Here are some stories about what happens in places like Bigfork and Deer Creek in Montana throughout the year. If you have read this page before, you can jump to the last part and look for "Bigfork. August. 1997" for the latest information. If you haven't read this page before, then start here.
I am a temporary resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia where, with just a couple of exceptions, our elected politicians trust their fellow citizens with firearms. Just minutes away, in Maryland and DC, that trust disappears and we see frequent examples of ignorance in action as more and more restrictions on firearms ownership and use have no other apparent effect than the continuation of high rates of violent crime. There is another part of the U.S. where firearms ownership and responsible use are considered normal, where fathers teach their sons and daughters firearms safety, shooting skills, and character all in the same afternoon. In this part of the country, you can find a cowboy action shooting, black powder, or IPSC match somewhere nearby just about every weekend. Out there, the locals don't whine much about what government should do for them. Instead of looking away, they look you in the eye. They say that where they live is "the last best place" and I agree. When they hold a shooting match, big or small, it's worth attending.
The match I look forward to each year is the Al Kimery Memorial Trophy Match in Missoula, Montana. In 1996 it was held on Sunday July 14th. People come from all over, from up north in Lake County and all the way from Spokane, Washington. A lot of the competitors are full time law enforcement officers. They're the ones trying to win the trophy. The rest of us are there for various reasons, including getting through the day without being disqualified (IPSC rules are fair, but tough), moving up from one classification to another, doing better than last time (one of my goals), and winning the overall match.
Shooting at someone's farm or at Blue Ridge near Dulles Airport in Virginia or at the NRA (indoor range) Range in Fairfax is one thing, but a real match is different. I remember in Navy boot camp the day we had our swimming test. We hadn't been near a swimming pool in at least a couple of weeks, so we marched up to the edge of the pool, jumped in the cold water and had to swim around the deep end of to pass the test. The shock of hitting that cold water is one of my many fond memories of 1968. Stepping up to the line to shoot in an IPSC match when you've not done this in awhile can be just as much of shock, as it was last year. This year, however, I was able to compete in a smaller match the day before the one in Missoula. The other match was in Bigfork, Montana, in the Swan Valley near the north end of Flathead Lake. The Bigfork match had just four stages, none of which was as complicated as some of the stages in Missoula the following day. There were fewer people in Bigfork and everybody knew just about everybody else. I figured I'd try to blend in with an Hawaiian shirt and my Gun Games Magazine cap and aside from the shirt and cap, that plan worked out pretty well. Here's a fashion tip for Bigfork: stick with caps from places like Wilson Combat or Denny's Shooters' Supply. Same for shirts. The best shirts are ones from Montana regional matches.
One of the competitors in Saturday's match was a real live elected politician. She used a Beretta Model 96 .40 S&W and did pretty well. Another competitor was my friend Jerry who retired and moved from Virginia to Montana. He was very serious about this IPSC stuff, wearing both a Gunsite cap and holster. The first stage we all shot was easy, but tricky. Imagine six IPSC targets. The two closest to you are wide apart. The next two are closer together and the two at the greatest distance are side by side. If you numbered them from left to right as 1 through 6, we had to shoot 1-5-3 then 6-2-4, moving the point of aim back and forth and in and out. This is not difficult, even shooting with one hand, but to get a decent score you need to shoot a .45 ACP or .40 S&W or a very hot .38 Super and while you're doing this the clock is running. IPSC scores are based on accuracy, speed, and power so just standing there taking careful aim is not going to win you anything.
You'll notice a good example of a mental mistake if you look at my feet in this picture. For a right handed shooter, the left foot should be forward.
Another stage did tend to reward accuracy. In this one there were a number of good guy "no shoot" targets in front of regular bad guy IPSC targets. Large areas of the high scoring zones were covered by the "no shoot" targets. Shot placement was the key to this stage.
I did a lot better on this one since it rewarded marksmanship more than speed. Here I've got the stance right and I'm just mowing down the bad guys while missing the good guys.
