Spent casings litter the ground where recreational shooters congregate. Photo © Joshua Zaffos
The ground of the small gulch within Left Hand Canyon is cobbled with a colorful array of shotgun shells and gun cartridges. A hot-water heater, a VCR and other less identifiable appliances and electronics are scattered, bullet-ridden, on the slopes of the draw. On a cool April morning following a wet spring snow, the foothills of the Rockies outside Boulder, Colorado, are quiet, but the debris is ample proof of the thoughtless and sometimes dangerous gun-related shenanigans that take place in this canyon turnoff.
Catherine Luna, a U.S. Forest Service recreation planner on the Boulder Ranger District of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, surveys the site. Looking more like a landfill scavenger than a Forest Service employee, she stoops to pick through the litter. Spent casings crunch underfoot wherever she walks.
“This looks pretty good,” she says, offering a generous assessment of the debris. Luna has seen the gulch in much worse shape. A crew of volunteers—off-road vehicle (ORV) users and agency staff—cleaned up the area a few weeks earlier.
Throughout Left Hand Canyon, recreational target shooters can find several sites to practice their aim. On weekends, thirty to forty “plinkers”—shooters using informal targets such as bottles, cans or appliances—will line up in this one spot, aiming at computer screens, TVs and even mannequins, placed up and down, across and along the slopes of the gulch. Too often, shooters are cavalier with their aim or careless with cleaning up after themselves. Forest managers, including Luna, have posted rules and closures within the canyon, with dubious success.
“Signs are just targets. I have not found them to be very effective,” Luna says. “You can go just about anywhere on the district and see evidence of shooting.”
Recreational shooting has turned into a lose-lose activity on most Forest Service lands along Colorado’s Front Range. Booming population growth in and around Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins has led to a tricky management paradox: More recreational shooters are looking for places where they can practice their craft while less space is available for the activity because private ranges are closing down. Shooters are unhappy with the limited and overwhelmed sites. Other outdoors users are turned off by messes left behind by some plinkers and associate all hunters and shooters with littered beer cans, shot-up appliances and piles of spent casings.
The result is sites that have become overcrowded, trashed and hazardous for shooters and other forest users.
Left Hand Canyon became a flashpoint battleground over shooting access and impacts in the summer of 2007 when Forest Service managers in Colorado announced they were altering management of the “urban front country,” which some interpreted as a proposed recreational shooting ban. That wasn’t the case, but managers and users recognized that something needed to be done to address safety and environmental concerns associated with shooting.
Left Hand is “the poster child for some of the problems we have here, but it also depicts that we have few places to go shoot,” says Kent Ingram of the Colorado Wildlife Federation, a habitat conservation group whose membership includes hunters and anglers.
The problem isn’t unique to Colorado, but the response in the state is tapping into some cooperative energy. Last summer, federal land managers, state wildlife officials, recreation groups and hunting organizations formed the Front Range Shooting Partnership, which is now meeting to assess and solve shooting problems. Managers across the country are hoping the initiative could serve as a template for hitting the target on safe and accessible shooting on public lands.
TRADITION TURNS TO TROUBLE
Dating back to the days and ideals of Teddy Roosevelt, hunting and shooting were among the first activities that helped build a recreational connection between the public and the national forests. Forest Service rules reflect the long-standing tradition: Bullets fly on every national forest in the country, often with little supervision or oversight.
“As far as hunting opportunities, that is something that will always stay in the national forests,” says Jamie Schwartz, the Forest Service’s shooting sports liaison.
Generally, target and recreational shooting are permitted with few restrictions, despite the concerns that hikers and ORV users might have with stray bullets and zealous plinkers. Guidelines for shooters on national forests are usually a few simple dictates: Targets should be distanced 150 yards from occupied areas and other activities. Shooters should not fire weapons on and across roads or watercourses. Targets should be set in front of stands or established embankments, not on trees or natural features. Casings, targets and trash should be removed from the forest. Each rule sounds like common sense, but each is regularly ignored by careless shooters.
Some supervised ranges exist, typically operated by gun clubs under special-use permits from the Forest Service. Under the conditions of these permits, many of which were issued decades ago, club members perform regular maintenance and develop a sense of stewardship for their ranges.
But plenty of individuals prefer to go out on their own or with a few friends and fire off handguns, rifles and shotguns, a practice Schwartz calls “wildcatting.” Luna says she has seen someone firing an Uzi in Left Hand Canyon. The rise of semiautomatic and automatic weapons has added to concerns over shooting safety, particularly as the number of hikers, ORV users and bicyclists recreating on some national forests has increased.
