Trashed shooting range under the gun
March 27, 2006
Trashed shooting range under the gun
By BILL McKEOWN THE GAZETTE
The U.S. Forest Service is running out of options on how to manage the Pike National Forest’s only public shooting range — an eyesore at best and often simply a pigsty.
Years of relying on shooters and volunteers to keep the unmanaged Rampart Range shooting range even halfway tidy has failed, said Frank Landis, a planner for the Pikes Peak Ranger District. That leaves just two options: find someone to operate the range as a concession or close it.
In the past, neither option was palatable for one reason or another.
The range, carved out of a west-facing hillside about 3 miles above Garden of the Gods, lies just yards off Rampart Range Road. The twisty dirt road offers stunning eastern views of Colorado Springs
and the Black Forest as it climbs west into the forest and out onto a high-mountain meadow above Woodland Park.
But the view of the shooting range — revealed by a sharp bend in the road — is something else altogether:
Thousands of paper targets blanket scrub oak trees, pines and both sides of the roadway. Mixed in are the ubiquitous beer cans and bottles, fast food sacks and cups that are dumped during busy weekends.
Appliances such as refrigerators, water heaters and computer monitors are routinely dumped at the range, soon to be pockmarked by a frenzy of bullets. A chicken-wire fence built to catch the trash has been torn down, “fragged” by shooters who hung targets on it, Landis said.
The Forest Service has given up on using signs to give guidance to those who use the range.
“You can’t even sign it,” he said. “Even the boilerplate signs we put up are shot with armor-piercing bullets.”
Landis said the occasional cleanup always reveals the extent of the problem: The agency has filled one or even two 30-yard Dumpsters at one time, with each costing $550 to empty.
Landis doesn’t try to hide his frustration: “The public hasn’t respected it. And I think if the public cannot step forward, the next recourse is to close it.”
But he’s also mindful of the law of unintended consequences; that’s how the Forest Service, in part, ended up with the mess on the bend of the road:
“I don’t know how close we are to (closing it), but we’re not there yet.”
The range and another one, at St. Peter’s Dome on Gold Camp Road, were built in 1990, in part with the help of Fort Carson. The construction came after the Forest Service, with general public support, banned the shooting of firearms along all major roads in the Pike Forest.
After the start of the first Gulf War, the Army post could not make a commitment to maintain the Rampart Range. Then, about 6 years ago, the agency closed the Peter’s Dome range because of its proximity to the city.
The surge of shooters to Rampart and the agency’s lack of money and manpower to actively manage the range led to a predictable expectation by shooters, Landis said: “They (shooters) go to expect a completely unmanaged range — ‘I can blast my old computer monitor or I can dump my washing machine.’”
“That’s obviously not the solution,” he said. “We put effort into construction (of the range), but I don’t think we understood the ramifications of maintenance 15 or 20 years ago.”
Over the years, the agency has tried to clean the range every couple of months with volunteers, although the last trash pickup at the range was before Christmas.
In 2000, the National Rifle Association started a pilot program with the Forest Service and sent out 12,000 mailers in the region, a “call to arms” to help keep the range policed, said NRA spokesman John Robbins. The Virginia-based group flew staff to a meeting in Colorado Springs, where 150 members attended and 50 volunteered outright to help maintain the range.
Landis, though, said such volunteer initiatives have always faded. When it came to “crunch time” for NRA volunteers to clean the range, for example, only 20 people showed up.
He said six or seven groups that have volunteered over the years to clean the range have given up, including one calling itself Friends of the Rampart Range.
Now, he said, he relies on Boy Scouts and Eagle Scouts and the occasional community group when he plans a cleanup.
Landis thinks the only way the range can survive is to operate it as a concession, with a private operator charging users a fee while providing an on-site manager, creating open and closed times.
Though he’s had some interest expressed in the idea when he’s advertised twice for a range concessionaire, no one has bid for the project. He thinks the fear of high liability insurance might be scaring away potential operators.
Robbins of the NRA said the group has a range-protection program that offers range operators technical information, competitive insurance from one private carrier and a technical team that visits ranges to evaluate their operation.
He said that if ranges were operated as businesses, they could be successful, although he said the group has normally worked with either private ranges or those run by state wildlife agencies.
Landis said despite the problems, his agency has been reluctant to just close the range down. Without it, he fears people will simply shoot where they want in the national forest, and the agency does not have the manpower to patrol the forest for illegal shooting.
Landis said the Forest Service will continue to clean up the range, using volunteers, and will try to do those cleanups more frequently.
“But if the problems continue to accelerate like they have the last couple years, we’ll have to consider closing the facility,” he said.
CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0197 or
bill.mckeown@gazette.com
Colorado AR-15 Shooters Club Discussion Forums
Welcome to the Colorado AR-15 Shooters Club Discussion Forums.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by PhL0aTeR
