DARRINGTON – OK, so it has no movie theater. Or swimming pool. Or sports bar. Or upscale restaurants. Or shopping mall.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about what this little town at the foot of majestic Whitehorse Mountain does have.
It has breathtaking scenery. It has river rafting. It has hiking trails. It has fly fishing. And, maybe most important of all, it has friendly people.
People who know how to impress guests and make them feel right at home. Or, to use an old Midwestern expression, people who know how to “put on the dog.”
Darrington folks will be turning the dog loose this week when the town hosts the National Field Archery Association (NFAA) Outdoor Championship.
Folks from all over the country will be pouring in and upwards of 450 archers are expected for the Monday-through-Friday competition in the foothills of the Cascades.
By the time family members are figured in, the gathering could swell to 1,000 people or more, or just shy of the 1,300 who make their home here.
Oh, forgot to mention. Among the things Darrington doesn’t have – it doesn’t have two motels.
It has one: The Stagecoach Inn. Which has 20 rooms. That’s 50 people to a room.
Cozy.
Fortunately, visitors have options. That friendliness we mentioned? It extends to townsfolk renting out their homes for the week.
The owners take a week’s vacation or move in with relatives and turn their abodes over to their guests. And these are mature, respectable, family-oriented guests. Not a bunch of college-age males who are going to trash the place.
“They come here to shoot, not to party,” said Darringtonite Marvin Kastning. “So they don’t screw off, and they don’t let their kids screw off.
”They’re in bed by 10, so they’re kind of easy to take care of and everybody loves them. They get up, go shoot, come back and go to bed.”
Archers have an intimate relationship with this town. They’ve been coming here for national meets since 1982.
Not every year, mind you. This will be the ninth one that Darrington has hosted.
Not only that, but it has “put on the dog” for two world tournaments.
The last world meet held here was in 1996, the last national meet in 2003.
The reason the NFAA keeps coming back to Darrington? Simple. “They really go out of their way to make sure you have a good time,” said T.C. Parker of Hoquiam, an NFAA director. Parker, who travels the world to compete, also gives the course excellent ratings.
When Darrington, with Kastning as its spokesman, put in a bid for the ‘82 tournament, officials from the National Field Archery Association asked, “Where the hell is Darrington?”
Kastning replied, “You give us an opportunity, you will know where Darrington is.”
“It is,” he said with warmth, “a special place.”
Back when Darrington made its pitch for the ‘82 meet, “We were pretty much a logging community and people had to go to work,” Kastning said. “They said, ‘We’re not going to offer any bed and breakfast, we’ll provide a bed and bath and they (the visitors) can do something else for their meals.’”
What they do is cook their own meals in the houses they rent or in the motor homes they drive to the tournament. And there’ll be a lot of homes-on-wheels parked on the softball field at Darrington High School near the shooting areas.
Many of the shooters take a vacation to compete in the meet. They bring lots of money. And they spend it.
“If they want steak, they buy steak,” said Kevin Ashe, owner of the IGA store in town. “They don’t seem to be overly money conscious.”
Ashe runs specials during the week for the visitors. “It’s a win-win thing for the town and for the archery people,” he said.
Some archers stay for only the week of competition, some stay longer, taking advantage of the outdoor activities or just unwinding in the peace and quiet of the place. Kastning estimates that the visitors will drop more than $200,000 into the local economy before all is said and done.
“There is no other (local) activity that would be larger than this,” he said.
Seeking a way to make Darrington a destination rather than just a town people passed through, Kastning came up with the idea of trying to attract the archery tournament here more than a quarter century ago. After winning the bid, the Darrington archers had one year to transform a 140-acre parcel of land in the foothills into a shooting area.
The townspeople dug into their own pockets to contribute $40,000 to the project. And Kastning and his wife Joan estimate they sank $7,000 of their own money into it.
“And we had to have 9,000 hours of labor in order to get this entire facility ready in one year,” he said. “That’d be like building five golf courses.
“We had to get the prison system to come in and help with the trails. If the prisoners hadn’t come we wouldn’t have been able to do it. Eight miles of trails through the woods where all the ranges are is a big job.”
The trails lead from target to target, with 28 targets to a shooting range, of which there are five, or 140 targets in all. The terrain is up and down, but mostly up, so a shooter has to have “good legs” to get around.
The man making the “good legs” observation should know. Dave Nations – a lifelong resident of Darrington and an avid archer – has done much of the work to get the ranges ready for this year’s tournament. “I’ve put a lot of days in this year,” Nations said, as he walked part of the rugged course on a hot, humid day with horse flies tracking his every step. “Since spring, there haven’t been many days that I’ve missed being up here.”
And his work is all voluntary. “It’d be nice to get paid,” he said. “Then it’d be fun.”
It’s no fun toting in bales of hay upon which the targets are placed. Or cutting weeds that overgrow the trail. Upon spotting a branch that partially obscured a target off in the distance, he knew he would have to lug a ladder in and do some trimming.
“This is a piece of cake,” he said. Compared to what? Rolling 200-pound hay bales “straight up” a hill, he said.
Nations gives the extra effort because of the pride he takes in the course.
“We want to be able to put on a shoot that’s the best,” he said.
Apparently, they’ve succeeded. “We’ve never screwed up a range,” Kastning said. “If you do, they won’t come back.”
The entire community gets involved in the project. The Cascade Seniors put on a couple of dinners. “There is a price, but it isn’t very expensive,”
Kastning said. “The Seniors have to make a little money like everybody else.”
Before the first arrow flies in the morning, the Darrington Horseowners Association will be serving up breakfast every day.
Out on the ranges, the high school cheerleaders serve food and beverages at five concession stands to make money for their uniforms.
“These are Tar Heels,” Kastning said, referring to the strong North Carolina influence in the community. “Most of them have this real sense of hospitality.”
Archers get a symbolic welcome to town when they pass the IGA Store. In the parking lot is a seven-ton statue of three archers – a man, a woman and a child – with their bows pointing toward the shooting area.
Kastning is especially proud of the statue. The model for it was a pin he designed as archery’s world symbol for bow hunting.
He expects about 50 professional archers to show up for the tournament, including all the Tiger Woods of the sport. And the funny thing is, they and all the rest of the shooters won’t win a dime. No prize money is offered.
“This competition is more about family,” Kastning said. “They (the NFAA) have kept their constitution that way, that anybody could walk off their yard and come to a championship and compete.”
And while he says archery isn’t really a spectator sport, anybody is welcome to come to this tournamernt.
But they’d better have good legs.
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