I almost got shot today

I took this after they continued to shoot down the road in spite of nearly shooting me


I was hiking down a serene creek-side logging road near Lake Cushman today, when I heard gun fire. It sounded like it was a small caliber rifle. It also sounded like it was coming from the road I was on.

I hoped that the shooters were wise enough to be shooting into a bank. But, for all I knew they could have been shooting down the road. So I blew my emergency whistle every 10 seconds and walked very slowly down the road. Sometimes when I blew my whistle the shooting would stop, so I thought that they had heard me and realized there was a hiker coming down the road. But each time the shooting started up again.

Then I came around a blind corner and got my first glimpse of the shooters. When I saw that they were shooting straight down the road and right at me I let out another whistle. Then they yelled it's ok we’ll stop shooting. That was way too close for comfort!

I had to walk right past them to keep going and there was three of them and only one of me so I did not want to be too confrontational. But I took a few pictures. Unfortunately, I forgot that my camera was set to manual focus, so the pictures are not very clear.

I told them that they should be shooting into a bank and that the road I was on gets a lot of foot traffic. They said they did not think anyone would be on that road because it is washed out. There is no excuse for shooting down the road EVER! I had never been there before but I explained to them that I had seen a lot of evidence of brush picking and recent litter in the area so clearly the road got a lot of traffic.


This was to slow them down on the way out so they would not run over my dog.





My first view of the shooters as I came around the corner


You can see their targets in this picture


This is what the targets looked like from the shooters point of view

There were two women and one man. The gun they had looked like a .22.
The man told me that just as one of the women was about to shoot again he saw my dog (she was running ahead of me) and he told her to stop. I hate to admit it, but I had let my dog run ahead for just that reason. I figured she was lower to the ground than what anyone would be shooting at so if they were actually dumb enough to be shooting down the road they would see my dog first and stop before they shot me. If they had not seen my dog they would have fired that shot and might have hit me. So maybe I owe my life to my dog now.

They said they were going to leave and go shoot some where else but after I had walked only a few hundred feet past them and around a corner they started shooting again! So then I went back and took a picture of their license plate. These people just don’t seem to get it! I'm going to report them in the morning.

What a way to end a hike! I’m still a bit shook up.