Wedeln: Why camp gunfire at dusk?

Comments Wedeln:

I had a wondrous weekend camping on the shores of Upper Priest after kayaking up the Thoroughfare. If you’ve never paddled it, paddle it. It’s ok and cool in a powerboat but it’s blissful and sublime in a canoe or kayak.

Great star show at night until the stupid moon came out and ruined it. I took a pic of the Milky Way rising over the Thoroughfare and Upper Priest just after sundown.

But here’s the thing. What’s with all the gunfire from camps at dusk? I mean, my guess is they are bearanoids and want to scare scary apex predators from coming into camp and opening up their tents like burritos and eating them but c’mon. It used to be an occasional but kind of rare thing but Saturday night it was absurd. I heard gunfire from multiple camping areas on Upper Priest. I’m guessing it might scare deer away but who cares about deer in your camp? Bears and ravening packs of mean Canadian scary scary wolves are not gonna high tail it cuz of warning shots at dusk. Maybe it’s not that at all, maybe it’s just a drunken idiot convention of locals who camp on Upper Priest to pop a few rounds off. But here’s the other thing: all those rounds going up have to come down somewhere. DERP. I pack a 12 gauge loaded with slugs in case of an extremely rare griz attack scenario, or more likely, hillbillies, but I don’t pop slugs into the sky even though aiming at a mountain is pretty safe, but could you imagine a one in a billion event and that slug coming down on a hiker or kid or something? Nah, that wouldn’t be cool ‘tall.

So, hipsters, hippies and hillbillies - stop shooting your stupid guns at dusk at Upper Priest. It’s annoying and absurd.

Other than that, nothing like swimming in clear clean water which isn’t even at bathwater temps like the rest of the lakes in North Idaho tend to be in these global warming summers. Priest and Upper are truly our lake gems. The best.