The rest of the weekend was spent making tea from the plants she had collected. When it had dried we weighed it to alittle more than a kilo and the tea is now curing on glass jars, and I am looking forward to have a cup when it is ready. We also launched a small raid on the strawberry field.
After she left yesterday morning I went back up to the mountain to continue the search in the Gebirgsjäger camp. I had very little luck. I brought home a handfull of k98 casings and two medical ampoules. After searching many hours I finally had a massive signal stretching for about a meter long and half meter wide. It turned out it was a dumping pit for horseshoes. Small and big, new and worn thin. Nearby I had found what probably was the camp kitchen so I wonder if these horses who had worn the shoes had become dinner for hungry troops. In the afternoon I still hadn`t found anything interesting so I enjoyed the nice weather for a while, just sitting by a tree eating blueberries I could grab from around me.
Today I decided to go to a huge dumping pit I still hadn`t finished from last season. I have gotten many good finds from it so I was pleased to see that nobody else had found it, which is kinda strange as I know of at least one other digger searching this camp. I started from where I had left off. It was just lifting away the top vegetation and begin moving sand. Very soon the first bottles, wires and food tins got removed and I could see the edge of a porcelain plate. I pulled out three plates but only one was intact. It had no German markings, just the Norwegian producers logo. The next find was a fork, and two large buckets that I spent a lot of time on getting out of the way. It was two items behind the buckets. I thought it was a speedometer at first but it is some other kind of meter which look like it could fit to a cars dashboard. The other item was made of porcelain. I moved away some sand and saw it was a coffee cup. But would it be intact, and would it have markings? Exciting. I got it loose and it was a intact Luftwaffe cup! Awesome! Last season I found a Heer cup here. I wonder if there is a SS cup in the other corner :D
Bottles kept pouring out like it was a glass recycling station I was digging. Mostly it was small perfume- and ink bottles with the occasional wine bottle in between. I spent another hour digging around a big mess of wires to get the bundle free and out of the way, it was really annoying but I was rewarded with two bakelite boxes. One small for powder charge for Gebirgs Geschutz and a larger for a field artillery gun. A small porcelain lighter and a roller date stamp was also rescued from time and deterioration. The date on the stamp said 22. Nov 1946.
I found the bottom of the section I was digging and picked up some rubbery material. Attached to its underside was a medal!! The Eastern Front medal, "the order of the frozen flesh" as it was called. It looked to be in decent condition, for sure far better than the last one I found. Some plastic foil turned out to be a car pennant when I got the sand brushed off it. Too bad it was completely destroyed, it would have been a cool thing to have in the collection. Behind a bunch of the remains of field telephone headsets was a porcelain bowl. Intact but again only Norwegian markings on it. And behind that again was a drinking glass and a few gaming pieces.
But now it began raining. At first I just continued digging as I hoped it would just be a quick shower. It didn`t stop. It just grew stronger and wetter. It was time to fill the treasures into the backpack and get home. Seems it would have been the end today anyway because I could barely close the backpack it was so full :D
I cleaned up the dig site so it looked nice but I think I might go back there tomorrow if the rain stops :)