Another bad position, with the right arm bent. IPSC forces you to
stand in a box in situations where you might back up a little in the
real world. Regardless, this is great fun.
The next day was the big match day in Missoula. As always, we drove down from the reservation land, through the cut in the hills, and over the winding road out to the Deer Creek range. People in Montana don't use a lot of words so it's easy to communicate even if you're from out of town. Last year I was greeted with a brief hello and informed that I needed to have a safety check before I could shoot. After that I paid the match fee to Pat, the Big Sky Practical Shooting Club secretary, who noted that I was the club member who lived in Virginia. This year, I got in the first word by saying, "I'm back." Not many lengthy conversations out west. But even if it has been a year, the smiles are just as broad and the handshakes just as firm and you have not the slightest doubt that you're welcome to be there.
There was no fancy opening ceremony at the match, but we did observe an important ritual. One of the best shooters there gave the safety briefing. Nobody talks or mills around during the safety briefing. After that a fellow from the statewide shooting association talked about a fund raising match coming up. That match was to raise money to help defeat a politician who went back on his word regarding his support for firearms ownership. One stage in the upcoming match will require competitors to use a so-called "assault rifle." After the safety briefing and the reminder of what can happen when we don't carry out our obligation to keep the politicians in line, we formed up into squads. A squad is the group you shoot with all day. You take turns picking up brass, taping targets, picking up and returning magazines, and get to make new friends. My friend Jerry was in this squad and so was Pat, a master class IPSC shooter from Washington. We also had Adam, Luke, and their father and I'll have more to say about these people as this story goes along.
One of the stages at Missoula involved firing a minimum of 38 rounds at regular targets, "poppers," moving targets, and a falling plate. When you're faced with that many targets and reloads and the potential for mental mistakes it can be quite a challenge. That was the stage our squad had to deal with first. Rather than describe how I fired at least 38 shots, I'd rather make the point that IPSC shooting gives you the smallest glimpse of what it might be like to use a pistol to defend yourself. When you're faced with a complex situation, strict safety rules, a clock that's running, and a lot of peer pressure from 20 people watching your every move, the stress factor kicks in. Master class shooters miss targets. Regular people like me make dumb mistakes (you can be both safe and dumb - I've proved it more than once...) like forgetting to engage a target that was on a course book page you thought you'd memorized. After you've done some of these stages, however, the number of mental errors starts to decrease and you do build up a little self confidence and that's why IPSC shooting is so worthwhile to anyone who carries a firearm.
One of the other complex stages in Missoula required us to pick up a shotgun, pump the first round into the chamber, and fire four rounds at four separate "poppers," then open the action, put the shotgun down in a safe direction, pick up a pistol and spare ammunition, and continue with the stage. If you missed any of the first four targets, you had to shoot them with the pistol, wasting time in the process. When our squad came up to this stage several of the range officers were trying to get the club supplied shotgun to work. It had jammed and wouldn't function. Seeing as how this was out west there were no shortage of pump shotguns in cars in the parking lot so someone got another one and we were back in business. The shotgun that failed was a Winchester. The replacement which worked fine for the rest of the day was an ordinary Remington 870. Thanks to Berny Hostrop's NRA shotgun instructor training awhile back, I was able to pick up the 870, chamber the first round, then hit all four targets with the 00 buckshot loads. After showing my friend the day before how to mount a shotgun the right way, and how to work the action and so on, it would have been pretty bad if I'd missed those targets at such close range and he had hit them. We both nailed all four targets, and a lot of the other shooters missed at least one. It was a lot of fun to watch the police officers firing the shotgun. You got the impression they had received a lot of training with pump shotguns.
There was another interesting aspect of the law enforcement competitors. In order to win the trophy, they had to shoot their duty firearm and wear their regular holster, handcuff case, etc. If the officer was a detective, he had to shoot whatever he carried each day and I saw at least one S&W Third Generation semi-auto with a de-cocker. At least that fellow didn't have a thumb snap holster as an additional problem to deal with. A lot of the police officers arrived with Colt 1911 or Para Ordnance high capacity 1911 type pistols, not the sort of thing you see being carried on the beat every day. I began to suspect that there were an awful lot of SWAT team reservists there, although quite a few of the officers played it straight and did the whole match with guns like the Beretta 92 coming out of retention type holsters.
