Five Fantastic Finds
- Inka
- Jun 28
- 4 min read
I have just been showered and fed after having hunted for treasures the whole morning, but I can still feel the flies and bugs all over me. They were busy out there today! I guess the weather alternating every other day between scorching sun and weather like something from the Great Flood story is good times for the insects. Which of course is great for nature, but it can be perceived as `challenging` when standing inside the black bulb of bugs that hums and buzzes like busy traffic, and constantly goes after any bare skin.
And naturally when you lift the mosquito net to drink some water you trap a good chunck of bugs together with you inside the netting. Which excites the bugs even more. One nearly considers running off a cliff sometimes.
The first hunt early on in the week it was raining so the insides of my car is still muddy from that. I went to check the site of the last dumping pit I dug last season, where I found the silver frame from an Iron Cross. After a thorough scan of the woods around I had only picked up a Norwegian 5 Øre coin from 1941.
With the pinpointer I checked the edges of the dumping pit and found nothing but a couple of items. A pocket watch, a pair of `Maskenbrillen`; glasses for wearing under the gasmask, a horse from a chess game and a plutonium green plastic thimble.
One of the following days I went to search a little bit in a gebirgsjäger camp. Then the sun was out and I first noticed the increased population of insects. At one point I felt like I was wearing the stereotypical Australian outback hat with all those hooks and corks hanging from the brim, just that mine were birchlarvas ( Operophtera brumata ).
Between good signals which were not so interesting items and straight up garbage some pure gems were dug up from their hideouts. Ca twenty centimeters below ground I found an interesting machinepistol drum magazine. It kinda looks like a PPSh mag, but with a neck. Im not familiar with it so until someone lets me know I am guessing it is Finnish.
A little bit later the detector presented me with another strong and good signal. I cut open a piece of the ground and made eyecontact with half of an Erkennunksmarke. That was a surprise! It was dirty and looked a bit deteriorated so I couldn`t read it other than that I could spell `Geb`.
I stuck the pinpointer into the ground and scared up two whole tags! And these ones were easily readable: " INF. PZ. ABW. ERS. KP. 3 " and " 9. / G.J.R. 141 ". There were marks of flames and heat on the tags, so I wonder if they had been burnt together with Soldbuchs, coz there were a few bits of charred paper with them.
Now I roamed around after similar signals, but there were nawt but food tins, until a strong iron signal grabbed my attention. From the ground I pulled the magazine for a Luger, and a small piece of wood with a diamond cut grip.. Surely the mag alone wouldn`t give such a strong signal, so I scraped away some sand and beheld the iconic shape of every film-nazis favorite pistol; the Luger!
I was mildly in shock. What a fun thing to find. I had never imagined I would.
It looked like it had been wrapped in a piece of cloth, and what I thought was part of a holster was actually just a piece of asphalt paper from the barracks roof. On one side the wooden grip had rotted away, but the other side was intact.
When I was done taking pics and playing with it I naturally placed it back for the next digger to get a rush from it.
Today the GirlfriendWife joined for the expedition, but she took a stroll towards the mountain while I hunted aluminum and zink signals.
The hours flew by but I had only picked up a coin, and two blank EKMs, and had seen lots of old trash.
At times the buzz from the ever growing black bulb around my head made it difficult to distinguish signals from the metal detector, but next to a birchtree I had no doubt where the aluminum signal was coming from. It was weak, but clear and it was another EKM. It was a bit eaten by time but I could see it was a gebirgsjäger tag from Regiment 139! Wild.
A little after lunchtime when I met up with GirlfriendWife at our basecamp the only other thing I had found was a lump of melted aluminum. Probably it had been a whole lot of nice tags and belt buckles.
We tried to eat our lunch without getting too much extra proteins added and enjoyed a nice stroll back to the "civilization" while airing plans and ideas for other expeditions.
The finds this week were few but great and I hope I ll be back out there very soon, but the weather report for the coming week is not promising. So maybe I`ll finally get time for working on other projects.
Thanks for reading and until next time, Keep Smiling.
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