Nationally, hunting is declining, but about 80 million Americans own at least one firearm, which, according to the National Rifle Association, is an all-time high in the country. Many gun clubs and ranges are filled to capacity.
In Southern California, the Winchester Canyon Gun Club has been in operation since 1955. Through its permit, the club manages rifle and pistol ranges, trap and skeet fields on the Los Padres National Forest. Back in the 1980s, the forest had twenty or so popular shooting areas, in addition to the club’s ranges, where dispersed and unsupervised target shooting and plinking were the norm.
“Oftentimes, [shooters were] leaving a heck of a mess,” says Erwin Ward, a retired deputy supervisor on the Los Padres, “because there was a lot of irresponsible behavior going on. And there still is. The Forest Service has had a difficult time dealing with dispersed recreation.”
People referred to various shooting areas as Sparkle Mountain because of the glaring amount of broken glass and spent brass casings, says Alan Sanders of the Los Padres chapter of the Sierra Club. Sites in high-country drainages led cartridges and other trash to flow downstream. Lead contamination was—and continues to be—a looming concern, particularly as lead poisoning contributed to the decline of the endangered California condor, Sanders says. Environmentalists, anti-gun groups and animal-rights activists also cited near misses, the pileup of debris and fire ignitions linked to sparks from bullets striking rocks as reasons for revamping shooting rules on national forests.
By the late 1990s, other national forests in Southern California began prohibiting shooting at unsupervised sites. The revised forest plan for the Los Padres dictates similar restrictions, but they have not yet been instituted.
“I’m an anti-closure kind of guy,” says Ward, who has retired from the Forest Service and is now a spokesman and a lifetime member of the Winchester Canyon Gun Club, “because it’s an admission that everything else has failed.”
In Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, a range closure around the same time angered long-time shooters, who believed the prohibition would keep extending to cover more and more public lands.
“The issue was becoming increasingly adversarial,” recalls Susan Recce, the director of conservation, wildlife and natural resources for the National Rifle Association.
In 1999, the growing tension out West led to the first cooperative sit-down among shooting advocates, hunters, wildlife conservation groups and federal agencies, including the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The group established the Public Lands Shooting Sports Roundtable to work on solutions for safe shooting access, and the partners all signed onto a memorandum of understanding to work cooperatively on finding and maintaining appropriate shooting sites. The agreement was an initial step toward recognizing an escalating issue, but its implementation at the district level has been slow, according to Recce.
SACRIFICE ZONES
The Pawnee National Grassland in northern Colorado is a wide-open expanse of arid prairie studded with cactus and cow pies. Under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, the grassland is a sleepy landscape, popular among birdwatchers. There are no designated areas for recreational shooting, but people congregate at a few places that are marred with debris and casings, similar to Left Hand Canyon.
Members of the Crow Valley Livestock Cooperative have more serious concerns than litter. The organization of permitted ranchers estimates it spends about $20,000 a year repairing and replacing shot-up fence posts, water tanks and windmills. Tom Baur, the cooperative’s treasurer, says that members have also had some close calls; in 2007, one rancher’s pickup truck took a bullet and another’s house was fired upon. “It’s gotten worse over the last few years,” Baur says.
Ranchers and other grassland users report that livestock and wildlife have become targets. Plinkers use prairie-dog colonies as firing ranges and shoot down tree snags where raptors nest, says Phil Cafaro, of the local Sierra Club chapter.
“It’s a use that tends to drive other uses off the landscape,” Cafaro says. “I think the solution is to ban recreational shooting on the Pawnee National Grassland and other public lands. It’s just like I don’t want to see you dumping oil on the public lands. That might be traditional for some people, too.”
Both Baur and Cafaro participated in a grassland working group of ranchers, scientific researchers, environmentalists and other users during 2006 to talk about curbing the renegade shooting behavior. The group recommended creating a formal shooting area for the grassland, possibly with an annual permit fee. So far, that hasn’t happened, and Cafaro questions the Forest Service’s commitment to protecting natural resources.
Walking through shooting sites on the Pawnee grassland or Left Hand Canyon brings the phrase “sacrifice zone” to mind. Not all sites are covered with a mess of spent cartridges, broken glass and abandoned trash, but the dispersed plinking has clearly gotten out of hand for both shooters’ groups and land managers.
Luna bristles at the term “sacrifice zone,” saying the agency doesn’t believe in them. But Forest Service officials in Colorado haven’t figured out how to effectively manage shooting to deter destruction and resource degradation.
When ORV riders complained of whizzing bullets in one area of Left Hand Canyon, officials closed the site, but Luna says it hasn’t stopped the hazards. The shooters who didn’t use the posted signs as targets have poured into areas elsewhere in the canyon. The displacement has caused trash and ammo shells to show up in an adjacent gulch.
