Minturn to reexamine its exposure to wildland fire potential from shooting range
Mayor says fire restrictions don't do enough to protect town from threats caused by shooting range
Krista Driscoll/Vail Daily archive
The Two Elk Target Range in Minturn causes the town’s mayor to lose sleep, and not just because he’s heard automatic weapons being fired there at 1 a.m.
“When Stage-1 fire restrictions go into place, we can’t grill a burger in the backyard, but you can shoot guns in a semi-arid territory,” Mayor Earle Bidez said at a recent Town Council meeting. “It’s a property and a life safety issue that needs to be looked at closer, because it’s just getting drier and drier.”
The town had been in Stage 2 restrictions for much of the summer, which did close down the Two Elk Target Range, but issues persisted nonetheless, Bidez said.
“Once it goes to Stage 2, it still takes a week to a week and a half to get the range closed,” he said. “And then when they do that, they don’t close the gate because the Two Elk trailhead is on the same road.”
For a time this summer, after a sign had been posted saying the shooting range was closed, “the shooting continued,” Bidez said.
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Now, with the downgrading of fire restrictions in Eagle County, with Stage 1 restrictions set to be lifted on Friday, it means the shooting range will open again, something that makes Bidez and others nervous throughout the remainder of the fire season.
“Sooner or later, if we can’t control it, we’re going to put our whole town in danger of burning down completely,” Bidez said.
Bidez points to the summer of 2018, a dry year like this one, when two human-caused fires were started by shooters at the Two Elk Target Range. One of those blazes consumed 25 acres and required nearby Vail Mountain to be evacuated.
A couple of years later, a report was filed with the Sheriff’s Office in which people were video recorded firing automatic weapons at the shooting range at 1 a.m.
“You could see the flash of the gun lighting up over and over again in the video,” Bidez said. “But part of the issue is the shooting range is on Forest Service land, and the sheriff does not have jurisdiction there.”
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Bidez said the town looked into the possibility of closing the range, but the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act, passed in 2019, made that process harder. The Dingell Act requires the U.S. Forest Service to consider alternatives before closing any shooting ranges and ensure that the closure is “limited to the smallest area necessary and for the shortest time necessary.”
A more realistic solution might be to have the shooting range managed by the Sheriff’s Office, rather than the U.S. Forest Service, Bidez said.
“We believe that there are other Forest Services that have allowed local policing on Forest Service land,” Bidez said.
The town of Minturn has renewed talks with the Forest Service regarding management of the shooting range, a process that will likely lead to a community-wide meeting between the Sheriff’s Office, the Eagle River Fire Protection District, the U.S. Forest Service and the Minturn Town Council, Bidez said.
Bidez said they may invite adjacent jurisdictions, like the town of Vail, to join as well.
“We’ll probably present what our findings have been at that time,” Bidez said. “When we’ve got the process, and everything we want to do to move forward, we’ll need to have a major agenda item for the Town Council, so everybody can show up, give us their input and let them hear you.”
Bidez says he’s hopeful that something will be in place before next summer.
“I’m either hoping for that or a wet summer,” he said.
