homestead wishlist

It probably sounds silly to most people but one of my checklist items for buying our homestead was to be far away enough from neighbors and have enough land to make my own shooting range. Lucky for me God blessed me with exactly what we both wanted and some.

Initial plans

Since just about day one I started working on clearing out a certain part of our woods and making a path to walk around it all. I had done a lot of googling on other home shooting ranges and took notes of all the shooting youtube channels I subscribe to and decided I wanted to have one firing point and multiple target areas at varying ranges. I made a rough draft on google maps for the directions and distances of target areas.
range sketch.png

Attaining the railroad ties

For the sake of safety and easy of use I chose to use railroad tie backstops for 2 or 3 of the target area and will put sand/dirt behind them for support. The ties will used to hold paper targets and steel targets as well as stop all projectiles. I was fortunate enough to get get free ties from a local rail management company. Here is the pile I get to choose from:

Each one weights between 200 and 300lbs, sheesh! It wore me out every day I picked some up on the way home most of the time 8 at a time in the tacoma. I ended up getting 46 in total.

Beginning The Build

Once I had cut enough saplings along the trail to get the mower down I started to mow the cleared out area and shooting at cans on the tree stumps and one hanging railroad tie plate. I marked potential backstop locations with blue ribbon