A hike in the woods took a surprising turn for one Port Townsend resident after he came across an area field littered with shooting-related trash.

Larry Holman was hiking on state Department of Natural Resources land south of Lords Lake with his dog with the intention of going down to the Little Quilcene River.

The lake is about 6 miles northwest of Quilcene – 27 miles south of Port Townsend – and is part of the Olympic Gravity Water System that provides water to the city.

He saw a large shooting area littered with pulverized lead, and plastic and appliances shot full of bullet holes.

Items that were used as shooting targets included an air conditioning unit, oxygen bottles, aerosol cans, paint cans and lots of plastic, he said.

“All kinds of shotguns shells, thousands of shotgun shells on the ground,” he said. There weren’t many brass casings at the site.

Some of the bullets were a piercing type of bullet, he said.

TREES SHREDDED

“When you walk to the back … the trees are just shredded. Two-foot-diameter trees are just shredded from all the firepower they’ve taken,” Holman said.

“And then there are burn piles where they just burned plastic.

“I was just really surprised to see how much toxic waste was left behind,” Holman said.

Because the turnoff to the unofficial shooting range is just about half a mile from the Lords Lake water reservoir, the debris bothered Holman.

“I didn’t go up there planning on making a political statement,” Holman said of the hike. But he had his phone with him and decided to record a video of what he saw.

Holman said he first posted the video (youtube.com/watch?v=DT_u502HgLQ) on YouTube on Jan. 11, about two days after he recorded the video.

VIDEO BANNED

He shared the video on a Facebook page dedicated to Sequim, Washington. The page had about 8,000 members, but “the admin kept pulling it down,” Holman said of his video.

“He basically banned me,” Holman said of the administrator of the group.

The ban angered Holman, and he said that’s when he decided to share his video with government officials and The Leader.

Holman said the area includes two parcels of land owned by the DNR.

Holman looked at the site on Google Earth and was able to see pickup trucks and a large white tent at the area.

“You could see there was a tent set up and at least half a dozen cars [and] trucks around … there’s a huge number of people who go up there,” Holman said.

The Google Earth image, dated July 2016, shows 13 vehicles and one tent at the site. It is unclear if the people in those vehicles were involved in the shooting or contributed to the debris field Holman found.

NO STRANGER TO FIREARMS

Holman grew up in Butte, Montana, known as the “Richest Hill on Earth” for the large amount of copper mined in Butte. About 9.6 million metric tons of copper were mined in Butte from 1880 to 2005, according to ICMJ’s Prospecting and Mining Journal.

The mining process polluted water and turned Butte’s massive Berkeley Pit, a former copper mine, into a federal Superfund environmental cleanup site.

Holman’s familiarity with that Superfund site was on his mind during his hike.

With all the errant gunfire that likely has taken place in the area, “there’s probably lead all over the place,” Holman said.

Holman said his father was a deputy sheriff for Silver Bow County in Montana, and his grandfather was a police officer in Butte. Holman said he hunted when he was younger and used guns, “but we would always pick up our targets and never leave debris,” Holman said.

He later lived in Seattle for about 20 years and moved to Port Townsend in the fall of 2017.

Part of the reason he moved to Port Townsend was to be close to the natural world, he said.

“I was just exploring,” he said.

Holman said it was his first visit to Lords Lake, and he hasn’t visited the area since.

Holman said he didn’t see any shooters while he was there, although he said he spotted a few people collecting salal.

“I was just really shocked [by the gun trash]. I spend a lot of time out in the woods,” Holman said.