Overcrowding, says Recce, “ends up pushing into sites that were never meant for that amount of use.” Hunting and shooting advocates insist that the behavioral issues stem from a lack of resources.
“Our options for recreational shooting on public lands are awful,” says Ingram. “We need more amenities. We need more shooting opportunities.”
Population growth and the emergence of the urban-wildland interface have exacerbated the problem. By one Arapaho and Roosevelt official’s estimate, about forty private shooting ranges along the Front Range have closed over the last two decades due to encroaching development. Closures have also followed complaints about safety, private-property trespass, vandalism and noise.
On the Boulder Ranger District, the development of private inholdings—backcountry cabins that have been built on parcels surrounded by national forest—has limited the number of places where people can shoot within an appropriate buffer zone.
For some environmentalists this means the public lands shouldn’t host recreational shooting, but shooting advocates say denying opportunities on public lands isn’t a solution.
“If we don’t [address the problem], we’re going to see stopping on the road and popping off wherever,” Ingram says.
AIMING FOR ANSWERS
Can a few good ranges actually curb renegade behavior? Is there a way to instill a balance of stewardship and supervision at shooting sites?
Erwin Ward, of the Winchester Canyon Gun Club, says private groups “are years ahead of the Forest Service in terms of how do you manage shooting on public lands, within the scope of the laws.” Under the guidelines developed through the national shooting-sports roundtable, the club is one of the first to create an environmental stewardship plan as part of its permit renewal. The group has also opened its ranges to the general public three days a week.
The permit application has encountered opposition from the Sierra Club and other groups. The gun club’s location includes a cultural site called Wind Cave, and Alan Sanders, Sierra Club member, refers to the site as “one of the highest quality Native American rock-art sites on the Pacific coast.” Sanders claims a less-sensitive location would be more appropriate for a shooting range.
Ward believes that clubs have shown they can safely manage their spaces, contain lead contamination and avoid the resource damage that mars too many overcrowded or under-supervised areas. The assessment might sound like a criticism of the Forest Service. But it’s also a recognition that gun clubs, hunters and shooting-sports groups may have a role in the future management on public lands, even outside of permitted ranges.
This shared responsibility is the basis of the national roundtable and formal agreements that emanated from the 1999 collaboration. Now, the model—and on-the-ground implementation of the memorandum of understanding behind the roundtable—could finally be emerging in Colorado through the Front Range Shooting Partnership.
Following the anxieties over shooting bans on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, federal and state agencies and a number of sportsmen’s groups formed the partnership to consider practical solutions to safe, environmentally sensitive and accessible shooting areas along the Front Range.
“Going through the process in Colorado is probably going to be a model to use in the future,” says Forest Service liaison Schwartz. “It’s all about partnerships, and we look at projects and overarching things...and try to provide some oversight.”
So far, the partnership has hired consultants to assess proper areas for ranges. Discussions have focused on how the matrix of public and private lands can best provide for different opportunities as well as strategies to increase education and ethics at informal and dispersed areas. Recce, of the National Rifle Association, credits the effort for being a goal-oriented, good-faith effort tackling the matter at a regional level.
People who are sitting at the table live in the local communities and close to the land-management boundaries, Recce adds. “It helps to pool and tap into more expertise than people have on their own.”
Considerations include a few super-ranges meant to accommodate large numbers of shooters, or more dispersed areas with supervision, possibly provided by local shooting groups through something like an adopt-a-site program.
“If you create a go-to place”—one that can serve skeet and target, pistol and rifle shooting, with benches and some sanitation services—“you can funnel a lot of recreation to a good site,” says Ingram. In other words, some thoughtful collaboration can create a win-win management scheme for public-lands shooting.
And for all the talk that’s gone on, land managers are still determining the wants and needs of recreational shooters. The national roundtable is conducting a survey of 1,000 recreational shooters who use public lands to find out who they are and what they look for in sites. Recce says the information will help to cater stewardship messages and hopefully instill a sense of pride in places.
One of the lessons from the Front Range partnership is that shooters—despite the perceptions of aversion to government intervention—are demanding more management, says Roger Tarum, who served on the partnership for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests before recently retiring.
The partners aren’t entirely re-inventing the wheel: All national forest users are expected to help maintain and protect the environment when agency staff are spread thin. Just as ORV riders have stepped up to participate in route-maintenance programs, education and cleanup initiatives, shooters will have to assume a level of responsibility—even for the unconscientious plinkers out there.
“I think it’s kind of unique,” Tarum says. “Any place that’s had success in getting shooting ranges, they’ve had to have a lot of cooperation.”