My first day at the big Sandy

This place is noisy to the extreme, but at least the pictures are quiet so they can be safely clicked.

My first sunset at the Big Sandy Machine Gun Shoot. By no means spectacular but I think it captures the ruggedness of the desert mountains in Arizona, and the bleak isolation of this largely uninhabited part of the Arizona desert.

My hearing is poor, to say the least, and I started getting that way when I was in the Air Force, working on the flight line, around running jet engines. I probably made it worse by being a shooter for most of my life when hearing protection wasn't commonly used, and by the time I wised up, most of the damage had been done.

Of course, getting older certainly doesn't help your hearing as you lose some just naturally as you age. Losing your hearing, to one degree or another, is a serious handicap, but it's just about the only handicap that doesn't get you any sympathy at all; in fact, it's just the opposite, some folks treat you like you have mental problems just because you can't hear every word they say.

So why am I talking about my hearing today? It's because today was extraordinarily noisy. I brought my mouse ears with me, which is something you always do when you're around shooting, but I forgot to bring my earplugs and left them in the bronco. So even though my headphone type hearing protectors are suitable for ordinary shooting, when you're around machine-gun fire or cannon fire, you really need earplugs and mouse ears. So I had to get back on the shuttle that takes folks from the boondocking area to the firing line, which is about half a mile or so, up and down a pretty steep hill, to get my earplugs before I lost what little was left of my hearing.

                                                                     Theboondork

My sunrise this morning, again was nothing to write home about but it signaled the beginning of another day of the joy of being on the road and doing what I enjoy doing.

By sunrise this morning my boondocking situation had changed considerably since yesterday, and the crowds are starting to gather. I'm not thrilled with being around crowds, and this is way too close to neighbors in my ordinary boondocking world. But seeing as how this is reportedly the largest machine gun shoot in the world, some compromises on my part have to be made.

I don't know if The Big Sandy is the biggest machine gun shoot in the world, but I've never been to one bigger.

The bronco is at the end of the road just about in the middle of the picture. You can see the shuttlebus coming up the hill, I suppose I could walk, but its 90° outside today, and the hill where you see the shuttlebus, is a lot steeper than it looks.