I went to bed at 12:40 this morning.  I only lost five pounds this year instead of the usual 10.  So you should know from just that data point it was the best event ever.  An amazing number of people were there.  Spectators drove from Missoula and brought someone from Mississippi.  Participants drove from Texas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Michigan, and Arizona.  Others came in from New York City, Maryland, Florida, California, and Alaska.  The KING 5 crew for Evening Magazine seemed to be good people even if they were a little nervous and perhaps a bit overwhelmed.  They both shot explosives from close range with Ry’s tricked out Kalashnikov.  I’ll post when I know the show date and time. Ry will record it and create DVDs for us.

Blogs with pictures so far are here:

FishOrMan
Periodic Journal of my wanderings (See also here, here, and here)
Musings of the Commando Kumquat

The weather was fantastic.  Best ever.  My son James will have to change his story on the Boomershoot weather predictions now.

The fireball demo worked this time.

The anvil firing and bowling ball launch were big hits.

The worst safety violations I saw or heard about were spectators not using ear protection and a couple participants that forgot to put on safety glasses while shooting.

Ry entertained us by getting his van stuck in the mud–twice.  Barb took particular pleasure in the fact it was her Jeep that pulled him out both times.

In all the insanity of the group “clean up” at the tree line we overlooked six 4”, 25 6”, and one 7” target behind the berm.  That was 32 targets the participants missed out on.  I’m sorry about that.  But what struck me the most about that oversight is that in the first Boomershoot in ’98 I only had 68 targets total and at this event we overlooked nearly half that many and never missed them.

Thanks to someone’s good eyes they noticed a fire up way up on the hill from a tracer round and I was able to put it out before it did any damage.

Gene Econ and assistants put on a great clinic by all accounts.

I didn’t see much of the clinic.  I and many others were busy making targets.  That is a story in itself that would take an hour or more to write up and I don’t have the time for right now.  The bottom line is that we had a crisis with targets not detonating due to a couple of subtle process variables that changed from our earlier tests.  We didn’t realize the process had changed but it had.  It could have been a disaster.  In some ways it was a disaster but rather than put a bullet in my head we figured out a work-around and made it work.  The long-range targets were failures but the 375 yard targets worked well and people loved getting up close and blasting away from 25 yards away.  Video should be available from Jason Mount and others soon.

I planned to write and post the speech I wanted to give at the Boomershoot dinner soon.  The time I had allocated to write it were consumed recovering from the target problems.  Lots of things I wanted to say and didn’t remember at the time.  Lots of things I could have said much better.  I really appreciate the tolerance.  I figured the targets for the next day were more important than my blathering the night before.

I’m tired, very tired.  Time for about 12 hours of sleep.