Now let me tell you about Pat from Washington. Pat shoots in the master class, the highest in IPSC. Watching him shoot is like watching a professional golfer who comes close to doing everything right every time, while the rest of us are just thrilled to do something right every once in awhile. If it took 15 seconds for an average shooter to get through a stage, Pat would do it in half that time. While the rest of us had all kinds of store bought gear to help us shoot better, Pat used what appeared to be a stock long slide Glock and two extra high capacity magazines, and even used an in the waistband holster. Watching him trade off an occasional miss for the faster time with a lot of good hits gave us a glimpse of the way to success. I watched Pat just before each stage. He was thinking through each motion to come, with slight movements and obvious concentration. When the beep tone went off after that, he just went through it again but this time firing and running. He made it look easy. It is not easy.
Jerry, my retired friend, is somewhere between my beginning skills level and earning his first qualification card as an IPSC shooter. He has the time to practice and he reloads so he can practice some more. He went to the trouble to get some very expensive custom gunsmithing work done on his Colt 1911 and wound up with a very accurate and reliable pistol for competition. He also has the Gunsite cap and Gunsite holster from Galco, but does not yet have a pair of black SWAT team pants with the big pockets and the "Colt" monogram. I suspect his shooting will improve even more after he gets these items. We shared ammunition and magazines at Sunday's match and I was stunned when his expensive gunsmithed Colt failed to fire on one of the stages. I would have offered to let him use my box stock, except for the guide rod, Colt Combat Target Model which never failed once all day, but didn't want to hurt his feelings. Jerry's gunsmith lives in Reno, and drives an expensive car.
Luke, Adam, and their dad made the day for all of us in the squad. Luke is younger than Adam. Both would be considered "juniors" in the 43rd. Their father has coached them to be safe and shoot well. Luke has a Glock 9 mm. Adam and his dad share a Glock 21 .45 ACP. "Sharing" a pistol at an IPSC match is not a simple matter either because when one person is finished, the pistol has to be cleared and returned to a range bag on the firing line. The first person steps back and the second person may remove and clear (again) the pistol while the range officer watches. On a couple of stages, Luke had to fire away at a distant plate, but never gave up until he got it. In the background his dad was saying, "Front sight, Luke. Front sight." We all cheered when the plate went down. There are a lot of screwed up kids, fathers, and families in today's world, but none of them were around the Deer Creek range in Missoula, Montana on July 14, 1996. At the very least we got to see a couple of decent kids having fun. At best, we might have seen one or two future national champion shooters. And it was great to watch the old guy range officers who had no trouble keeping up with me trying to get enough traction to follow Adam and Luke from one shooting position to the next.
A five stage match with close to 90 people shooting makes for a long day. Around the middle of the afternoon you quit worrying about appearance and start doing sensible things like pouring water over your head and not caring how wet you get. Evaporative cooling is a good thing. Our squad ended up on one of the more simple stages. There were four nearby poppers. You had to shoot all four and then do a mandatory reload. There were two paper targets farther back, and some small poppers and a final stop 8 inch stop plate maybe 50 feet downrange. It looked so simple after the 38 shot marathon we started with. I went first on that last stage. I'd rather let others shoot first and watch, but my name came up that time. All of the poppers were down, the reload and follow-up shots made and I brought the pistol back to a close-in "ready" position with my finger off the trigger. A couple of voices behind me said, "Stop plate" and I realized I had one more target I'd forgotten. The last shot at the range or the last shot of the match always rates a little more concentration and I'd almost forgotten this one. From the ready position, I extended my right arm, supported the pistol with my left hand, got the sight picture and pressed the trigger, and watched and heard the plate fall over. I think it took Luke over 10 rounds to get that stop plate and Adam didn't get it on the first shot either. What's the old saying about age and experience winning out over youth and skill? Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if they both beat me on the overall score. I had forgotten how fast kids can run.
