Memorial Day, Acme shooting Trip - After Action Report
Great shooting up at Acme today. We had three all together, my buddy that lives near me dropped out last minute. From the Hide we had myself, Steveptr, and Sacshooter come out. We were able to get an early start on the day and despite the I-5 Skaggit river bridge being down, we made our time marks and were able to get out there a little after 9:00AM. Interesting story on the drive up. As we started up the forest service road, we encountered a Sherrif deputy in his car headed back down the hill and he stopped in front of us so we couldn't go up. So we stopped and just waited for him to get out of his car and approach. We were beginning to wonder what the deal was and if there was going to be some problem. He asked us where we were going and for what purpose and if the truck behind us was part of group. We mentioned to him we were going to do some rifle shooting and motioned to our gear in my truck and he said there might be a problem because the road was temporarily blocked. Through the course of the conversation he mentioned a fellow committed suicide by gunshot on the side of the road up a ways and that they were still processing the scene and didn't want cars driving through. He asked us where we were coming from and we mentioned Seattle and sout of Seattle and he was quite surprised we drove that far. He ended getting on the radio and was able to get approval to have us drive past the scene while they covered the car with a tarp so we wouldn't have to see it. I thought that was pretty cool of this deputy to help us out that way, so we ended up only having to wait about 10 minutes before we continued up the mountain road. The scene of this incident was about 100 yards south of normal shooting spot, right on the side of the road.
We decided to continue straight around the bend and start setting up the steel targets. We saw BigWheels targets out there near the normal places and ended borrowing one for the day, and I placed up two IPSC 66% targets at 750 Yards. By the way, I know about not setting up targets on the Y in the path and we placed the targets in the normal impact areas with the dirt birms in the back. We noticed while we were out there someone had cut down hundreds of small sapling trees which became an effective obstacle to easily walking from the road to the target impact areas. Next time we get a work party out there we have some work to do to clear a small walk way and also cut back the growth like we did last summer.
Next we came back down the road about half way and setup two 8" plates on posts (estimating at about 400-500 yards). It took us a good 20 minutes to walk these in far enough away from the road and trying to find a high elevation spot so we could see them from the shooting position. Ended up that when we got back to the shooting position and both of these targets were completely obscured because there is a small rise in the terrain and so - lesson learned here was that entire area is not useable for placing targets.
Finally we came back to the shooting position and we grabbed 4" round plates with hangars and walked the plates out to following distances, 82 yards, 120 yards, 175 yards, 220 yards. by 10:30 we were all setup and began to get our gear unloaded so we could start shooting. Luckily the weather cooperated early in the day. Cross winds were averaging about 2MPH and it was raining an almost impercetable mist. We got our environmentals and recalced our ballistics and started to send lead down range. Due to the light rain coming down, it began to be tough to spot bullet splash because there was no dust being kicked up. Regardless, we all had the steel targets singing. I believe Steve and I exhausted the ammo we brought and Sacshooter still had some rounds left, but the rain was starting to come down a little harder so we decided to go ahead and pack it up and retrieve our targets around 1:00pm. Even though it rained today, we weren't the only people out there shooting. We encountered someone using the small pit doing some plinking today. Also a number of people were out on their 4 wheelers and motorcycles.
Afterwards we got all packed up and were ready to head back to town, Sacshooter graciously offered to take our small group out to lunch so we drove back to Sedro-Woolley and spent a couple of hours talking guns, politics, and work while eating our sandwiches. Defintely a good time. I look forward to the next outing.