Oh what a glorious day it was. Fine, mostly sunny, rain-free weather. When left the house, it was 45 degrees. When we later left the 435 shooting pit west of Darrington, WA, is was 51 degrees. In December, how remarkable. It's fairly rare for me to go out to the woods to shoot this time of year. My shooting companion, my grandson Anthony, is out of school for Christmas vacation. And being a weekday, it was likely that other shooters wouldn't be nearby. Which turned out to be true.
We took a number of guns. AR15 and the Glock 19 pistol, both of which Anthony likes to shoot. I took a Ruger Number 1 in .223 in order to get a newly mounted scope zeroed, which took a little while. Later, Anthony asked to shoot it and enjoyed it so much that he used up the rest of the .223 ammo. Given a decent bullet, the No. 1 shoots very small groups.
Anthony has asked me before about "battle rifles" so today, I took along one of the two M1 Rifles I have. This one is in .30-06. He queried me about how much did it "kick," and I explained to him that due to the gas system, the recoil isn't as much as you'd think. So he wanted to shoot it and had no problem with it. I have one of those little plastic, portable MTM green shooting benches. We were shooting the rifles off of that.
We took three shotguns. One 12 ga. pump w/ rifled barrel. This one for testing my slug loads, and with a bit of sight adjustment, I was able to hit dead nuts in the center of the target at 60 yards. I also had a 20 ga. pump and a 20 ga. single shot crack open. We took turns throwing clay birds for each other with the 20 ga. pump. Using one of those red, plastic hand throwers. The single shot I used to test fire and pattern my Number 4 Buckshot loads. Those worked fine.
We filled one of those plastic Tupperware salad tossing bowls two thirds full of centerfire brass. We turned a lot of ammo into empty cartridge cases.
After a few hours of this, we were getting hungry. So we left and stopped at the Pilot truck stop where there is an Arby's inside. We both had Waygu burgers, which hit the spot.
One thing more. If you are familiar with WA Hwy 530 east of I-5 where the Pilot station is, you may have noticed the electronic outside advertising board on the north side of 530. It lights up the countryside at night. The owner of the farm next door to the east planted dozens of trees several years ago in an attempt to block out the light. Today, I noticed that the sign company has remounted the sign higher up. I feel sorry for the neighbor who planted the trees; he was probably beside himself when he saw that work being done.
We took a number of guns. AR15 and the Glock 19 pistol, both of which Anthony likes to shoot. I took a Ruger Number 1 in .223 in order to get a newly mounted scope zeroed, which took a little while. Later, Anthony asked to shoot it and enjoyed it so much that he used up the rest of the .223 ammo. Given a decent bullet, the No. 1 shoots very small groups.
Anthony has asked me before about "battle rifles" so today, I took along one of the two M1 Rifles I have. This one is in .30-06. He queried me about how much did it "kick," and I explained to him that due to the gas system, the recoil isn't as much as you'd think. So he wanted to shoot it and had no problem with it. I have one of those little plastic, portable MTM green shooting benches. We were shooting the rifles off of that.
We took three shotguns. One 12 ga. pump w/ rifled barrel. This one for testing my slug loads, and with a bit of sight adjustment, I was able to hit dead nuts in the center of the target at 60 yards. I also had a 20 ga. pump and a 20 ga. single shot crack open. We took turns throwing clay birds for each other with the 20 ga. pump. Using one of those red, plastic hand throwers. The single shot I used to test fire and pattern my Number 4 Buckshot loads. Those worked fine.
We filled one of those plastic Tupperware salad tossing bowls two thirds full of centerfire brass. We turned a lot of ammo into empty cartridge cases.
After a few hours of this, we were getting hungry. So we left and stopped at the Pilot truck stop where there is an Arby's inside. We both had Waygu burgers, which hit the spot.
One thing more. If you are familiar with WA Hwy 530 east of I-5 where the Pilot station is, you may have noticed the electronic outside advertising board on the north side of 530. It lights up the countryside at night. The owner of the farm next door to the east planted dozens of trees several years ago in an attempt to block out the light. Today, I noticed that the sign company has remounted the sign higher up. I feel sorry for the neighbor who planted the trees; he was probably beside himself when he saw that work being done.
