wsr

The third archery event I attended this year was the Western States Traditional Rendezvous. This event rotates around several of the Western states, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California, I believe, year by year. I was fortunate it was nice and close this year because now that I know what a great event it is I will certainly be willing to drive further for it in the future. Traditional Bowhunters of Washington were this year's sponsors and they did a fantastic job. The location was a large private ranch on the Cowlitz River near Mt. Ranier National Park. Our weather predictons were dire... straight days of thundershowers predicted.As those who follow my adventures know, i had resealed my little wall tent after the Kitsap shoot, but I decided even that wouldn't be enough and invested in a plastic tarp fly with its own poles. This really worked, and I stayed merely damp, rather than soaked, as long as I was in the tent.

I was really fortunate in going up on the Friday, fairly early. The weather was taking a break and I got to set up in dry conditions. By Friday afternoon, the deluge. After that, merely damp was a good condition. Saturday was not pouring... just what we refer to here as "the air is soft today", i.e. mist and occasional rain, but no downpours. Saturday evening the rain started in earnest and it just poured all night, Sunday was looking like more of the same and I figured Friday, Saturday and half of Sunday was enough and broke down the camp and went home.

In spite of the rain, it was a truly fantastic event... loads of fun and lots of shooting. They had three 3D courses set up. Course A was tough in that almost half of the shots were set along the river bank... miss high and goodbye. I passed on those. Course B had fewer river shots, and Course C was a dream. I really wanted to shoot Course C a couple more times, but the rain wasn't about to let up and I didn't. I'd been really drenched on Friday afternoon and was feeling a bit puny as a result so I just didn't want to do the whole shoot in the rain in the rain drenched woods thing over again. I will however remember Saturday morning's tour of Course C as one of the nicest shooting experiences I have had... great shots in beautiful settings. I'm sorry I don't have pictures of that course, but I was being careful about having the camera out.

There were some nice novelty shoots. The most interesting was the floating bear, but the Long Elk Shoot was great, too. There was something called a Viking Shoot (you dressed up as a Viking(!?) but it was at 6:00 am... a scientific interval I have only read about, so I missed that one.

There was an outstanding representation of vendors, and I left a suitable amount of money behind... mostly in getting set up to make arrows.

Anyway, I had a wonderful time and certainly want to thank the TBW folks who put this event on.

Here's the camp. As I said, I came in early Friday. Conditions were good and I had plenty of space. By Saturday afternoon, this area held well over 200 camps!

Some folks are serious about traditional!

and some folks believe in spacious quarters!

others keep it simple...

This was the view across the campground on Friday.

Okay... the floating bear event. They rigged a raft with a bear on it. Now, the Cowlitz, thanks to the rain and an unseasonable warm spell, was running high and fast. The bear swung out further than expected and floated pretty fast. I'm told he was 35 yards out. Shooters lined the banks and shot at will.

Here I've zoomed the bear, so he looks closer... he's not. I really like this picture. Note the arrows floating in the water behind him.

There were, as you can see, a lot of good shooters. Very, very much to my surprise, one of the arrows in that big central grouping is mine.

Does that bear look mad to you?

The arrows in the bear are, of course, only part of the story... Here you see some, only a few really, of the arrows that weren't sticking in the bear! It was hard to get a good shot of this, but in addition to the obvious arrows, all those little white specks are nocks barely afloat. Not having scuba gear, I was unable to get pictures of the aluminum arrows that missed!

This is maybe the worst picture I took... certainly it is, for me, the most disappointing. I meant to get a good picture of the guy out in the water. He was out there in waders rescuing a very high percentage of those floating arrows. At times he was out considerably deeper than is shown here.

This is a more usual view of the hills... lowering clouds about to dump on us...

Activities started here, at the registration tent.

This is a collage of some of the vendors... by no means all, just the ones I happened to get pictures of.

Jerry Krauth gave a seminar on "42 Years of Roosevelt Elk Hunting". Nice that he established his qualifications right up front!

Jerry, consulting his notes. He has hunted Long Island, an archery exclusive area of Washington, for 42 years.

For me, one of the most interesting parts of Jerry's talk wa watching him empty his "day pack" (from which he can easily stay overnight). This pack had many pockets and watching the stuff come out was like watching the clowns exiting a circus car... it just went on and on and on and on and.....

The other novelty event was the Long Elk Shoot. Now, this is the practice field, but if your eyes are good, you can see the elk.... waaayyyyy out there.

This shoot was three shots for $1. For each round, the closes hitting arrow was left... all others removed. (Of course, this presumes a hit!) Winner when it was over got this Glenn St. Charles made arrow plaque.

The firing line for the first flight.

I couldn't resist keeping this shot in... kids and dogs were very much a part of this event. Here, they're "helping" locate the arrows that overshot the elk.

This was the best shot from the second flight. First flight had only one hit, below the eye.

After Saturday's dinner (barbecued pork or bratwurst... lots of sides and desserts), there was a big campfire, and Fred McClintock and I joined it. Needless to say, the kids were fascinated. Fred couldn't get a date with any of the girls, though.

G. Fred Aspell was our guest speaker. Here he is getting set up... which mainly consisted of finding out which way the smoke wasn't blowing.

G. Fred gave a very entertaining talk about how he got into archery and hunting. We all enjoyed it enough that even though it started raining midway, we stuck it out and all went back to our camps somewhat more than damp...

As I noted above, Saturday night was a
"get out the ark" downpour all night. It lightened up a bit on Sunday morning, but then started up again, and I had had enough fun for one weekend. A warm shower and a dinner out with Ann was looking mighty good. I think I may have made a good decision. A few folks were leaving, but there were still a couple of hundred or more cars to get out of there. What do you think this was like by Monday afternoon?

... and so we bid good bye to Camp Rainy Days.... until next year in Oregon!