There are IPSC matches around Virginia. If you've read this far, it means you're on the 'net and can check out the US Practical Shooting Association's Home page or the Gun Games Magazine's Home page for more information on IPSC shooting.
Also, if you weren't around on August 29, 1996, you might have missed
this sign...
This year's shooting matches in Montana began on Friday April 25th at 4 a.m. near Washington, D.C. Not all of the competitors have to be up at that hour. Everybody else gets to spend a normal Friday while I have to go to National Airport and catch the 6:45 Northwest Airbus to Minneapolis. That connects to a smaller DC-9 that stops in Great Falls before the last 26 minute leg to Missoula. This, by the way, represents the end of more than a year's boycott of Northwest Airlines due to an unfortunate incident involving luggage, Christmas Eve, and the dumbest employee in the history of commercial aviation, but that's another story.
Getting to Bigfork for Saturday's match involved more than just a lengthy plane ride. We also had to ford the flooded section of highway 35. This was the first time I ever saw the actual utility of a Jeep Cherokee, but then we don't have that much snow, or flooding either, in Virginia. I always figured the Cherokee was built so that Chrysler executives could roll in the floor laughing, get up, say to each other, "Can you believe we're selling these things for over 30 grand?" and then roll in the floor laughing some more, but that's another story, too. Oh, at this point I should put in a disclaimer because some of the people in Big Fork have found this Web page. I am not now making, nor have I ever made fun of the sensible, straightfoward pickup trucks driven by Montana residents, many of whom upon first seeing a Cherokee said things like, "What the heck is that thing?" And then later said, "You paid how much? It's a damn Jeep!"
But enough about Jerry's car.
Last year I talked about the shooting, and I'll mention that again here and there, but it may also be interesting to mention all of the other activities that go on at a match. The first thing you do is sign up. If you've been there before, and somebody remembers your havng been there, then all you have to do is pay the match fee and fill out a form. Then you get several sheets of paper. Each of these sheets has information on a particular stage. If the stage is an official USPSA qualifier stage, it will be a standard form used everywhere USPSA matches are held. If it's a local stage, there's no telling what the form may look like except that there is almost always a diagram of the targets, the shooting positions, and other details you tend to forget as soon as the timer beeps. If you haven't been there before, you get to fill out the form and take a safety check.
Since I'm not a member of the Bigfork club, I have to pay the visitor's match fee which is more than what a member pays. I figure if I join the club and manage to shoot one match per year, in six years I'll have saved enough money to pay the first year's membership. I'm still working the math on this one.
Once you have the forms, you take them to the first stage you want to shoot, and give the form for that stage to whomever is holding a clipboard. When it's your turn to shoot, you step into the "box" and the range officer asks if you understand the course of fire. If you say yes it often means you've forgotten everything on the sheet, but think you might remember most of what the last person just did. The next step is for the range officer say, "Load and make ready." Now you load the pistol, engage the safety, and put the pistol back in the holster. Once your hand touches the pistol, the rules get very strict. The range officer will then ask if you're ready. If not, you say, "no" out loud. If you don't say anything, that means you're ready. When the timer beeps, you can draw and shoot.
The real value of practical shooting is that you're under a lot of pressure from several directions. The first pressure comes from the strict safety rules. This past weekend I saw two people disqualified, both at Missoula. One shooter had a jam and tried to clear it. That's ok, but he had his trigger finger inside the trigger guard and that's an automatic "DQ." The second disqualification came from a shooter "sweeping" his non-shooting hand. "Sweeping" means he pointed the muzzle at his other hand. That violates the NRA's "Golden Rule" and IPSC rules. Both people were told what they had done wrong, and there's a good chance they won't make those mistakes again.
