On Saturday, Chris & I packed up some of the rifles (a Garand, a Mosin, & a Glenfield lever action) and headed East down I-90 to go shoot in the wilderness a bit. Â We stopped at the ranger station in North Bend & asked the ranger on duty about where is good & not good to shoot. Â He tells us he’s from the Enumclaw office, so he doesn’t know much about the I-90 corridor, but he does know of a great spot outside Enumclaw. Â So we get directions, jump in the car, & head south.
We make our way to the spot (nice, 500′ hillside that had been logged recently but still had trees near the road for shooter shade), and despite the ranger’s implication that the site would probably be quiet, there was actually a lot of people there. Â The vast majority, we learned later, were all forum members of SeattleGUNS.net, a very friendly bunch who came with an assortment of guns, a willingness to share, and a desire for the day to be fun, safe, & respectful of the site.
Despite the presence of people not part of their group, they did a good job maintaining some semblance of range discipline, declaring hot & cold ranges so targets could be setup & recovered, making sure everyone was on the same page that the range was hot or cold, and at the end, handing out big black garbage bags to everyone who was willing to go cleanup as much as possible (everyone who showed up was told that a cleanup would happen & when, and a disturbing number of people packed up & left right before the scheduled cleanup time – sigh…). Â Chris & I, being former boy scouts & all around decent persons, stayed & cleaned up as much as we could (neither of us had gloves with), so we got invited to the forum.
The forum itself is primarily a Buy/Sell/Trade kind of setup, but they also hold shooting events all over the sound, so if you are looking for a group to go open shooting with out in the woods, I think you could do a lot worse than making friends with the folks on the forum.
As for our fun, Chris managed to blow the leg off one of his reactive targets, shot clean through (“The gun was pulling to the left!” Â “No Chris, you were pulling to the left.”). Â So I stood a log up on it’s end & figured I’d try to knock it down. Â Thing was seasoned & about as thick as my leg & I hit that thing multiple times, watched impact clouds form directly behind it, even saw chunks of toothpicks blast away from it. Â Never knocked it down.
Anyway, here is the forum link to the shoot we did (you’ll need to be a member to see it).
Here is where we seeded a hillside with lead & copper.
