Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage - Anais Nin

Today was Boomershoot day. We were up bright and early for breakfast and then the drive out to the range where the event is held. Talk about a beautiful drive. That could be the subject of an entire other post. It’s gorgeous country, I can’t wait to head back out to this part of Idaho for a return visit on the motorcycle.

Future plans aside, once we arrived we located our shooting position (assigned by number) and started to setup. That entailed erecting our little shelter, setting up the shooting bench, the spotting scope, etc. Around 9am we checked in with the officials to get our badges and a little later gathered together with the other shooters for the safety briefing.

You might think that an event like this involving a bunch of gun enthusiasts (“nuts” some of you might say) would be a free for all but nothing could be further from the truth. Most ranges and events are tightly managed with a focus on safety and Boomershoot is no exception. Shooting commenced around 10am and except for a few pauses and a lunch break, continued throughout the day until around 4pm or so.

The basic sequence for long distance shooting like this generally involves a team of two people. One of them, the shooter, is at the rifle. The other, the spotter (which is what I did this weekend) is observing the target and providing feedback to the shooter to get him to successfully hit the target. The shooter has a scope on the rifle, but it’s generally lower powered and while he (or she) can see the target to line up the shot, they normally don’t get enough detail at these ranges to see what they need to correct when they miss.

The spotter has a higher powered scope on a tripod and can see the “splash” of debris from a miss and provide corrections to the shooter by telling them how much to adjust their rifle scope and in which directions. Working as a team, they get the rifle dialed in and start hitting targets. Or at least that’s the theory. Mike (the shooter) was having a rough day and while we were hitting targets out past 500 yards it wasn’t going as smoothly as he would have liked.

I still had a great day though. Shot some really good photos, along with video footage that I’ll be editing together when I get home. I did upload a few more teasers on Flickr but I’ll have plenty more photos once I’m home.

Tomorrow, we’re up early again (though not quite as early as the last couple of days) to start the trek back to Seattle.

Janie’s Got A Gun by Aerosmith