EUGENE — One day in September, two workers on fire patrol for the Oregon Department of Forestry were driving up a gravel road in the woods near Lorane west of Cottage Grove when they heard a sudden pop.

Thinking they might have blown a tire, the two women — college students on summer jobs — stopped and got out.

They heard more popping noises and recognized the echo of gunshots.

And then they heard another noise, closer.

A bullet had struck the hood of their truck, ricocheted and punctured the windshield on the driver’s side.

Quickly, the women got back into the rig, crouched down and backed their way down the road, unsure whether the shot was accidental.

State police and Lane County sheriff’s deputies were called. Farther up the road they found a landing with a wooden target and brass shell casings from bullets fired by a high-powered rifle.

Someone had been target shooting. Because of the rise and fall of the gravel road, the shooters never would have seen the fire truck, which had been hit by a bullet that no doubt passed right through the wooden target.

“It’s very apparent that it was accidental,” said Link Smith, unit forester for the state forestry department. “I don’t think the shooters had any idea what they did.”

Safety and respect

But the frightening near-tragedy had a galvanizing effect among some who work in the woods. Recently representatives of those who work on state, federal and private forest lands joined to urge a new commitment to safety and respect by target shooters on public and private lands.

“It truly is dumb luck that there haven’t been more incidents,” said Dave Cramsey, district forester for Roseburg Forest Products, which owns 124,000 acres of timberland in Lane County.

In the view of Smith, Cramsey and Bill Hatton, field manager for the Siuslaw Resource Area of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, unsafe target shooting has increased dramatically in recent years.

“A number of forest workers have had some pretty close calls, have come around a corner on a road and find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle because somebody is shooting down the road,” said Cramsey, who himself had that experience recently.

Smith, Cramsey and Hatton emphasize that they are all target shooters themselves, and they understand that shooters will seek to practice their sport on Lane County’s public and, where not prohibited, private forest lands.

“I look at it as the use of good common sense,” Hatton said. “As a target shooter, you don’t shoot unless you have a direct line of sight to where your bullet’s going to impact and that it’s going to impact in a solid backstop. To me, that means a substantial mound of dirt, or a dirt face on the side of a hill.”

“Trees aren’t a substantial backstop, because bullets can go through trees,” he said. “Rocks are not a good backstop, because bullets can ricochet off rocks.

“It needs to be a good, solid dirt bank. Those are shooting skills that most people are taught as kids. My concern, and I’m a shooter, is that we’ve got a generation of shooters that weren’t taught ethics — just good outdoor ethics, and safe shooting practices.”

Not hunters

Once, perhaps, target shooters and hunters were the same. That’s not the case anymore.

“There are a lot of shooters out there who aren’t hunters, and that’s OK,” Smith said. “But if you get a hunting license, you go through hunter education programs and there are means to teach people about where a safe place is. To get a gun and buy ammunition, you don’t need to pass a test and learn where to shoot safely. I think there are a lot of folks who haven’t had the opportunity to do that.”

In Lane County, there are two outdoor shooting ranges. It’s hard to find a safe alternative.

Shooters also meet difficulty finding open spaces with at least 100 yards to shoot — hence, the cases in which shooters have actually set up their targets on logging roads.

Questionable safety

On a recent weekday, the forestry officials took a Register-Guard reporter and photographer to two frequently used forest locations southwest of Veneta. One area is Salmon Creek, a clearing on BLM land on an old gravel stockpile. On that day, five men were shooting there — two firing rifles from a prone position at a wooden target backed by trees, another group of three firing various weapons, including a pistol.

In the view of the forestry officials, the site is of dubious safety; any shots fired to the right, as the shooters face the area, can travel unimpeded through the woods.

The place is also littered with casings from ammunition for shotguns and rifles, as well as other trash, despite a volunteer cleanup effort last spring by a group of local shooters who removed 15 cubic yards of garbage from that site and five others.

“Not all shooters are idiots,” said Joe Schafer, of Eugene, a target shooter who organized the cleanup effort, drawing close to 30 volunteers from participants in an online forum and dubbing the effort “Taking Aim at Trash.”

The trash is a byproduct of thoughtless shooters, who bring old computers or TV sets for use as targets — or shoot at those items when dumped by others.

“There’s a segment of shooters that do not clean up after themselves,” Cramsey said. “They leave a tremendous mess out there. They give everybody who owns a firearm a bad name.”

Schafer doesn’t disagree that unsafe shooting seems to be increasing.

“People don’t understand the need for a solid earth backdrop,” he said. “They don’t see beyond their target. I think a lot of people are being exposed to shooting later in life, and they don’t have the skills to find an appropriate place.”

Another nearby site is a staging area known as High Point. It offers a spectacular view to the east and north — and no indication that there are a few homes a mile away, in shooting range for a high-powered rifle.

“Shotguns, clay birds, trap shooting, this is a safe place for that,” Cramsey said. “It’s not a safe place for a solid projectile.”

Clearly, shooters have been active there, as evidenced by the shell casings on the ground and the other trash in the area, and by the damage to older trees and seedlings caused by bullets.

“This is a direct hit to the landowner’s pocketbook, because you’ve lost growth on trees,” Cramsey said. “The damage to young forests from shooting is significant, maybe in the tens of thousands of dollars a year.”