Wednesday, August 20, 2008

"Crash miles"

...or how I decided that maybe I'm not quite as bad off as I thought I might be...

So yesterday after work I took my trusty mountain bike out on the road for some more "last minute miles" before Cycle Oregon gets here. That won't be too long from now, as CO starts September 6th. Or at least check-in does. We don't actually start riding until the 7th. I've been thinking that I really need to get in some miles, and I was right, so I've been doing them on my heavy mountain bike...

Yesterday was 41.5 miles, which I actually did in about the same time as I did 35 miles last week on the same road, so maybe it's paying off. I looked at my training diary last night, and with trainer miles, CROC ride miles, a few miles on the treadmill, and my mountain bike miles, I have 956 miles for the year. I'm going to be doing some more riding on the mountain bike, so maybe I'll survive this year's Cycle Oregon after all...

A friend has told me that this year's CO is "laid back enough that you should be able to ride yourself into shape by day 5" which is the day we ride from Halfway to Wallow Lake via the backcountry. I sincerely hope he's right. Nonetheless, I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of praying along the way...

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Night shooting in Baker City

This video may not look cowboy, but for you western movie aficionados, this video will remind you of something...



So now on with the show...

Shanghai Noon, aka Clint, and I went to the Vigilantes of Virtue annual night shoot and BBQ the evening of July 26th. It was a blast in more ways than one. I of course was shooting Frontier Cartridge loads, or black powder, which made for some rather smoky scenarios, and the occasional fireball...


This gent goes by the alias of Bullett. He was making plenty of smoke with his shotgun, eh? The pictures below are of me. I think I contributed my share to the pollution...
The baby fireball in the picture below came from my Henry rifle...
But this is the cool, or should I say hot one. This is my shotgun shooting FFg Goex real black powder. Note the streamers of fire...
Shooting at night with black powder makes for some interesting pyrotechnics. A lot of the shooters were using black that night just because of the fire and smoke. It looks pretty neat under the lights...

Monday, August 11, 2008

Making up for lost time...

So here I am, almost a month down the road since my last post. How time flies when one is having fun. Let's see, since my last post I've gone to two cowboy shoots, a video cattle auction in Winnemucca, and a family reunion in Sisters, OR...

First off was the first of the cowboy shoots, which was the annual night shoot in Baker. I have some pictures to post on that one, so I'll write it separately later, even though it happened before everything else...

Then there was the video auction. Our calves sold on Thursday, so we (Cheryl, Clint, Jean, and I) drove down to Winnemucca on Wednesday. We had dinner at the Martin Hotel, which is famous for its Basque grub, and played a few machines. I think I came out about $40 or so ahead for the couple of days we were there, playing penny machines. The calves did okay on the auction. Not great, but okay...

We left Winnemucca at about 8AM on Friday, drove back to Durkee, hooked Jean's travel trailer to our pickup, and drove to Sisters, getting there about 8:20 PM. Long day...

The following Wednesday, which was, incidentally, last Wednesday, Clint and I packed up the guns, gun cart, etc. in his little car and drove to Nampa to Cheryl's cousin Bill's house. This would be our headquarters for competing in the Idaho State Championship of Cowboy Action Shooting. Neither Clint nor I have been practicing especially, so we were there more because it's fun than because we figured we'd win anything.

Thursday was the warmup match. Clint did well; I ended up somewhere in the vicinity of 56th out of 63 shooters. I think I may have beaten 2 kids and some old men and old ladies. I hoped to do better in the main match, which started on Friday. After all, hope springs eternal. However, by the time that the smoke cleared, so to speak, the springs were getting pretty wimpy. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Thursday was hot. The Black's Creek Range is in an old gravel pit. A very deep gravel pit. The sun bakes down on the gravel and with the berms there ain't a whole lot of breeze stirring there most of the time. Fortunately the sponsoring club, the Oregon Trail Rough Riders, had almost literally tons of water in coolers in the shooting bays, and folks were sucking down lots of hydration...

A video company from Nampa or Boise or one of those places had some mirrors set up so they could take videos and pictures of the shooters from the front without actually standing down range where the lead bees could buzz around their ears. It made for some interesting photo ops.
That's Clint on the left and a gentleman who goes by the name of Fernley on the right...

Thursday was also side match day. I tried my hand at long range pistol caliber rifle shooting with my 1860 Henry, but to no avail, although I did have that steel chicken standing out there at about 100 yards surrounded. It was so confused it just stood in one place and watched the bullets kick up rocks and dirt all around it...

Friday was equally as hot, if not hotter. It was also the first day of the main match. I managed to have enough of a brain fart to miss two shots at a huge and very close target on the first stage due to trying to shoot too quick, then I did the same thing on two more a couple of stages later. I am proof positive that there is no such thing as a target too big or too close to miss. I did manage to shoot the other four stages clean. Somehow...

Friday afternoon, after a nicely done lunch of burgers, beans, potato salad, cookies, and soda, was the team shoot. Shooter numbers were drawn in groups of four. Clint ended up teamed with Belinda Belle, Texas Slick Willy, and Willie Killem. I was teamed with Wogg, Kuna, and Pinto Smith. The object of the team shoot was somewhat as follows: the four team members were chained together at the ankles. The guns were staged on four tables out behind the jailhouse. The team would run outside as best they could, run to the first table, and the first person on the chain shot the rifle targets while everybody else stood behind them. Once that was done, the remaining three went to the second table, where the next person on the chain shot two pistols. The remaining two went to the next pistol table, and the next person on the chain shot two pistols. Then the last person went to the shotgun. The whole thing was pretty entertaining, except for the fact that Clint's team beat ours. And everybody else's. Clint was heard to say that "It'll probably be the only time in my life that I beat Wogg!"
That's Clint in the blue plaid shirt. He was the shotgun guy on his team and he did a dandy job of getting his 97 loaded quick and knocking down the two targets he had to shoot.

This is Clint with his trophy for the team shoot. He appears to be just tickled to death with himself, doesn't he? My team ended up fifth, quite possibly mainly because Wogg missed a shot with the pistol. We're going to blame him any way. Otherwise we would have been second. It probably would have helped if I had shot faster on the rifle targets, too, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any of them...

Saturday wasn't quite as hot as Friday, but almost. The humidity level was quite a bit higher, which made those of us who shoot Frontier Cartridge (myself) and Frontiersman (Rockhouse Ryan) quite popular with the RO/timer, the spotters, and the rest of the posse. The way I look at it is that if all and sundry are complaining about the smoke, I've accomplished at least a part of what I set out to do. Unfortunately, I had four misses on Saturday mainly due to not being able to see the targets and just firing for effect. Again unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the smoke. At least not yet. Sweet Violet is supposed to e-mail me some pictures of me shooting, and if there's any smoky ones there I'll post 'em...

So Saturday after lunch clouds moved in and a minor monsoon ensued, right during the dart throw. It actually felt good standing out there getting soaked, up until the breeze came up and I was wet enough I actually started to get a little chilled. Of course the sun came out again and took care of that...

The banquet Saturday night was good, although the drinks at the no-host bars were way overpriced. One of the high points of the evening was the fact that I ended up with a trophy for third place in Frontier Cartridge, which was totally unexpected. It turns out that I beat the fourth place guy by .63 seconds. I would have actually beaten him by more except I had 8 misses and he had none...

Over all, this was a great shoot. I was at the first one in 2005, and this one was way much better. Better organized, better presented, more interesting stuff going on, etc. It was just an all around good time...