Steamboat Pilot & Today

Thanks for the cover photo and publicity you gave our organization May 17, we think!? While we appreciate Tyler Arroyo visiting and taking a pretty picture for the paper, we'd like to point out some misinformation accompanying the photo and a few additional facts about the Routt County Rifle Club.

Tom Sullivan is not a "skeet shooter" in the photo. He is shooting a shotgun/clay target game called Trap. Though both involve thrown clay birds, it is a very different game from "Skeet." Both have been played by shotgunners for most of a century, and both are Olympic sports (don't plan on watching them this summer though, except perhaps at 3 a.m.).

Tom is not taking "aim at a clay pigeon." Shotgun shooting is a dynamic sport requiring constant motion, you must mount, point and swing; to aim is to miss. The clay target leaves the trap machine at 40-plus mph. Your eye and brain must instantly gauge that speed, direction, angle, rate of climb and then get the gun muzzle behind the clay, swing through it, ascertain the correct lead (where the target is going to be when the shot pattern gets to it), then tell your trigger finger to pull.

Think of it as PlayStation for old folks, though we do have a very large group of young shotgun shooters in our Junior Club and they get quite good very quickly, thanks, no doubt in large part, to the hand/eye coordination video games have given them.

Sullivan is the President of the Routt County Rifle Club Inc., a Colorado corporation created in 1948 by a few local WWII returnees who wanted to get together to shoot their M1 rifles. The Club acquired the 40 acres where the photo was taken in 1959 for the then princely sum of $1,000. The original rifle range was on Yampa Street in the basement of what is now the Steamboat Yacht Club building, but that's another story.

Today the club includes 300-plus active shooting enthusiasts. Our property has ranges for rifle shooting at distances from 25 to 200 yards; handgun berms for the safe recreational shooting of and training with pistols and revolvers (all our city and county peace officers belong to and train at the club); an indoor range for the winger shooting of handguns and rimfire rifles; and the shotgun range for a variety of clay target games and where Tyler visited and took his photos. We continue to use our original corporate name because, well, like a lot of us, it's old and cool.

Finally, though a lot of duffers and hackers who also are RCRC members would like to have a "club shooting" every Sunday, we've resisted the temptation.

Thanks,

John Rogan

Routt County Rifle Club

secretary-treasurer