Shoot 'em up (clay targets, that is)

By Scott Hammers / The Bulletin

 

Jeff Moore, 47, from Bend, prepares to shoot Saturday at Central Oregon Sporting Clays and Hunting Preserve between Bend and Redmond. Customers say the facility is the only place in Central Oregon for shooting sporting clays, also called “golf with a shotgun.”
Photos by Scott Hammers / The Bulletin

 When Spencer Tabor first saw Halligan Ranch, he was confident he could transform it into a top-notch shooting destination.

So confident, he quit his job.

After 18 months of work, Tabor, 45, opened Central Oregon Sporting Clays and Hunting Preserve on Dec. 1 on the ranch, located halfway between Bend and Redmond. For the former funeral home director and financial adviser, a day at work is now pretty much indistinguishable from a day off.

“I'm living on a resort, man,” Tabor said Saturday, eating his lunch by the campfire. “I'm out here just like I would be if I was hunting; I just get to do it every day.”

On a small corner of the 225-acre ranch about three-quarters of a mile east of U.S. Highway 97, Tabor has built a series of shooting stations. Overlooking the range from the top of a 10-foot tower, he's able to operate about a dozen electric trap throwers tucked in among the junipers, launching clay pigeons at the push of a button.

Sporting clays use the same clay targets as trap or skeet shooting, but the targets are launched from multiple locations at different speeds and trajectories, often with trees and other natural obstacles down range.

“Sporting clays gives you more of a wild bird actuality, what the birds are actually going to do in the air, left to right, up and down, coming at you,” Tabor said.

Since the Bend Trap Club closed its range on Brosterhous Road in 2006 and relocated to Millican, shooting sporting clays has often meant a long drive for local shooters. Bill Truxal, 59, of Bend, said many Central Oregon shooters had to resort to Salem or the Columbia River Gorge to find sporting clay courses.

“They had a really nice facility over at the Bend Trap Club before it got moved, and now Spence has opened up this other place,” Truxal said. “It's great. There's really no other place to shoot sporting clays in Central Oregon.”

By January, Tabor expects to have completed the next phase of the project, opening a course where shooters move through 13 different stations, each one offering a different shooting environment. He's planning a trail system between the stations, and golf carts for shooters who prefer not to walk.

The similarity to a golf course is no accident

“They call sporting clays golf with a shotgun,” Wolfe said.

The fields around Halligan Ranch had been fallow for seven years until Tabor and Wolfe replanted them last spring, growing sunflowers, milo and oat hay to encourage a robust bird population. Quail are already found at the ranch, and Tabor and Wolfe are raising pheasant and chukar with plans to release them into the wild for hunters.

Scott Hammers can be reached at 541-383-0387 or at shammers@bendbulletin.com