Tahoe Donner resident Paco Lindsay began noticing last summer that the activity at the shooting range on the backside of the subdivision had been steadily increasing. He was hearing the pop pop pop of guns all day — morning, noon, and night — and the sounds weren’t coming just from rifles but also semi-automatics. It got to the point that when Lindsay took his dog, Sonora, out for a walk, she would startle and sprint for home every time the gunfire started up.
Finally, this summer Lindsay had enough. After reaching out to other Tahoe Donner homeowners, he identified around 60 people who were also concerned by the rise and intensity of shooting coming from the gun range on Carpenter Valley Road, located off of Alder Creek Road on U.S. Forest Service land. Citing concerns about noise, safety, the environment, and fire, Lindsay started a grassroots effort to remove the makeshift gun range, which has been in use for around 20 years.
“This is not a gun issue,” said Lindsay, who owns more than 12 guns and has lived in Tahoe Donner since 1996. “This has nothing to do with guns. This is totally the wrong place for this.”
However, you’d be hard-pressed to find the gun range now. At the end of August, the U.S. Forest Service complied with Lindsay’s and others’ demands and bulldozed the one-and-a-half acre shooting range. All that’s left is tilled soil, the raised backdrop, and hundreds of empty shell casings. John George, the recreation and staff officer for the USFS Truckee and Sierraville Ranger Districts, said it was the fairest solution.
“We are trying to be sensitive to both sides,” he said. “This is a step in the right direction to come to common ground.”
It is legal to fire on public land as long as shooters are 150 yards away from any structure, don’t shoot across a roadway or water, and do not damage natural resources. Although bulldozing the shooting range may discourage people from returning to the Carpenter Valley range, it is still legal to shoot there.
For Lindsay and other Tahoe Donner residents, this solution was a long-time coming. Lindsay first contacted the USFS in January, and also complained to the Town of Truckee, the Tahoe Donner Association, and Nevada County Supervisor Richard Anderson. Other residents, like 15-year Tahoe Donner homeowner Parvin Darabi, called the police. (Carpenter Valley is outside the Town of Truckee’s boundaries, so it falls under the jurisdiction of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.)
“I don’t know why their right to shoot guns trumps my right to live in our home in peace and quiet,” Darabi said at the end of August. “This is Tahoe Donner. It’s a nice place … Last Saturday and Sunday, it was bang bang bang all day long.”
At first, the USFS responded by posting signs at the shooting range that informed users that the noise was bothering homeowners and directing them to a nearby alternative, sanctioned target range near Boca Reservoir. The agency also increased patrols and had volunteers clean up trash. In January, a Nevada County Sheriff’s Deputy arrested one person at the shooting range for possession of a large capacity magazine and assault weapon. The suspect was also in possession of marijuana.
Lindsay said these actions cut back on the gun range activity but didn’t stop it.
“I said ‘These signs are a joke, they are not going to achieve anything,’” Lindsay told the Forest Service. “The moment they stop patrolling, they are going to come back. This is not acceptable.”
In addition to being bothered by the noise coming from the gun range, Lindsay was also concerned about other issues like safety, citing the shooting range’s proximity to Tahoe Donner hiking and biking trails and the nearby Alder Creek Campground, as well as residences.
“People are due to have misfires,” he said. “With arms that have ranges of 1 to 3 miles, out of 6,000 homes in Tahoe Donner, that is probably putting 4,000 homes at risk.”
George of the USFS, however, disagreed that the shooting range put people in harm’s way.
“I don’t believe that people are in danger,” he said. “We had law enforcement assess the safety situation.”
Lindsay also worried about the litter generated at the shooting range, noting that people had shot up TV sets, computers, and trees.
“The ground is littered with thousands of spent shells,” he said. “How many thousands of pounds of lead are now in the ground? That’s like changing your oil in the woods. This is a toxic dump.”
George said the trash was mainly made up of paper targets. When Moonshine Ink was at the site after it was bulldozed, the only litter on the ground was spent shell casings.
Lindsay also expressed concerns that gunfire could start a wildfire. The September 2013 Morgan Fire on Mount Diablo that scorched more than 3,100 acres was caused by a target shooter firing steel-jacketed bullets with a high-powered rifle. However, George said that the possibility of that happening in Carpenter Valley was slim.
“After discussing with our fire folks, it’s been determined that a fire [caused by target shooting] is extremely unlikely,” he said.
George said that ever since the signs went up in April and the shooting range was bulldozed, the noise complaints have substantially decreased. In the end, everyone seems happy. Even avid target shooters like Bruce Aldrich, who writes the Tahoe Truckee Outdoor blog, applauded the outcome.
“It seems like a reasonable solution to me, to make it unappealing,” he said. “It’s a fair compromise and probably a good thing … I never like to lose a site, but if it’s bothering homeowners, then why go there?”
Lindsay is also pleased with the USFS’ actions since bulldozing the gun range was the option he was pushing for.
“I’m really pretty happy. I felt I had an obligation,” he said. “This was not just for me but for the whole community. I hope most responsible people go to Boca.”
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