Gun enthusiasts clean up trashed, illegal shooting range near Healdsburg

They didn’t make the mess.

But 10 or so gun enthusiasts spent a recent Sunday in the remote reaches of the Mayacamas Mountains cleaning it up.

For decades, target shooters have used remote pockets of land on Pine Flat Road, beyond the sprawling Modini Preserve northeast of Healdsburg, to set up informal shooting ranges.

One area, a turnout just over 10 miles from the valley floor, proved particularly popular for shooters. That site was recognizable by the sagging, bullet-riddled skeleton of a Conex cargo container — and also by the jaw-dropping amounts of trash left behind by some hobbyists.

Spurred to action by a Press Democrat story detailing the extent of the mess on those public lands, a group of volunteers spent six hours on May 21 restoring it to a much tidier state.

While they couldn’t collect every single bullet casing and bit of detritus, said Brendan Pankow of Rohnert Park, owner of local firearms retailer Omma Distribution, “We got a vast majority of it.” The difference between how they found the site and how they left it “is night and day.”

The group, consisting of Pankow’s friends and customers, collected nearly 1,200 pounds of scrap metal, plus another 26 heavy-duty, 42-gallon garbage bags full of trash.

“We met up there a little before 9:30, and cleaned til about 2 p.m.,” said Kyle Scally, who along with Pankow organized the event, which was also publicized by the Sonoma Chapter of the California Rifle & Pistol Association.

Part shooting range, part dump

Among the pulverized junk picked up were old televisions and numerous car parts, said Scally, including wheels, mirrors, and brake rotors. The shooting range had become “almost a dump spot,” he noted — as if people had rationalized, “Well, I shot it, so that justified dumping it.”

Scally has attempted cleanups on a far smaller scale in the past. “I’d go up in my Toyota Camry, but couldn’t really load it up with trash — maybe one big bag.”

On one occasion, he and some friends left several full trash bags at the range, hoping someone would bring them down the hill. Instead, “we came back and those bags were in the middle of the range, completely shot up.”

For the past few years, said Pankow, “it was getting a little bit worse and a little bit worse, each time you went up there.”

Pankow, Scally and others had talked about a more ambitious cleanup for a long time.

“Once we saw that article” in the Press Democrat, “and a lot of the comments on it,” said Scally, “we thought, ‘Wow, this looks really bad. Let’s just go up there and do it.’”

Whose land?

In that story, the conservationist and bird watcher Becky Olsen, who’s been driving up Pine Flat Road for a quarter century, described the trashed shooting range as “appalling” and “atrocious.”

Her attempts to find out who owned the land on which the shooting range rested proved Kafkaesque and confounding.

Much of the land on the upper reaches of Pine Flat Road, which dead-ends into a gated entry to The Geysers geothermal power field, is owned by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency.

Olsen was first told by the BLM’s Ukiah field office that the area in question was not federal land, but rather, “a mix of private property and California State land.”

Olsen then directed her queries to the Sonoma County division of Environmental Health and Safety, which advised her to consult the county’s Code Enforcement Division, which informed her, via email, “We have identified the parcels as being Federal lands.”

Eventually, the BLM real estate specialist Mary Feitz discovered that northern parcel was given to California by the U.S. Government in 1853.

The next step for the BLM, said Scott Luneau, an employee in the Ukiah field office, will be “to go take photos of these shooting areas and record some GPS coordinates on their locations, so that way we may be able to facilitate some cleanups going forward.”

But Pankow, Scally and their Omma Distribution crew beat the BLM to it. Luneau did not respond to emails this week requesting an update on the BLM’s plans for cleaning up the site.

“Wonderful” news

The cleanup crew came equipped with work gloves, shovels, rakes, garbage bags, along with water bottles, chips and Lunchables — the latter item chosen “because they’re easy to eat,” said Scally, 26, “and they’re pretty good, too.”

Crew members also used jury-rigged spears designed by Pankow, who bought some “three-dollar dowel rods” at Home Depot, drove a nail through the end of each rod, “then cut the nail off real sharp with a pair of bolt cutters.”

The resulting homemade tool worked perfectly for spearing cans, plastic bottles, cardboard and other refuse.

“I’m so happy to hear this,” Olsen the bird watcher shared in an email, after learning about the crew’s work. “It’s wonderful that the shooters have rallied together to clean it up. I hope that since they know it’s on the radar, they’ll keep it clean.”

In addition to the original confusion surrounding who owned the land, there is abiding uncertainty about the legality of shooting there.

Many of those blasting away along Pine Flat Road have long assumed that it is legal.

But as Luneau pointed out in May, “Shooting on any BLM Ukiah lands within 150 feet of, or across any road or trail, is prohibited, so that would certainly apply to this situation.”

While the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office is “perfectly aware that it’s up there,” said Sheriff’s spokesman Rob Dillion in early May, “We rarely get calls up there, and if we do, we investigate them to the best of our ability.”

This remote part of the county is popular with target shooters because they have such limited options in the North Bay. The only full service shooting range open to the paying public in the area is at Circle S Ranch in Marin County, set among dairy pastures about 12 miles west of Petaluma.

On the upper reaches of Pine Flat Road, in the unpopulated hills beyond the nature preserve, shooters “aren’t really bothering anybody,” noted Pankow.

“But you’re gonna bother people if you don’t pick up your trash. If you don’t pack it out, it reflects poorly on everybody.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.