10th annual Baltimore Bowmen shoot

I was waiting for Mike to arrive after a half day of work in order to get down to Baltimore and secure a good campsite. I scooted out of my front door and saw this hen turkey. She did not seem to care about my presence too much so I watched her as she fed around my house to the backyard. There I got my camera out and snapped this pic. She finally had enough of me at 10 yards and after a few "putts" casually fed away up the hill. My wife saw it at the bird feeder the next day!

well, after a late start and about an hour of rush hour traffic we made it to the range and found one of the last cramped areas to set up 2 tents.

Our neighbor had a old canvas tarp set up like a whelan tent and 2 osage selfbows hanging from the poles. He was from downstate DE and we found out later he might be hunting in the same CO unit as Chris and I this year. I left him my card and email info.

After striking our tents, Mike and I checked out some vendors tents before heading out to the first 3D target range. We got to the end of the course just as it was too dark to see our arrows in flight.

We ate our steaks by citronella candle as we were too close to other tents to use any of the massive amounts of poplar wood I split and brought with us. It was a pretty quiet night despite so many folks. The next morning I was roused from my slumber at 6am by the sound of an elk bugling! Man, that got the juices flowing and made me excited for Colorado again! We ate a big breakfast and headed down to the ranges. The weather was beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky, warm, and not a single mosquito or gnat! We ended up shooting all 3 courses multiple times. There were 80 targets so we figure we shot about 150 targets over the day and a half.

There were all sorts of targets as the 2 favorite courses wound through a wooded creek bottom. I can remember shooting at grizzly bear, polar bear, caribou, elk, turkey, javilina, big horn sheet, mountain goat, bison, jaguar, and lion.

The practice was definitely worthwhile. Mike and I struggled at first, and shooting with onlookers was unnerving at times, but we improved as the day went on. I can only remember 1 arrow I lost permanently that broke on the river rocks. A lot of the sky-lined targets were positioned to put your arrow into oblivion or into big oak trees if you missed. I found a fair amount of other people's arrows and placed them in the bucket at the clubhouse for their owners. I was a fun shoot and I look forward to doing it again!