When the beep goes off, you draw, take the safety off, put the front sight on the first target and try to complete the stage without any mistakes. Depending on who is shooting, you can learn an awful lot by watching other people. At any match there will be absolute beginners, and one or two master shooters. One thing I've learned is that money spent on pistols does not equate to reliability. Many of the very fancy, very expensive pistols will fire a few shots and then stop. I don't know about others, but if I have a pistol that jams and I can't identify the problem (a bad magazine is the most frequent cause of jamming), then that pistol doesn't stay in the inventory. One way to minimize match reliability problems is to take the pistol barrel out and drop each round to be used into the chamber. Rounds that fit go to the match. Rounds that don't, don't go to the match. Another way to avoid reliabilty problems is to buy good magazines. I haven't been shooting all that long, but I do know that there is no such thing as a bargain magazine.
Everybody seemed to have a great time at Big Fork on Saturday. I have no idea how well I did, and will find out when the score sheets arrive in the mail back in Virginia (the term "back in Virginia" is a clue that I'm writing this while still on the west coast).
Sunday there was another match, this time in Missoula. The weather on Saturday was great, but on Sunday we had a cold, soaking, drenching, rain. Things that work well in clear weather don't work as well in a cold rain. Each stage at Missoula was a qualifier, so all the scores go to the big USPSA computer somewhere in Washington. The rain was so bad that the tape used to cover holes in targets wouldn't stick very well to the targets, and targets had to be changed often. Since IPSC shooting is more mental than physical, it wasn't a lot of fun to be all psych'd up to shoot next and then be told to wait until targets could be changed. I realize this builds character, but it's still a nuisance.
I guess there are different aspects in different sports that some individuals like more than others. For the younger shooters, some of whom are runners, the idea of running between separated shooting boxes must be very appealing. For us old guys, the idea of standing in one place and hosing down the area with as many bullets as possible - all without running anywhere - is more fun. One of the Missoula stages was just perfect for the standing still crowd. This was a "speed shoot" where you had to start from four positions (you never have enough magazines...) and fire two shots each at four targets as fast as possible. The start positions varied the direction and amount of turning you had to do before shooting, but once you had the targets in sight it was a speed contest. I liked this stage a lot because it was a little bit like what you might encounter in the real world: multiple targets at short distances with speed and accuracy being the winning factors. Success on a stage like this is based on three things: practice, practice, practice. It was not like the "El Presidente" because no reloads were required while you were being timed. In the real world, reloads aren't needed that often either. If you have ten rounds and four targets, that should be more than enough ammunition.
In engineering, when a project is over, you make up a list of "lessons learned." It seems like a good thing to do after an IPSC match as well. This past weekend, I learned a few more lessons. Here are some of them. Check magazines ahead of time. I shot a Browning Hi-Power .40 S&W both days. I had three Browning magazines with base pads. These were in excellent mechanical condition, stainless steel, ready to go. I had one more magazine, a borrowed "Pro Mag" (borrowed from a Jeep Cherokee owner...) that I planned to use to drop the hammer on the Browning (which still has its magazine disconnector intact). On one stage at Bigfork, I decided to shoot the last string with the borrowed magazine. Bad idea. Real bad idea. It jammed three times.
Another lesson learned is to bring a holster if you think you're going to need one. I planned to shoot the Browning on Saturday and a Glock 21 on Sunday, but didn't have a decent holster for the Glock. I ordered a belt slide holster from Dillon, but found out too late that it won't stay open for re-holstering. None of my 1911/Browning holsters came close to fitting the Glock. On Sunday at Missoula, I noticed one of the better shooters had a Glock 20 with a Safariland holster. Sure wish I had one of those, or maybe the 007 or 010 models I saw later on the Internet. The Browning did ok, but I had wanted to shoot the Glock in one of the matches.
