My family and I almost became
collateral damage at the end of a pleasant hike through Colorado’s
Roosevelt National Forest. We were walking on a trail north of the
small town of Lyons, when bullets suddenly peppered the trees
behind our backs. My 8-year-old son, in tears, flattened himself
into the dirt, and though my wife screamed “hikers! hikers!” at the
shooters, the bullets kept coming. But here’s the real shock: While
the shooters were undoubtedly careless and stupid, it was legal for
them to fire their guns in our direction.
That should
change. I think it is past time for the Forest Service to toughen
up its shooting laws.
The Forest Service knows it has a
problem. The recreational needs of a growing, active population in
the New West are running smack into the freedoms of the past. The
problem is particularly bad in Forest Service lands abutting urban
areas such as Boulder, the city nearest to this incident. The area
around Boulder is laced with foot and bike paths; climbers hang
from cliffs; fishermen line streams; and every government
jurisdiction has limits on shooting, except one — the Forest
Service.
Complaints about shooting are by far the most
common in the Boulder District, says James Bedwell,
Roosevelt-Arapaho National Forest supervisor. He adds that patrols
and sign maintenance are “sporadic at best” because of dwindling
resources.
The Boulder Ranger District has one
overwhelmed ranger for more than 160,000 acres, and this staffer
has the tall task of ensuring the safety of the 1.2 million people
who visit the district annually. Federal officials say the
Roosevelt-Arapaho National Forest, which includes Boulder, is one
of the nation’s busiest national forests.
On the
afternoon of our near-shooting, it wasn’t until the bullets began
whistling by our heads that we discovered where they were coming
from: The trailhead. I’d hit the dirt with my son, but then got up,
ducked low, and ran up a hill to the trailhead. There, I saw three
groups firing away down the ridge: the two men who almost killed
us, a man and two boys blasting at cans and a half-dozen men
dressed entirely in black, wearing capes and firing automatic
weapons blindly into the woods.
The shooters who almost
got us were firing at targets they’d nailed to trees in a grove
above the trail. Any bullet that missed the targets and trees could
have hit hikers like us. The gunmen had an excuse — of sorts.
Over the years, signs identifying the trail and warning against
shooting had been riddled with bullets and ripped down.
I
got the license number of the men who shot at us and reported it to
the Boulder County sheriff’s office. But the deputy I talked to
said shooting is legal in a national forest and common in the area.
Forest Service officials backed him up; it is even legal to fire
into a hiking trail as long as it is unoccupied at the time.
Shooting is traditional on Forest Service lands and a
“hot-button item,” says Christine Walsh, Boulder District ranger.
It is a use that rangers are not about to quickly change. A few
Forest Service areas near major cities have small area-specific
restrictions, but there are no national limits. The Boulder
District is beginning a review that could lead to some limitations,
but it will take at least two years. Meanwhile, the system favoring
shooting remains.
Nearly as galling as the fact that my
family could have gotten legally shot on a hike is the stupidity of
these riflemen. I grew up with guns and recall a family photo of me
at 8 years old, blasting away with my father’s handgun, along with
my 5-year-old sister, in a cute little dress, firing a .22 rifle.
We were at a rugged hunters’ range outside a California desert town
where we lived. But we could clearly see where our bullets went
— unlike the guys who nearly shot us.
Inside the
Boulder District, there is one well-known though unofficial target
range, a few miles north of Boulder. Shooters have lugged in
refrigerators, computer monitors, and TVs for targets, and this
misuse of public land has gone on for 20 years, rangers say. That’s
long enough for a cleanup program to have sprung up, not run by
shooters but by others offended by the waste. Last year, two
dumpsters full of shot-up trash were picked up.
Unless
the Forest Service toughens its national regulations, shooting will
continue pretty much at will on our publicly owned land. I guess
people will have to trust to luck to avoid injury or death at the
end of a sunny afternoon hike.
Jeff Johnson is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives in
Boulder and is a Ted Scripps fellow at the University of Colorado
Center for Environmental Journalism.
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