BY SKIP KNOWLES
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
    Murle Hafner never thought he would see the day there is more shooting going on down in the streets of the Salt Lake Valley than at the Holladay Gun Club. 
    He has a huge shooting-sports family, but they are about to be evicted. 
    Holladay Gun Club's leased land will be ground up and poured out as gravel for the I-15 expansion within a year or two, and there is nothing he and his close-knit group of 30 friends can do about it. Up to 500 hunters a day zero their rifles at the 18 bench rests here at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon in the weeks before deer season. Public visits combine with those of 400 members who shoot clay pigeons and rifles to total more than 30,000 visits annually. 
    Hafner is the clubhouse clerk on duty, a retired government employee and a rangemaster here for 20 years. He is sad to see an institution he has been a part of for 30 years forced out, and wonders where all those people will go to shoot. 
    "People should shoot where they are supervised and safe," he said. "Any time we lose a gun range, we lose a lot. There are a lot of shooters, and county commissioners will build dozens of golf courses, but they won't provide a shooting place and we don't have enough." 
    With it will go his job. Shooters relied heavily on his advice on safe reloading. But the loss of the club may also be felt by mountain hikers and bikers, too. The hordes of hunters who annually sight-in their rifles before the hunt to assure humane kills may turn to the National Forest for target practice. Other outdoor recreationalists could find themselves in the line of fire. 
    Currently, anyone can show up at Holladay and pay to shoot. With $4 and a shotgun, a person can test hand-to-eye coordination with a round of 25 skeet overlooking city lights, roadways, and sprawl of the valley. The problem is, that same view took in nothing but scattered farmlands in the 1950s. 
    Pressure from growth is closing in on shooting clubs and ranges along the Wasatch Front. Increased land values, highway expansion and noise complaints from new subdivisions are putting guns on the run at some of Utah's oldest public social clubs. The result is severely limited options for trap and skeet shooters, hunters, recreational shooters and even law-enforcement agencies. 
    The Holladay Club is still alive, for now. But the valley's oldest shooting club, the Salt Lake City Gun Club (since 1913), suffered a short-notice cease-fire in September because it lies in the path of Gov. Mike Leavitt's Legacy Highway. 
    Even the benign little Bountiful Lion's Club Range has been threatened, despite support of city officials. It is a heavily used public range that benefits the blind (the Lions' main cause), hosts annual community gatherings and provides free services for three law-enforcement agencies, as well as dozens of church and youth groups. Still, it is on and off the ropes due to encroachment of trophy homes on Bountiful's east benches. 
    In a time when gun-fear is peaking nationwide, shooting-sports enthusiasts feel a bit like Frankenstein. Holladay members feels like the mob is at the door. 

    Fighting a Losing Battle: Holladay is the Intermountain West's most complete shooting club, a family oriented place with lots of women, children, Boy Scout troops and hunter safety instructor classes going on. Concealed weapon qualifying classes are held and blackpowder shooters rendezvous frequently on site. Wingshooters enjoy all three disciplines of competitive shotgunning (clay pigeons) and pistol classes that teach safety are routine. 
    The club has weathered many tempests in the past few years, including a membership decline when rumors of looming closure during legal battles in 1995 prompted many members to stop paying dues. 
    The site was used for shooting since the turn of the century, said president Dave Winburn. Winburn is a blackpowder shooter who worked all summer to buy his first muzzleloader for $25 in the 1930s. J.B. Walker bought the property in the 1920s and liked the group of people who shot on the foothill area at the mouth of Big Cottonwood. He let them build a duck tower (skeet house) and a clubhouse in 1954. The club formalized, and membership grew until the early '90s. 
    Things started to get rough when Bonneville Pacific took over adjacent land from Utah Power and immediately closed the Salt Lake County Sheriff's rifle range, Winburn said. Next, the county commissioners approved an adjacent 62-acre homesite for Boyer Development, moving to condemn the club's road (now part of a lease) for eminent domain to help the developer. 
    "It cost a lot of money, but we fought it with lawyers and won," he said. 
    As a result, the commission moved to condemn the club based on high noise readings that would occur when the subdivision was eventually built. But two years ago, the state Legislature passed a bill protecting noise-making entities from people who move to an area and then file complaints. 