The next lesson had to do with vision. In all the excitement of thinking about flying to Montana, I forgot to bring my spare pair of reading glasses. That wouldn't have been so bad, but I also forgot to bring the other pair, too. As soon as I got to the Missoula airport, I opened the yellow pages to the ads for optical places and copied down the phone number that I could still read, and went there for an exam late that afternoon. After talking to the doctor, I decided to get a pair of "distance" glasses. That was a first. Up until now I've just had reading glasses. Yes,I know this paragraph is very boring so far, but be patient. It gets better. These glasses weren't ready until Saturday afternoon. I wore them to the Sunday match in Missoula and could see the front sight pretty well, but was still a little bit uncertain as to how long it would take to get used to these glasses. By Monday afternoon I was getting concerned that I was doing something wrong, because the glasses didn't seem to help much and in some instances made things look worse. Having worked with scientists and engineers a lot, I asked myself what a scientist, many of whom wear glasses, would do in this situation. My first thought was that a scientist would ask for a government grant to study the problem, but that seemed like an extreme position to take - plus I wanted the problem resolved in hours rather than months. Then I realized that a scientist would perform an experiment of some sort, so I took off the glasses, turned them upside down, and put them back on. The sign I was staring at started to look normal. This is what people in law enforcement call a "clue."
I drove over to a local optical shop and they checked the prescription and, sure enough, the lenses were on the wrong sides. If you are going to wear prescription glasses to a shooting match, or anywhere else for that matter, you might want to be sure the prescription is right and on the right sides. I was very lucky to have purchased a pair of these stupid looking trendy round glasses so fixing the problem required just a small screwdriver and a couple of minutes. Later, I took out the Glock and Browning and now I can see the sights even better than before. I'm going to write to the local optical shop in Missoula and tell them that my chances at a professional IPSC shooting career ("Randy Beats Rob for National Title, Takes Home First $1,000,000 Match Prize") were ruined on Sunday in the rain at Missoula. I don't want the people in the lab to be fired, just yelled at for maybe a half hour or so.
Another lesson had to do with wearing or bringing the right clothes to a rain soaked shooting match. When we got there, the rain was just annoying. By the time it came our turns to shoot the speed stage, the rain had reached catastrophic proportions. I thought we were getting close to having the range officer stand under an umbrella ten feet away from the shooter and yelling things like "Good luck!" or "Be careful!" instead of "Are you ready?" As it turns out, there aren't that many right clothes for this kind of stormy weather. Having a dry set of socks in the car for later is an excellent idea. Having a cap that keeps the rain off of your reversed prescription glasses is also good.
Check this page every once in awhile. I may think of something else after my head stops hurting. Until I got the glasses straightened out, I ran into a few walls and doors. I also ran into a parked Buick station wagon in the lot of the 4Bs restaurant in Polson. It could have been much, much worse. I could have tripped and slid under a Jeep Cherokee.
It's mid-July in 1997 now, and this story continues. The 1997 Al Kimery Memorial Trophy Match is over for this year. I checked the list of names for the match and there were 60 people signed up. Of those, 8 were from the law enforcement community, 5 were women, and 2 were junior shooters. In past years, we were assigned to squads. This year, everyone went from one stage to another stage with the smallest number of people waiting. This is like the post office or the bank where you queue up and go to the next available window and it works. We were finished with all of the stages much sooner than last year. Granted, there were fewer people at this year's match, but the stages still moved along faster.
This year I brought two guns to Montana, a Glock 20 and Glock 21. The Model 20 has Aro-Tek ghost ring sights and the Model 21 has conventional, adjustable sights. The Model 20 just got back from the Glock shop in Georgia so I had some confidence it was all checked out and ready to go. The .45 was in good shape, too, so it came down to a matter of the ghost ring sights and I opted to shoot the Model 20 (10 mm) in the match. With "medium velocity" 10 mm ammunition, this was the same as shooting .40 S&W. The larger frame of the Model 20 made this a very easy experience.
With luck, there may be additional opportunities to shoot at Big Fork
and Deer Creek this year.
Bigfork. August 1997.
