Growing up Gunnison Part 2

Most everyone I hung out with back in the day carried a firearm in their vehicle as soon as they learned to drive.

We would shoot at all sorts of things depending where we were at the time.

I read a story about John Elway that during his early years with the Broncos he and a lineman would go out at night and shoot jackrabbits in the road around Highlands Ranch.

Similar to John we used to do the same thing in Gunnison.

During the coldest part of the winter the jackrabbits would come into town at night and sit in the middle of the road near the edge of town.

We used to wait until the wee hours of the morning and go out jackrabbit hunting from the window of our cars.

It wasn't uncommon at all for a group of us to run around at night looking for jackrabbits to shoot.

One weekend a group of friends got into buggers CJ5 and cruised around town. They got bored and decided to go hunt some jackrabbits.

The problem was that it was only 10pm or so.

Bugger drove up around the college next to Wilson’s field ( a prime spot). They weren’t disappointed and saw a jack sitting in the middle of the road.

Bugger kept a .22 pistol under his seat and I never could get a straight answer as to who did the shooting, but someone started blasting away at the jackrabbit.

I should say that at that time thee was absolutely nothing in Wilson's field so the barren mountains were a pretty safe backdrop for shooting. Not at all like today.

As soon as the shooting started a pair of headlights came on in a parking lot up the road and campus security started chasing them!

They tore out of town did a little off-roading while they waited on things to cool down in town.

As you know, teens don’t think things through very well so they soon convinced Bugger that the cops wouldn’t recognize them if they headed back into town.

They barely got past where McDonald’s is today when there was a full on felony stop with police, sheriff and state patrol right in the middle of Tomichi!

The officers with guns drawn got the guys out of the Jeep one by one, and had them sitting on the ice in the middle of Tomichi. Held at gun point while they search the Jeep for a weapon.

After looking for a long time they had to threaten quite a bit to get Bugger to tell them where it was hidden.

After he gave it up, the police calmed down considerably and called the kids parents to come get them.

They issued Bugger a citation for shooting in the city limits and shooting from a vehicle, but I think he got his pistol back after he paid a fine.

One of the funnier things to come from this is that while they were sitting on the ice with their hands on there heads one of the guys, Ezra, was able to look up the cylinder of the revolver pointed at him (this was back when some cops still carried revolvers).

He told us all afterward that the cop with his gun pointed at him didn’t have any bullets in his gun (you can see the end of the bullet in the cylinder when you look at it from the front, and there weren’t any there).

We started calling this officer Barney Fife from that day on.

We also learned to wait until the college security guard was in his office drinking coffee before shooting jackrabbits.

If you like this one, just wait until I tell you about the great Skunk hunting contest.