    They had won. Then, last year, the club lost its water supply when the wooden flume at the mouth of Big Cottonwood was replaced with a huge pipe at lower elevation. The grounds have lost their greenery and trees, and have attained a gritty, ghost-town look that is actually much closer to the pre-existing desert conditions. And that is just fine with the mule deer. Like all the benches along the Wasatch Front, the area is critical mule-deer winter range where hundreds of deer migrate in the winter to escape deep snows up higher and forage for food. Herds of deer cross the range in the middle of rifle practices from December through March, take the grounds over every night and even stand down range of the skeet and trap areas, shaking off falling bird shot like flies in the summer. 
    Winburn said he is still rankled the county commission missed an easy opportunity to buy the adjacent 150 acres south of the club for winter mule-deer habitat and open space when the new owners declared it as surplus and posted it for sale, instead letting developers have it. 
    That would have kept the sheriff's rifle range next door for law enforcement, money they then had to spend elsewhere, he said, while insulating the Holladay site from growth. 
    After winning those costly battles, and learning to use portable bathrooms and bottled water, the really bad news came from the club's long-term friends and lease holders. Walker Development is going to grind up the land as gravel-mining operations expand, and when the gravel is gone, the land may be sold for home sites, Winburn said. 
    "When we need that material underneath it, we are going to mine it away and we will reduce the club or shut it down," said Doug Shelby, general partner with Walker Development. "We don't know the time structure." 
    Shelby, ironically, is a member, but calls it a natural death for the club. 
    "It has always been planned that it would be mined . . . I hate to see it go away, it's convenient and a lot of people have enjoyed it over the years," he said. 
    He will go to the Lee Kay Center to shoot, he said, a state-run facility at 600 West and 2100 South in Salt Lake. 

    Losing High-Caliber Friends: What most pains Holladay's Club members is the loss of a close-knit group who share an outdoor activity. Plenty of young shooters and families fill the place evening, nights and weekends. But it is retired sportsmen and trap shooters who sit around talking, bragging, and taking shots at each other's shooting all day long at the clubhouse. 
    "It's just good people down here," said Hafner. " I've made a lot of friends here that will do anything for you any time, anywhere, it doesn't matter . . . and I would do anything for them." 
    Loss of that camaraderie will hurt the most for four-time president Al Robbins, a soft-spoken older gentleman with a laser eye for busting clay pigeons with a $4,000 Winchester Model 12 pump, 12 gauge he cradles under his arm as he shuffles around the club. He joined in 1959. 
    "I made most of my friends here," he said. "It's a shame. It's not fair. There is no place like it. We got all these golf courses and we can't get help with one little shooting club. A lot of people enjoy it," he said. 
    "There's 50 people here on any given weekend day, and we've had up to 500," he said. "This place is half our lives. We had our businesses and families, and this is the other half. Us old retired guys, what are we going to do? Go down to the pool hall in the city?" 
    That would be a bad idea. A person could get shot down there, according to recent news reports. And that is not lost on the 77-year-old rangemaster down at Bountiful Lions Rifle Range, which averages 12,000 visits annually. 
    "Every day you hear someone getting shot and killed down in the valley outside a saloon or in a parking lot, but never up here on the rifle range," said Van Chappen. 
    Aside from the "half-moon" club -- those with a scar over the right eyebrow caused when a shooter crowds the scope on a heavily recoiling rifle--there have been no injuries in the 30-year history of the range. 
    Well, there was the one man who put the wrong caliber bullet in his gun. 
    "We found parts of that rifle when the snow melted in spring, but he wasn't hurt," Chappen chuckled. 
    Chappen works for a pittance, plinking away when things are slow with a blackpowder rifle he built with his own hands. Most of the time he is watching other people's hands. 
    "It's hands that make a gun go off. They never go off accidentally," he said. 
    Safety is the reason the club exists, said Troy Hanks, current Bountiful Lions president. 
    "If you are not shooting in a safe, controlled environment, than you are shooting in an unsafe, uncontrolled environment," Hanks said. "We don't want people in the mountains walking into some plinker's line of fire. This started as a service project . . . so the public doesn't have to run up in the hills and shoot up the countryside . . . at cans and targets," he said. 
    Now, the Bountiful range provides funding for the blind as well as community projects with money that comes mostly from a huge annual turkey shoot. Highway patrol officers, city police and Davis County Sheriffs use the range free of charge. 
