Bemidji shooting club to move away from airport location

When planes land at the Bemidji Regional Airport, local trap shooters hold their fire.

The Bemidji Trap and Skeet Club's shooting range is located on the edge of airport property, just beyond the 8-foot chain-link fence that keeps deer from sprinting out onto the runway and creating chaos with landing passenger jets.

Shotgun pellets don't have the momentum to reach the tarmac, but club member Bob Naylor said it's best to wait for planes to land and head for the terminal, just in case.

"It is safe," Naylor said, "but we're on a postage stamp sized piece of ground here."

The club won't be checking for incoming aircraft much longer. Thanks in part to a $419,000 Department of Natural Resources grant, they'll move to a 360-acre range west of town late next year.

The money is part of $2 million set aside last year by the Minnesota Legislature to help gun clubs expand. Matching grants were handed out to dozens of range projects across the state. The most recent round was awarded last week.

DNR shooting range coordinator Chuck Niska said the grants were prompted by an expansion in youth trap shooting leagues.

In 2001, a former gun safety instructor named Jim Sable started the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League. The first year he taught just five kids in Plymouth how to blast clay pigeons out of the air with 12-gauge shotguns.

Trap shooting is Minnesota's fastest growing high school sport. In 2008 only about 30 students statewide competed in sanctioned trap shooting events. This year, 8,600 students took part.

"There has been a drop off in young hunters," Niska said. "This is a way to reverse that."

The DNR grant money is a big relief to Naylor. Over the last decade, he said, the current range has been edged off the airport property.

He described the shooting club back when he first joined in the early 1970s. He was 20 at the time, meeting a group of guys at the range on Sundays after church.

"We'd see a handful of planes land through the day," he said. "Now it's between 50 and 100."

The airport was much smaller then — mostly used by private pilots. But a series of three runway expansions brought in commercial and freight traffic. These days, it's one of the busiest airports in northern Minnesota, and there's just no more room for the range.

About half the range was abandoned after the most recent runway expansion, finished in 2007. Small pine trees now grow where clays were launched.

And Naylor said it's not just the airport. Before Jim Sable sparked the growth of high school leagues, he said, the shooting sports were themselves getting edged out of the culture. Fewer and fewer young people came out to the range. Fewer went hunting.

"They were all inside playing with their thumbs," he said.

Now, he points to photos of Bemidji's high school trap team hanging on the clubhouse walls — a crew of more than 60 crack shots.

Naylor is a bit melancholy about leaving the current range. He spent a lot of weekends shooting clay pigeons with friends. He poured the foundation of the clubhouse. But the new range, which is currently under construction on Highway 89, is going to be better, he said.

It'll be big enough for all those high schoolers, and there's no airport in sight.