And, with luck, there was an additional opportunity to shoot on August 23rd at Big Fork, a five stage match on a perfect summer day. Getting to this match was a little easier than getting to the July match in Missoula. For one thing, I didn't have go as far. I was already in Idaho so all I had to do was drive to Missoula, buy the lowest priced 10 mm ammunition available at Bob Ward's sports store, and then arrive at the Bigfork Rod & Gun Club range by 10 a.m. Saturday morning.
Getting up to Missoula from Idaho Falls doesn't take as long as it used to. The speed limit on I-15 in Idaho is 75 mph. When you reach Montana, the daytime speed limit is "Reasonable and Prudent." Since I had a brand new rental car, with the accompanying moral obligation to break in the engine for others who would rent the car later, I decided to maintain steady speeds for the 300 or so miles between Idaho Falls and Missoula. At no time did I go faster than one hundred thirteen miles per hour. Just kidding. In reality, it is difficult and very tiring to drive at high speeds for several hours. On the road from Monida Pass, at the Idaho Montana border, to the intersection with I-90 near Butte, there are a couple of places where taking curves at 85 miles per hour is neither reasonable nor prudent. The same is true for several sections of I-90 between Deer Lodge and Missoula. For the rest of the journey, however, it is great fun to move right along at a reasonable high speed. Montana may set a numerical speed limit next year, because there have been more fatal accidents since the new speed limit went into effect. My theory is that the accidents are caused by people from out of state who have no business in a car in the first place. Anyway, if you are going to drive fast on I-90, I can think of no better place to do it than between Butte and Deer Lodge.
The drive from Missoula to Bigfork is a lot slower, but more scenic ("scenic" is relative in Montana, where the scenery ranges from an "8" where you can still see parts of Idaho to "9-10" everywhere else). Highway 93 is a very dangerous two lane road frequented by tourists on the way north from Missoula to Glacier Park. Just south of Polson, at the south end of Flathead Lake, you have to get off 93 and follow the signs to Big Fork. This road takes you around the east side of the lake, through cherry orchards planted on the rocky hillsides. You turn at the sign to Swan Lake. Why anybody would name a nice Montana Lake after a wimpy ballet is, and should remain, a mystery. The next sign to look for says "Bigfork Rod and Gun Club." A few more turns on a road through the trees and you're at the range.
One of the first people you see at a Big Fork match is Crow Carter. Crow signs up the participants, and runs the match.
He even gets to shoot.
The August 23rd match had five stages, including three that could be
shot from one position and two that required some movement between
shooting positions. This is a wide angle look at the range setup.
Here's a picture of Andy as the range officer and one of the shooters
getting ready to reload and move to the next shooting position.
Jan is shooting a Glock 9 mm from behind a barricade.
Jan has moved to the next position and is shooting through a narrow
opening at multiple targets. Jerry is the range officer.
Joe is the range officer on a tricky stage where you had to start
from a kneeling position facing away from the target, then turn,
draw, and shoot.
Gina shoots a fancy race gun with her weak hand.
Gina is in the middle of a fast reload. Her left hand is a blur. One
magazine is dropping away from the gun and she is reaching for the
spare magazine to reload.
Crow shoots. Andy RO's the stage.
Brent shoots his USP .45.
Frank is the RO. Jan is scoring. Mike was the shooter. I am either
confused or getting ready to tape the targets.
Jerry is practicing his anti-grizzly pepper spray moves on Tracy.
Before today's match, I had to buy a cap because I forgot to bring
one. I decided I wouldn't spend more than $10 for a cap. All the
stores in Missoula had those fancy $17 caps like Tiger Woods wears.
Just as I was about to give up, I found a blue S&W cap for $9.99
(and no sales tax in Montana!). At the match I met two others, Brent
and Dave, with the same cap. Today we were "Team Smith and
Wesson" at Bigfork.
This is a picture of the essence of IPSC shooting: Weaver stance,
front sight on target, shooting to win.
For more information on IPSC, take a look at the Big Sky Practical Shooting Club's Web Site. For more information on shooting sports in Montana, check out the Montana Shooting Sports Association's Web site.