is for the birds
but it was fun
Drove 1900 plus miles and a bunch of fuel to get down to a little place called Stanton, AZ, a old gold mining town that was a outlaw riddled gold mining town in 1863 that drove most law abiding people out. It now belongs to the LDMA.
I scratched a lot of dirt for taking samples for our next winters return, but found very little. Didn't expect to find much from just taking spot samples. But we had a good time.
Met up with a friend from SD and spent a great day shooting at the Rio Salado shooting complex in Mesa or Phoenix, not sure which town as a guest but it was just a short range 100 to 300 that we could shoot on, but It was great hooking up with Dick and Kristy.
I went to the Ben Avery range to see if I could shoot there but that failed because I needed to get a clearance from Steve Rhodes (sp) but I could not reach him by phone.
I wanted to shoot his match while down there but I will never shoot a match again with a new rifle and loads that never have been tested past 200 yards again, so I pulled out and headed north to Raton and spent several days on the Whittington range where I had the whole 1000 yard range and the silhouette range to my self the whole time I was there and I blasted several pounds of lead down range
I shot the .44-77 all 100 rounds knocking over the silhouettes and even banged the buffalo on the mountain side at 1128 yards using 77 grains of 1.5 KIK and the old dead guys RN 475 grain bullets using just the silver blade front sight and the Lawrence back sight.
On a low wind like I had I would not hesetate using that light weight barrel with the single trigger it has and the cressent butplate for the silhouette match. It shot great with all 100 rounds with out cleaning the bore and just using the blow tube.
At 6000 FT+ the temp ranged from 15 degs during the night to almost 70 degs one day but mostly in the mid 40's during the day.
All I can say is WOW!!! what a range and very friendly people running the complex, and all targets were free to use. Also very good RV camp less then 300 yards from the silhouette range.
The Avery range is also a very nice range but clearance is needed to shoot on it.
One night it got so cold at Stanton AZ that it froze my camper door shut
, it took a little doing to get out
It aint spose to get that cold in AZ
Sitting here in North Platt Neb after going through some pretty heavy snow in Colorado today and the camper is covered with dirty Ice.
But it's great!!!
Kurt
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I don't know where you are Jim, but this snow bird didn't fly away far enough to get away from Arizona to get away from the snow.