Don't shoot across the road

I was riding my bike down Perry Canyon yesterday and was cruising down a dirt road. I had heard shooting periodically in the hour before this.

As I'm cruising down, I see a guy with his friends shooting a target. But they were on the left side of the road, the target was on the right, and if they didn't see me cruising down the road, I would have been in the line of fire.

The precaution of "Oh I'll see them in time" does not always work. I can get BOOKIN' on this downhill bike, and it doesn't have an engine so it can be relatively quiet. And some hikers make no noise.

As I was coasting by, I reminded them "You might not want to shoot across the road".

I'm not sure if anything else was said in reply, as I kept on cruising down the road. And I'm not here to scold anybody. Just a reminder that it's not a good idea to shoot across a well traveled path.

Again I'm not incriminating anybody, but this is just a visual. If you recognize these folks (2 guys and 1 girl, all wearing red shirts for some reason and shooting pumpkins) I'm not out to publicly hang them, I'm just showing this photo as a reference.

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More photos and video from the ride here:

http://www.bogley.com/forum/showthre...4-Perry-Canyon

You can't shoot from, or across a road in Utah is my understanding of the law. And there's a minimum distance you're supposed to be away from a road as well, though that seems to vary some from county to county? I've seen numbers from 150-600 yards in different sources.

I see this all the time in the West Desert. Guys firing 5.56 or 7.62 across active roads and trails..totally oblivious to the danger they're causing. One word: IDIOTS!

A couple of years ago I was up American Fork Canyon with one of our local Forest Rangers, Cheryl, flagging out a fairly major reroute of an existing trail (trail #252). The #252 trail crosses the Cascade Springs Road. The CS road gets a fair amount of vehicle traffic. We were up on the hillside to the west of what's called Elk Camp(it used to be called Mexican Flat, but that's another story!), a small primitive flat camping area and trailhead, just right off the CS road. Across the road is quite a large uphill sloped meadow. All of a sudden there was a flurry of activity below us in the hunting camp as the hunters started point up into the meadow while grabbing their rifles. They then proceed to start shooting, from their camp and across CS road,up into the meadow. Ranger Cheryl starts yelling at them to stop shooting across the road. They keep shooting. Cheryl yells again to which they yell back something to the manner of "Shut the f*** up b***". By this time Cheryl is furious and takes off down the slope to confront them. My buddy and I decided to follow her down and offer some backup. By the time we got to the hunters, a couple of the guys started off on their horses to collect the elk they had shot at the top of the meadow about 300 yards away, even though Cheryl was telling them not to leave. More profanity and derogatory remarks against women spewed forth from these real classy guys and they left anyway after threatening to shoot Cheryl if she didn't move out of the way. So, a couple of guys left on horseback and a couple of others stayed behind. It was pretty intense. I was ready to step in and protect Cheryl if need be but, I also felt pretty helpless not having any authority to do anything other than watch. The 2 guys who stayed behind ended up walking back to their camping trailers while Cheryl called the USFS law enforcement officer from her radio. The LEO showed up about 30 min later and, after some more intense dialogue, diffused the situation. Ranger Cheryl was actually pretty calm and kept her head all during the confrontation. When the guys on horseback showed back up,dressed elk and all, they claimed they didn’t hear Cheryl yelling at them to stop shooting across the road (still doesn’t make it legal) to which I countered with “If you didn’t hear her, why were you yelling at her to shut up?”. Anyway they knew they were busted because my buddy and I were able to corroborate Cheryl’s version of what transpired. The LEO was one tough, intimidating dude- the kind of LEO who isn’t a jerk just because he’s tough and confident. I believe he served as an MP in Iraq. He ended up confiscating the elk and the shooters rifle. With the threats they dished out to Cheryl, he could have thrown them all in jail. There was a chance my buddy and I could have appeared and testified in court but, It ended up being settled beforehand. I believe the guy got his rifle and elk meat and hide back for doing some community service or something. It was a memorable experience!

Yowza, that could have ended bad