sun and warm weather.
Tuesday morning, around 09 I was in the gebirgsjäger camp covering myself in bugspray, getting ready for some walking and digging. The conditions were perfect and the mosquitoes kept their distance.
At first I walked into a cluster of signals all of which stemmed from a crushed cast iron oven, and some meters away I found a lot of horseshoes and horsebrushes. After another couple of great signals that turned out to be rubbish I found myself zigzagging down a slope when a not so good signal caused me to stop and investigate it.
Directly from below the web of roots under some small blueberry bushes I pulled a leather holster for a gun. It was heavy but because it was so small I decided it had to be a very well made toygun from back in the days when stuff had some quality to it.
I opened the holster and lured the metal piece out of it and could immediately tell that it was definitely not a toy! It was a very nice and small Baby Walther. I was absolutely over the moon having found this rusted little diamond!!
Hours went by and all the following iron signals had been checked, and the other signals too, but no more very interesting bits found.
From under a pine I dug up a truppenfahrrad lamp and together with it an orange plastic butter dish. In a burn pit I found the metal corners from a suitcase and a shotglass made from a signal flare, everything else had been melted and went up in flames.
Blobs of aluminum made me fantasize about piles of edelweiss badges being devoured by the fire.
The day had almost passed, and I had circeled my way back to the car when yet again a signal from the Fisher and the weight from the rust filled backpack had me down on the ground. I cut open the ground and saw a beltbuckle!! It was a steel Heer buckle, but not in terrible condition as they often are. I bet this one will show some paint after cleaning. Finally I dug up a full gasmask canister, a motorcycle footrest and a tool to check the viscosity of oil.
Video of the find:
On Friday it was time to go meet Baard again. His holiday had begun so he drags his family to their summerhouse in the north, and then abandons them to go searching the forests. I drove there early morning and we met up close to a Heer/Gebirgsjäger camp in his neighbourhood.
We searched this place last summer, but there are still much more to be discovered. The place looked different since large parts of the birchforest had been cut, but that made it easier to sense the layout of the camp. Baard disappeared towards the mountainside while I decided to check out the area surrounding an MG bunker on top of a hill.
Behind the bunker were lots of good signals and one of them led me to find a large burn pit. Carefully I went through it over the next couple of hours, while the weather around me changed between rainy and cloudy, to blue sky and blistering sun.
When I took a break for food and coffee I saw Baard had been at our basecamp and dropped off finds, so I tried to call and shout for him but there were no response so I went back to work on top of the hill.
In my pile of finds were now lots of food tins and french toothpowder tins, a couple of Rosodont boxes, an aluminum Göffel and lots of gaming pieces. I found a wallet and several coins from Finland, Norway, Denmark and Germany, a silver or prehaps nickle coated bracelet chain, bottles, toothbrushes, a small bakelite cup and even a cloth Obergefreiter chevron.
When that pit was done Baard was back from his roaming and went on to dig up a nice P38 magazine filled with post war nato plastic excersise ammo. I began digging another small dumping pit which were partly blocked by some barbed wire, so we need to get back at some point armed with the wire cutter. But on the sides of the wire I found a few coins and gaming pieces and a pair of ski goggles.
Baard was also opening up a dump, but it was mainly filled with scrap and some packets of k98 ammo. Of course he broke them all open and made a pile of the gunpowder on his shovel and it became a nice"Gagarin" when the moist powder finally caught fire. When he was filling back the soil he scored the find of the day. A silver ring! It looked well made and had a name engraved on the inside.
Evening was approaching so we did a few last sweeps with the detectors and decided there is still much more to be found in the camp. But we have another interesting place to check on our next expedition soon :)
Thanks for reading. Keep Smiling :)
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