A friend of mine has been getting more into clay shooting recently, and invited me along to check…read morethis place out. I pulled into the parking lot on Sunday morning having no idea what to expect. I'd been to a few other ranges and gun clubs, so I know that the experience can vary quite a bit.
The parking lot is large and gravel, and there is a field setup for several RV hookups to one side of it. This place hosts tournaments, and people will just stay on site when they do. On the day of my visit in December, there were 2 travel trailers and plenty of open spaces. I don't know if they lease these spaces outside of tournaments or not.
Inside the building, they have a lot of merchandise available for sale (clothes, equipment and supplies, knives, and a shotgun store). I believe that they also allow for gun and equipment rentals, but my friend and I already had everything we needed, so we didn't investigate this. The building also has couches, vending machines, and a fireplace to relax and warm up at.
The range itself is setup as a circle, and kind of reminded me of walking the track around my high school football field. Each station for sporting clays has four electronic throwers, that all throw in the same general direction. You pay per clay and you're given a card to insert into the machine, which tallies the number of clays used, but we were told that even though you pay up front for a count of them, they give you a handful of extra so that you can throw one without firing (so you can see where they go) and also because sometimes the machines won't throw or a clay will break as it's being thrown. If you're shooting by yourself, there's a way to configure the throwers so that they'll go on a delay after hitting the button to throw, but since my buddy and I were both there, we just traded off who was pushing buttons and who was pulling triggers.
The shooting course is a lot of fun, with a lot of variety, and they tell you that the "A-B" pair of targets are generally easier to hit than the "C-D" pair. You can take whichever targets you want at each station though. The targets also include ones that run along the ground ("bunnies"), and one that's thrown from a tower.
The facility is also set up for skeet and helice, and they offer instruction as well.
A key thing I was surprised about was the level of service. As a novice to the sport, there were plenty of people around to ask questions, and at one station I was even given advice that I was shooting too high. One of our rifles was having issues feeding, and the same person offered some oil to try to solve the problem. When that didn't work he took it back to the building to leave in their racks so we didn't have to carry it around. They have push carts and golf cart rental to make the trip around the range easier, too.
Their gun store has a wide variety of rifles at varying price points, but be prepared - this isn't Walmart. The lowest priced used rifle we saw was about $1900, and went up around $20k. That said, you get what you pay for. My friend asked one of the employees to help with fitting me for a shotgun, during which I discovered that I go to shoulder a rifle completely wrong, but was shown how to do it correctly and much more comfortably.
