There used to be a home weather station about a mile from the Boomershoot site that was available on the Internet via Weather Underground. I would check the weather and know it was a very good representation of what was going on at my property. My phone app, Field Ballistics, automatically looks up the closest weather station to your shooting location and can feed that information, including the direction you are shooting, into your shooting solution, Having temperature, air pressure, and wind for when I was doing some shooting on site without getting out my thermometer, wind gauge, and air pressure meter was very cool.

A couple years ago the family with the weather station moved away and took the weather station with them. Brother Doug has a weather station about two miles away but he hasn’t connected it to the Internet and isn’t interested in doing that. I contemplated putting one up at Boomershoot Mecca but with all the trees around it the wind measurement would be wrong. I finally decided that I would put one at the Boomershoot shooting line. I needed to put in solar power and a permanent Internet connection there, but I decided it was worth it.

Yesterday Kim and I did most of the work. I accidently left a critical part in Bellevue so it is not online yet but it’s close enough that it will be a short job the next time I visit. This is the pictorial story of putting up the weather station.

It was cold and there was deep snow. Dropping a bolt or nut into the snow would have been a serious problem so we assembled everything we could while in Doug’s family room. We loaded up everything, including snow shoes, and drove over to the Boomershoot site. We knew we would have to carry everything in the last 250 yards or so.

As expected, the driveway into the shooting line had drifts in it and there was no way we were driving in.

Meridian road was plowed but as sister-in-law Julie explained there is a new snowplow driver for the county road department. The community has taken to calling him ”One-Lane McClain”. We parked just across the road from the entrance, which was mostly blocked by a vehicle anyway. Since this was a one lane road thanks to the snowplow we got off the road as much as we could then shoveled so other people could get past us if they tried to get through while we were parked there.

We borrowed a toboggan from Doug and used it to take in the heavy stuff. The battery alone was 130 pounds. With the box and other equipment it was a bit challenging to get through the deep snow. I wore snowshoes but Kim had never worn snowshoes before and was hesitant to try. She tried to walk in my snowshoe and toboggan tracks but was breaking through up to her knees on every step. It was a lot of work and after about 50 feet I encouraged her to go back and try the snowshoes. She had to figure out the adjustment to match her feet but soon she was experiencing the joys of walking through deep snow with far less effort.

It took us three or four trips but we got everything in, the steel fence posts pounded through the frozen ground, and everything assembled with the exception of some wires that came loose as we were jostling things into place.

This is the shooting berm. The snow drifts feathered the edges into nothingness.

By the time we finished, about 4:45, we were starting to get some nice colors in the sunset.

It was on the cold side of normal. It was 17 F when we arrived about 2:15. When we left about 4:45 it was 7 F. Kim, thinking ahead brought a thermos with hot water. It felt so good to warm up my mouth and face by sipping on the cup of hot water when we would take a break.

When the station goes online, probably sometime next month or maybe early March, I’ll post the URL.

Update: Brother Doug sent me an email telling me that Kim and I were working on the property the day before the 99th anniversary of when my Grandmother Huffman (Sadie Carey at the time) and two of her sisters purchased the place. This land has been in our family ever since.