SULTAN — Denice Ingalls has had enough.
For 15 years, she’s lived near a Sultan-area gravel pit where gun enthusiasts sometimes target shoot. She has never minded — until this spring.
“It’s been getting louder and louder,” said Ingalls, who lives less than a mile from the gravel pit on Department of Natural Resources land. “Two weeks ago I walked out of my house and quite literally the ground shook.”
For the last several months, DNR officials have been directing target shooters to its property at the end of 116th Street SE off the Sultan-Basin Road.
The result is a dramatic uptick in the number of people using the gravel pit for target practice. Some living in the area are concerned high volumes of unregulated shooting isn’t safe in an area that draws hikers, bikers and horseback riders.
The DNR doesn’t advertise the gravel pit as a gun range on its Web site but officials have started sending shooters there if they’re asked or they find them shooting in the Reiter foothills, a nearby recreation area.
Local gun enthusiasts have spread information about the pit, posting directions and maps on their Web sites.
The gravel pit is surrounded on three sides by about a 20-foot land berm. It is one of the few locations in the area safe for shooting, said Bill Wallace, the Northwest regional manager for DNR.
The DNR is tasked with allowing public access to its land for all types of recreation, including hunting and shooting, he said.
“There are a lot of folks who like to target shoot, and they’re going to go somewhere,” Wallace said. “One of our challenges is to find a safe place to do that.”
DNR officials take neighbors’ concerns seriously and in the past have worked to curb illegal shooting in the area, he said. They’ve worked with Snohomish County to stop unlawful shooting along a nearby stretch of the Sultan-Basin Road.
Before the ban, people would routinely pull their trucks off the road and blast away, said Laurie Bergvall, a DNR assistant region manager. It got so bad, the DNR had to run timber culled from the area through a metal detector, she said.
It’s not just the noise that worries neighbors, Ingalls said.
The pit can also attract less responsible people shooting rounds less than a mile from 116th, a country road lined with homes. Errant bullets can travel a mile or more. At one gun enthusiasts’ Web site, she found people talking about blowing up Tannerite at the pit on a recent Saturday. Tannerite is a mixture used as a target that explodes when hit by fire from high-caliber rifles.
She no longer lets her kids ride bicycles in the area, a patch of forested land crisscrossed with trails.
“I support gun rights and responsible gun ownership,” she said. “This is a dangerous place to shoot. It’s not being well-managed, and somebody will be hurt.”
‘A safe place to go’
The gravel pit is one of the few places in Snohomish County gun enthusiasts can practice long-range shooting, said Lee Mathena, a hunter from Sultan. He came Thursday afternoon to the pit to practice with his .308 Winchester rifle.
Mathena brought a black plastic garbage sack and picked up trash before he started shooting. He doesn’t care to come on the weekends, when carloads of shooters can crowd the pit.
“I do feel it’s a safe place to go,” said Mathena, whose father taught him responsible gun ownership when he was a boy, lessons he is passing along to his son and daughter.
If the pit closed, he’d have to drive to rifle clubs in Marysville or the Snoqualmie area to practice his shooting before deer hunting season.
Mike Ingalls, Denice Ingalls’ former father-in-law and her business partner, said he isn’t convinced the gravel pit is safe.
“The more I learn about this location, the more I shudder,” said Ingalls, a National Rifle Association certified firearms instructor.
Lack of regulation and close proximity to recreation trails make it a dangerous place for shooting, he said.
In the past few months he traveled to the gravel pit on weekends and observed people shooting into the trees above the pit. Hidden from the shooters’ view is a network of trails sometimes used by hikers and horseback riders. He also saw people shooting semi-automatic and automatic firearms at the pit.
Shooting sports can be conducted safely only with trained supervision, a safe back-stop and separation between various kinds of shooting, he said.
“We need a safe place to shoot,” he said. “In my opinion, DNR wants to help as well. They simply need to get help with safety. The unauthorized, unsupervised activities that have been tolerated at the 116th location scare me.”
The vast majority of people who shoot off 116th are responsible gun owners, said Larry Criswell, who lives about a half-mile west of the gravel pit. He and a friend have taken it upon themselves to pick up garbage and police the area.
The Vietnam veteran and target shooter will talk with people who are doing things they shouldn’t. He hands them fliers listing DNR rules. On weekends he loads his truck bed with buckets and a garbage can so shooters have a place to put spent shell casings.
Despite Criswell’s efforts, the rough, rocky floor of the pit is littered with spent ammunition and broken clay pigeons. Trees above the pit are pockmarked by bullet holes. He’s worried gun enthusiasts may lose one of the last places they can legally shoot.
“Their letting us use this is a gift,” Criswell said.
The problem isn’t responsible shooters, it’s “plinkers” — people who willy-nilly shoot up garbage and the like, said Steve Slawson, a Sultan City Councilman.
He’s seen other sites get overused and become filled with so many spent casings the site has to be shut down. He wants to get the shooting out of the woods.
A solution may not be far down the road.
Slawson and others are working with Snohomish County on creating a gun range farther up the Sultan-Basin Road at Olney Creek. The DNR is in the process of transferring a nearly 200-acre chunk of land to the county for that use.
The gun range would be open for public use and serve a variety of different kinds of shooting, including long-range target shooting.
“It’s a dream,” Slawson said. “But it’s almost become a necessity. There’s no place for people to shoot anymore.”
Debra Smith: 425-339-3197, dsmith@heraldnet.com.
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