MY TURN: Respect the gun and respect the place

Many years ago, we sent our daughter off to the summer Girl Scout camp Four Echoes on Lake Coeur d’Alene’s Windy Bay, which was a rite of passage for many children on the cusp of becoming teens. She gained the experience of being separated for a week from family with a group of individuals previously unknown to her. She gained the experience of a foreign environment, the self-confidence nurtured by swimming across Windy Bay and back and the experience of teamwork in an extended canoe trip down the lake and up the lower St. Joe. 

Like they all do at that age, the young girl grew into a woman and eventually became a college educator and bore two sons, one now a teen and the other on its cusp.

The youngest is a now a Boy Scout bound in just a few weeks for the venerable Camp Easton on the lake’s east shore. Among the merit badges he will be pursuing is one in the use of firearms. This will be the boy’s first experience with firearms and one that we trust will instruct him on the care and respect necessary to handle these devices of lethal force. 

After camp, the whole family will decamp with us for a week. If the interest in firearms remains strong for him, his father and I will take him out to shoot a 22-caliber rifle purchased by his great grandfather in the early 1930s and a much later, 20 gauge shotgun. The Hayden Creek Gun Range is the closest to our home, but we will not be taking him there. Since I am not a member of the Fernan Rod and Gun Club, we will drive north to the range at Farragut State Park.

The prejudice against the Hayden Creek Range stems from that care and respect for the handling of a gun and shooting range that we want to instill. A quick inspection of the Hayden Creek Range is all that is necessary to assess that no such care and respect abides in many of the people using the area for target shooting. Typically, the shot-up litter of their targets (paper and often other materials, including appliances) is strewn across the gun range. The firing line along the road’s edge is littered with shell brass and expended shotgun cartridges. 

Clearly there is no respect for the environment practiced by many using this range. A youngster learning proper gun use should not be exposed to this type of behavior by any responsible parent or grandparent.

The Hayden Creek Range stands starkly apart from its counterpart outdoor ranges at Farragut and Fernan. Stand in the parking lot above and look down on the Farragut Range, you will see no litter from targets nor brass or expended cartridges along the firing line. Shooting has been practiced on this range since men bound for the war in the Pacific (including the boy’s great grandfather) practiced their marksmanship in the early and mid-1940s. 

Stand along Fernan Road above the Fernan Gun Range and a similar clean well-managed view is apparent. The big difference is that the Fernan Range, located on Forest Service managed land, is under an agreement between the Fernan Rod and Gun Club and the Forest Service that assures the area is managed to dispose of the shooting debris you can see and the lead residue you cannot. Similarly, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game manages the Farragut Range to ensure similar results. Yet nobody is responsible for the shooting activity at the Hayden Creek Range. 

Over a 30-year period, no entity has stepped up to institute anything like full-time management. Litter cleanups have occurred at the Hayden Creek Range. Crews from Mivoden have cleaned the range at least twice, shooting groups have pitched in, and even the Girl Scouts completed a cleanup. Yes, the Girl Scouts cleaned up after the shooters at the Hayden Creek Range. Yet none of this addresses the area’s principle problem of no consistent management requiring shooters to perform the respectful act of policing the cartridges and targets after they finish shooting.

Another issue that lurks in the soil at the Hayden Creek Range is lead contamination. Under the federal Resource Conservation & Management Act (RCRA), lead is a hazardous substance regulated under rules managing its use. Gun ranges have lead contamination in both pellet sizes and molecular sizes that typically reside in the range’s back wall and along the firing line, respectively. 

Gun ranges, both indoor and outdoor, are required to manage this lead in its “intended use.” Managed ranges allow only a limited selection of paper and clay targets and certainly do not allow old appliances that shooters may want to use for a target. Aside from the obvious problems of the jagged metal and plastics produced, these appliances harbor any number of other hazardous materials that, when shot up, are released to contaminate the site. 

Given its 30-plus year history of target shooting, many of those appliances shot at the Hayden Creek Range certainly require RCRA oversight and very possibly, could result in additional hazardous materials contamination requiring some active cleanup or barrier development.

Ultimately it is the Forest Service that is responsible for activities on the land it manages and also for regulating the public use of those lands held in trust for us all by the federal government. Given the abuse at the Hayden Creek Range, the Forest Service has but two responsible alternatives: either find a group willing to undertake the range’s proper management and create an agreement to do so in writing, or to shut it down, even if that means bringing out a fleet of dozers and reshaping the old barrow pit so that shooting at the site is no longer possible.

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Geoffrey Harvey is a Hayden resident.