Shooters leave public land mess at illegal range off remote Sonoma County road

Pine Flat Road was once a wagon trail wending its way into the Mayacamas Mountains, passing through a mercury mining boomtown that long ago went bust.

Nowadays, those traversing the narrow, slide-prone byway east of Healdsburg include cyclists unfazed by its cruel pitches, and binoculars-wielding birders using the pullouts on the sprawling Modini Preserve, through which Pine Flat Road meanders.

And there are the sport shooters.

For decades, gun enthusiasts have used the remote pockets of land beyond the wildlife sanctuary, owned by Audubon Canyon Ranch, to set up informal shooting ranges.

At least some of those hobbyists are unfamiliar, or can’t be bothered with, the principle of Leave No Trace.

Together, they have left behind an awful mess.

The dispiriting site comes into view just over 10 miles from the valley floor, after the road has passed through what was once the short-lived town of Pine Flat, beyond a pond known for its rare dragonflies, above stands of oaks and skeletal Doug firs blackened by the 2019 Kincade Fire.

Thirty feet north of the road is the sagging frame of what was once a Conex cargo container, now shot to bits.

Around it are dozens of other targets: propane tanks, a fire extinguisher, gas cans, the torso of a female mannequin.

The ground is strewn with glass shards from countless beer bottles, summarily executed, along with thousands of spent shotgun shells, brass bullet casings and the odd slug, mingling with miscellaneous trash.

Becky Olsen, an outdoors enthusiast who’s been driving up Pine Flat Road for a quarter century, said she is “disgusted” by the sight, an environmental wound near the top of a mostly untrammeled mountain face.

“After going up to this beautiful, remote area, then coming across that, it’s just appalling,” she said.

“I’m not trying to prevent anybody from enjoying their hobbies,” Olsen added. “I just believe they need to be responsible for cleaning up their trash.”

Confusion over who owns land

A second, smaller shooting area can be found a mile east, up the road, where Pine Flat Road dead-ends into a gated entry to The Geysers geothermal power field, where various signs — including one prohibiting Calpine employees from bringing firearms onto the premises — are riddled with bullets.

The Geysers is administered by the Bureau of Land Management’s Ukiah field office. The BLM, a federal agency, owns other parcels in the area, including the 184-acre polygon whose northern border appears to overlap with at least part of that larger shooting gallery — the one with the shipping container and mannequin.

But when Olsen brought that trashed area to the attention of the BLM in April, she was told that land is “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.

A manager in that office informed her, via email, “We have identified the parcels as being Federal lands, and therefore the County has no enforcement authority.”

Olsen was puzzled. “BLM says it’s not their land,” she wrote. “What other federal agency would own them?”

“We have no idea,” came the reply from the county. “It just says Federal Land on our mapping system.”

Mystery solved

Shedding a bit more light on the matter was Tim Pudoff, a cartographic whiz and project manager for the county’s Information Services Division.

Using a Google Earth image from a reporter — the cargo container, detectable from the satellite, was circled in yellow highlighter — “and the overall shape of Pine Flat Road as a guide,” Pudoff wrote in an email, “I have examined the area using the County Assessor’s internal database and the BLM National Data Viewer website.”

Pine Flat Road curves its way through two parcels “in the area in question,” he wrote. The bottom, or southern tract, is that 184-acre polygon. On top of it is a smaller, 21-acre, parallelogram-shaped parcel.

An image Pudoff passed along appears to show that the shooting range straddles the shared border of both parcels.

The County Assessor system, said Pudoff, shows both properties as being owned by the Federal Government.

Which was strange, because the BLM website identifies the smaller parcel — on which the shot-up cargo box was plopped — as state property.

“I cannot explain why BLM shows it as being administered” by the state of California, Pudoff wrote.

That mystery was solved earlier this week by Mary Feitz, a real estate specialist at the BLM’s Ukiah office. She discovered, after some sleuthing, that the parallelogram was given to California by the U.S. government “as school land trust land.”

School lands, she explained, “were granted to the State of California on March 3, 1853 by an Act of Congress … for the purpose of funding/supporting public schools.”

That means, she concluded, that the staging area of the shooting range “is within BLM land, but the target area/shipping container is on state trust land.”

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.”

He wasn’t sure when that cleanup might begin. Feitz, the realty specialist, has been told by the State Lands Commission that it will support any local cleanup efforts.

Still, while the issue of land ownership has been cleared up, another remains cloaked in confusion.

Range shortage

Is it legal to shoot on this particular stretch of BLM land? Many of the enthusiasts blasting away along Pine Flat Road believe it is.

They’re incorrect.

As Luneau points out, “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.”

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

The BLM Ukiah Field Office does offer dispersed target shooting at the Indian Valley Management Area in Lake County. It maintains a proper shooting range at North Cow Mountain Recreation Area, east of Ukiah. Both sites are over 60 miles from Santa Rosa.

One reason Pine Flat Road is a magnet to shooters is that they have such limited options in the North Bay. The only 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.

After that, said Brian Thomson, director of operations and training at Rinkor Arms in Santa Rosa, there are a number of private ranges “where you have to know someone to get in. There aren’t many other options, unless you own property.”

In 1937, Congress passed the Pittman-Robertson Act, which levied an excise tax on the sale of firearms and ammunition. Those funds have helped pay for public gun ranges across the country. But not in these parts.

“It’s frustrating,” Thomson allowed, that, despite that taxation, Sonoma County lacks public ranges.

“This isn’t isolated to the Bay Area,” said Rick Travis, legislative director of the California Rifle and Pistol Association. “This is happening in the vast majority of counties across the state. There’s a range shortage.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, he said, California added over one million new first-time gun owners, which made that shortage more acute.

“Most range people and instructors will tell you that a new person needs 16 hours on the range,” said Travis.

“With the lack of ranges, you have a lack of firearm safety.”

While states like Arizona and Wyoming have used their Pittman-Robertson dollars to build “state of the art” public shooting ranges, Travis said, every year California sends “a big chunk” of those funds back, unused.

Thomson, of Rinkor Arms, advises customers to avoid Pine Flat Road. Yet he understands why some might make the trip. With legal options so scarce, gun enthusiasts will continue to find “other places as an outlet.”

That’s no surprise to Becky Olsen, the bird-watcher, who reports that the hobbyists she encounters up there have always been “courteous.” She just wishes they’d pack out their trash.

“Because right now, it’s just atrocious.”

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