NORTH COUNTRY RIDER |
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Copyright 2008 World Publishing Company. All rights reserved. |
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Mounted shooting makes its mark
LYNETTE SMITH/North Country Rider
Mounted shooting competitors use standard guns — .45-caliber pistols. Some competitions involve rifles, too.
Look at them. Those blank little red, blue and pink faces. Bobbing in the breeze tauntingly.
Happy-looking little balloons, like you’d see at a kid’s birthday party.
But they don’t fool guys like Bruce Thorn. He knows every last one of them’s got it coming.
Waiting his chance in the Chelan County Expo Park arena in Cashmere, he gallops out on Missy, his 20-year-old Quarter Horse, pulls his .45 and fires a well-packed blank as he thunders by.
That’s one balloon that won’t be troubling us anymore.
Thorn storms on down the course, leveling his gun and dispatching the balloon’s nine cohorts.
The score is settled, and it looks like Thorn wins again.
Thorn — who four years ago founded the Washington State Mounted Shooters, the only local chapter of the national Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association — is hooked on a sport that’s taken off like a shot in the past decade or so.
And the Wenatchee feed-store owner and shooting champion isn’t the only one who calls his sport “addictive.”
CMSA and a branch group, the Mounted Shooters of America, are signing up new members coast to coast.
“It’s probably the biggest-growing equine sport in America,” says Cle Elum’s Mark Zueger, who heads up the Evergreen State Mounted Shooters, the area’s only MSA group.
Zueger says the appeal is several-fold:
The scoring is simple and objective, he says — riders race the clock and shoot at balloons. Nobody can blame a judge’s bias for a poor score.
“It’s just you, your horse and the clock,” adds Ellensburg world-champion Kenda Lenseigne, the highest-rated woman mounted shooter west of Texas.
Then there’s the camaraderie.
“They just take you in like family,” Zueger says — and he means family. Mounted shooting offers competition classes for every skill and age level, making it an ideal sport for Mom, Dad and the kids, Zueger, Thorn and others emphasize.
Finally, there’s that addictive factor.
“It’s just a huge adrenaline rush,” says Thorn. “It’s a lotta fun.”
The two groups follow similar rules. The general objective is to shoot as many balloons as possible as quickly as possible on a modified barrel course.
CMSA places more emphasis on western dress for the competitions, while MSA is more about the raw sport, explains Lenseigne, who belongs to both groups and brought mounted shooting back to her home state five years ago after getting involved in it while she was working in Southern California.
Her introduction, 10 years ago now, was a snap.
“I bit on it like a fish on bait,” Lenseigne says.
When she was just 23, a coworker talked her into watching a demonstration near Agora Hills, Calif.
In those early days of the sport, events were less organized, she says:
“It was pretty relaxed — they let just about anybody grab a gun and go.”
The event’s master of ceremonies helped persuade her to give it a try, though she’d never fired a gun in her life. After undergoing a hasty three-minute tutorial on weapon safety, she mounted up and let fly.
To her surprise, she did well enough to get invited to a competition the following weekend — which she won.
That qualified her for the next month’s world championships, where she won reserve overall cowgirl.
“So here I was a 5 (Level 6 is the top proficiency in mounted shooting) at my third shoot,” she laughs.
Cheri Johnson of Wenatchee was hooked after taking one of the clinics that Lenseigne hosts at her Hunter Creek Ranch, just outside Ellensburg.
“I’ve been on the road (for competitions) ever since,” Johnson says.
T.C. Thorstenson, the Arizona-based national president of the Mounted Shooters of America, has heard lots of similar stories about the sport.
Thorstenson visited Cashmere in June, when Zueger’s MSA group staged its first statewide shoot. The event drew 60 contestants from Idaho, Oregon, California, Montana, Arizona — even Alaska.
He says participants come from all walks of life, and all income and education levels.
The sport’s emphasis on fun, safe, family-oriented gatherings keep them coming.
Another key drawing card: mounted shooting’s low-key competitions and easygoing sportsmanship.
“You’re racing against the clock,” Thorstenson says, “you’re not racing against your friend.”
“But,” Zueger adds with a laugh, “at the end of the day, you’d like to have a little faster time than your friend.”
TRY YOUR HAND:
• The biggest national mounted shooting groups are the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association and the Mounted Shooters of America, and both groups have local chapters:
For information on the MSA’s local group, contact Mark Zueger, 425-348-1415.
For details on CMSA’s local chapter, contact Bruce Thorn at Wenatchee’s Valley Feed Store, 509-662-9444.
• In addition to membership dues and clothing, new participants can get started with about $1,000 worth of shooting gear — including guns and holsters.
Both groups have set rules for guns and blanks, and each shot (depending on whether shooters load their own or buy them) costs anywhere from 12 cents to about 40 cents.
Novices may want to borrow equipment before laying down any money, and members of both groups say other shooters are usually eager to lend a helping hand.
