I woke up Sunday to the not-so-soothing sounds of the wind whistling around the house at what sounded like 100 miles an hour. I know it wasn’t blowing that hard, but it sure seemed like it. I think the wind speed was only in the 40s, but still, that’s windy enough to ruin any plans of going outside.
And that’s a real bummer, because I had big plans for Sunday. I was going to rebuild my backyard shooting range. When we bought the house, the old owners left a giant pile of 6×6 timbers. Those things are expensive, so having a bunch of them come with the house was great. I immediately put them all to good use on a makeshift shooting range in my pasture.
I needed those timbers, because the hillside I planned to use as a backstop had a lot of rocks in it. If I’d just shot into the hill, I’d have had ricochets on every shot. I laid the timbers up the slope, though, and that provided a safe backstop to shoot into.
Unfortunately, dirt and rocks have tumbled down the hillside and over the timbers. Every time I shoot, I have to sweep the rocks off my backstop. Not only that, but I can only get about 100 yards away from the targets. I have been planning to move my range to a different place in the pasture, where I’ll have a longer distance to shoot from, but I’ll need to move all those timbers to the new place and stack them up, then back-fill some dirt behind them. I’d like to lay a few on the ground in front of the stack to serve as a target platform, too.
Hopefully the wind will stop one of these days and allow me to rebuild the range – and then fine-tune the sights on several of my rifles when I’m done. I suppose I could rebuild the range in the wind, as unpleasant as that would be, but there’s no sense doing it if I can’t reward myself with some shooting when I’m done.