    But development, as always, is knocking on their door, and local residents -- most of the homes around the rifle range have been built in the last five years -- are assailing the forest service to pull the Lions Club's lease on the site. 

    Trophy Homes: Bountiful's east benches are a place where colossal trophy homes pop up daily on freshly bulldozed mule deer winter range. It is a place where people move in next to public shooting ranges, public hunting grounds and public areas where four-wheelers and snowmobilers like to ride, then complain about the noise, as well as all those deer that insist on nipping decorative flowers on winter range they have used since the Ice Age. 
    So far, the Forest Service has continued to renew the lease, and the turkey shoot that draws trap shooters from all over the West goes on. Last year, the Lions gave away 1,500 turkeys in the event, with some top shooters bagging up to 20 turkeys. 
    "We find it a little funny, here these people wanted to build their homes knowing it was there, then complain about the noise," Hanks said. "Pro-gun or anti-gun, stand back and look at the range and you can see it is a service to the community and both the city and the county are happy about it." 
    People had the same complaints about Bountiful's large Latter-day Saints temple on the East Bench. 
    "They came and built their homes next to it, then complain about all the traffic and lights," he said. 
    The Bountiful range, too, is an important winter range area for mule deer, a buffer from city sprawl, said Chappen. The Bountiful Lions are working now on community presentations to build support for the range in anticipation of public hearings on the site. They can count on the youth groups, church groups and families that use the place weekly for support. 
    "I have always come here. I'd miss it a lot. My dad always brought me up here . . . it's a family thing," said 17 year-old Terry Brandon, 17, of Bountiful. 
    The new residents surrounding the range "are scared of it," said one man in the neighborhood. "I knew what it was when I moved in, but we do hear a lot of complaints," he said. 
    Leon Davies, whose new home was built within a few hundred yards of the range four years ago, would like to see it go. 
    "Yes, it bothers us," he said. "Our neighborhood association is talking about it. All our visitors go 'What's that noise?' They have served the community well, but it has reached the point now with expansion . . . people all over here say it's an irritant, and you can't silence a rifle practice. People can say 'It was here already' but there used to be nobody in the whole state. As cities grow and expand . . . existing things are always being moved to areas where they aren't a problem anymore." 
    Besides, the developer told Davies it would be moved within two years (four years ago), when he bought the place, Davies said. 
    The range is not all bad news for residents, he added. 
    "I sure don't mind seeing all the police cars going by," he said. 
    Over at the Salt Lake City Gun Club, Marvin Hollis is watching the "lead miner" filter the spent birdshot and bullets out of the soil, an EPA requirement for defunct gun ranges. The club's restaurant, lounge, shooting supply store and 18 trap ranges are closed, and none of the 400 members are present. Hollis knows exactly what Hafner feels. Only he is losing not only a job and a lifestyle, but his home, too. 
    The rangemaster, groundskeeper and maintenance man has lived on-site for 13 years, and been a member for 33. The supply store moved to 3300 South and 300 West, but "the shooting is gone. We haven't got a place to shoot now," he said. 
    Gone, too, are the shooters from huge tournaments who came to partake in trap shooting the expensive, businessperson's pastime, shooting's fly-fishing parallel. 
    "It's the best we can do. It's kinda sad. It's been here a lot of years, a lot of people have gone through here," he said. 
    Neither the Holladay nor Salt Lake club can find a place to move to in the Valley. 
    "I'm not angry," said manager Larry Mitchell, of the Salt Lake Club. "I know progress is progress. The land became too valuable to be a shooting club anymore. This all happened so fast with us." 
    Like the tens of thousands of past patrons at both doomed clubs, Hollis is not sure what he is going to do. 
    "That's a good question. I have to find a new home. I'm don't know where I'm going," he said. 

   REMAINING RANGES 
   Holladay Gun Club -- Still open to public, 948-9802. 
   Bountiful Lions Rifle Range -- Rifle and pistol every day, trap shooting by appointment. Open every day to public from 10 a.m. until sundown. 
   Lee Kay Center -- State facility on 2100 South, 972-1326. 
   Magna Gun Club -- Located at 8400 W. 4000 South. Opens Thursdays at 4 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday at noon, 250-9818. 
   Hendrickson Range -- A police range in Parleys Canyon east of the East Canyon exit, public shooting for $5. 
   n Scoping out a successful deer hunt