Shooting

View from the Coast Range

Jack and I went shooting up in the Coast Range yesterday. We drove around on the logging roads for a while looking for the elusive "Minus Pit". We caught this view of Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams from a gravel pit near the top of the hill. Those are the white cloud-like smudges just above the horizon. Click to embiggen. They looked a lot more like mountains in person. There was a lot of shot up debris in the gravel pit, evidence that a lot of people had been using the place for target practice. There was also a red fire tools trailer parked there, and amazingly enough there didn't appear to be any bullet holes in it. Eventually we gave up on finding the Minus Pit and just made do with some random dead end road. Looked like someone had been camped there for a while. There was a rough skeleton of a structure made out of skinny logs lashed together, a flat spot where a tent had been pitched, and some steps cut into the embankment on the uphill side. There were also a bunch of wine glasses. Some broken, some not. This was a real surprise. Usually anything we find up here that looks it could be used as a target already has a hundred holes in it. I'm thinking someone lost their house and moved to the woods, and then one day realized this living in the woods wasn't working out so well, and what good were wine glasses if you don't have a house, just pitched it all and took off. It was a warm day, but out there in the woods it was very pleasant. Except for the earmuffs I was wearing for hearing protection. I didn't notice sweat anywhere else, but as soon as I put those things on, the sides of my head under the earmuffs would become drenched. Ear plugs might have been a better choice. I had been getting by on my store of ammunition, but I was getting low and had actually run out of a few calibers, so I went out to a couple of stores and bought some. This is what a hundred dollars worth of ammo looks like. 

Ammunition

Two boxes each of 9mm and 38 special, and 120 rounds of Russian AK ammo. You can save a dollar a box here or there, but it's basically gonna run you about 30 cents a round. I fired about 100 rounds. I did pretty well with my Smith & Wesson 38 Special, and OK with my CZ, but I couldn't hit diddly with Jack's K-Tel pocket pistol. I probably could have a hit a bigger target at closer range, but from 20 feet away the bullets were going into the weeds.

 

Target Boards

I made the 10 holes in the white board with 12 rounds from my 38. The big holes on left part of the black board were done by Jack with his 44. I made the holes to right with my CZ. The CZ is a little wild. Jack made the little holes with his 22 rifle. We were shooting from about 60 feet (25 paces). We eventually did stumble across the Minus Pit on our way out, but for someplace that is named for a kind of rock, it was the least rocky place we had been. There is a cliff about 50 to 100 feet high, but it looks like it's all dirt. We stopped at a bar in Manning for burgers and brewski's on our way back. Manning isn't much of a place, just a wide spot in the road. The place was on the wrong side of the road, and we were a little apprehensive about that. Last time we pulled onto the wrong side of Highway 26 during the weekend it was like an hour, man, before there was an opening in traffic allowing us to get across. This time it was not a problem. I guess the recession is good for something. The burgers were good, the beer was cold, and the waitress was pleasant. It was noticeably hotter in Manning than it was in the woods. We had been up in the hills, at maybe a 1000 feet of elevation so I was wondering if the elevation could explain the difference. According to Wikipedia, the temperature at altitude is given by this formula: Where:

• T is the temperature at your higher elevation,
• T₀ is the temperature at the lower elevation,
• h is the difference in altitude,
• L is a constant with a value of
• 0.0065 K/m if you are using the metric system, and
• 0.0036 °F/f if you are using the English system.

Notes:

• K/m is degrees Kelvin, or rather in new-fangled new-speak, just Kelvins, per meter. Since Kelvins are the same size as degrees Centigrade (or is that now just Celsiuses?), and we aren’t concerned about absolute, just relative temperature, you could just use the local temperature in Centigrade.
• °F/f is degrees Fahrenheit per foot, and if you live in America, that should be enough of an explanation.
• I calculated the English constant 16 ways from Sunday before I was satisified. I am pretty sure I have it correct now. Why is something like that so difficult? Perhaps because I'm hungry? Because it's Saturday? It should be trivial, but I managed to get it wrong 15 ways before I got it right. (0.0065 x 9 x 12 x 25.4 / 5000)

So if we had a thousand feet of altitude, which is stretching it, we should have experienced a difference in temperature of four degrees. That might be enough to notice, but it certainly wasn't the 20 degrees it felt like. Could it be that the trees were absorbing enough light from the sun to keep the air relatively cool?

Update September 2021 replaced missing pictures.