The last few days me and Girlfriend have been roaming around in the forests a bit. We have done a few recce trips to check out if rumors about some German camps held water, we`ve been doing some metal detecting and today we were out putting up an insect trap for her work, and found something interesting,,more about that further down on the page :)
Yesterday began with a visit to the doctor as I ve gotten some inflamation in the legs after working on concrete floors the last weeks, old age creeping up on me I guess,,but, walking in forest and uneven terrain should be a good medicine apparently, so I rushed back home with the good tidings and off we went to the forest, loaded up with detector, coffee, food and insect hunting gear. We plotted the coordinates on the autopilot in the car, leaned back and relaxed our way to the German camp where we earlier had discovered the field hospital barrack.
For a bit more than an hour I went around with the detector trying to find some good signals but the area is covered with not only metals but some rocky mineral that gives of very good signals, so the hunt soon turned towards frustration after digging the sixtyseventh hotrock.
Luck started to turn when I found a small patch with lots of rifle casings, and when Girlfriend a few meter away said "I think this might be a dumping pit, it is metal sticking out of the ground here!", I knew what I was going to do the next couple of hours.The pit was about two meter long and ca half meter wide, and the top of it had typically been filled with large rocks. As soon as I had gotten the rocks away, and could see relics starting to pop out I sliced one of my middle fingers on a broken glass, it seems to have become a thing for me that now :)
With a fresh Hello Kitty bandaid, and new gloves, I went back to it and continued digging out sharp and jagged shards of glass and the occasional piece of metal. After a while more and more metal began showing up. It was also clear now that the pit had been set on fire as it was lots of blackened bits and melted blobs of glass and aluminum.
A few hours in I took a break and we went to the car to pick up the food, and while I continued making the pile of relics bigger, the Bug Hunter cooked us some tomato soup and adding some mosquito proteins to it. It was delish, and with a hot cup of coffee after dinner I was fueled and ready to take on the rest of the dumping pit. At one point I felt a roundish object and after ruling out it being a rock it could only be two things, a pee pot or a helmet, and I was a big smile when I pulled out the latter. One of the last finds was also very exciting. A closed medical metal box with something inside it, as it was getting late we decided to try open it once home.
In the end I spent 4-5 hours searching through it and between a ton of rubbish there were quite a few nice relics worth bringing home. In the pile was a nice Wehrmacht razor, several medical tools and bottles, enamelled pots and plates, some gaming pieces, a lighter, a Gebirgsjäger boot, a canteen and three different canteen cups, plus lots of other items.
Back home we opened the medical box and inside it were a couple of scissors, scalpel handles, a plier, a piece of bandage and several syringe needles, alll in quite good condition,,a nice find and it was very exciting to open it of course!
The next morning we slept a bit longer than usual as it had been a long day in the forest, and after breakfast we went into one of the valleys to put up an insect trap for the Girlfriends work. In this area it had been very much German activity as the famous Lyngen line went through the valleys and mountains here. Next to the parking lot we saw some rusted gate looking thing in the forest. Of course I was on my way over before Girlfriend managed to stop me and in a small clearing there were tons of metal laying around. Bits from engines and vehicle parts, ovens and parts of a field haubitze, buckets, jerry cans and whatnot, splayed out across the forest floor! That was spectacular. But we had another mission planned for today so we went ahead into the valley where thirsty mosquitoes big as birds were waiting for us...
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