A killer mountain getaway

Walk down that dim hallway. Be wary. Don’t need a guidebook to tell you that this is the kind of sinister place where trouble makes a living. A man lunges out of the shadows, sure enough aiming a gun. Aiming it at you.

Are you fast enough to pull out a Glock and drop him?

Turn a corner, walk into a room of disorienting nightclub strobe lights, then find your way to the bar. It’s a seedy dive with some very somber customers, one slouched on a stool in front of you and others at tables to your left. Not what you’d expect in a resort community where room rates range from $325 to $2,600 a night -- too many trucker hats, soiled T-shirts and waxy, expressionless faces. You might be a high roller but can’t even get the bartender’s attention before another stranger points a gun at your precious self. Reach for the Glock.

Vacations, it seems, just aren’t what they used to be.

Fresh air, quiet, the great outdoors, all that -- those aren’t the only reasons to come to the Rocky Mountains anymore. In another sign of the times, you can now go looking for bedlam too.

Ladies, wanna take down a rapist? Gents, our grim planet is crawling with terrorists and muggers and fiends of all kinds, it’s time to lock and load -- yes, live ammo -- and stand up for yourself and the rest of us.

Valhalla is what they call this place. The Valhalla Shooting Club and Training Center, a pistol and self-defense complex that mixes Hollywood stagecraft, futuristic technology and resort luxury with brutal 21st century reality. Add the adjective “ultra” to all those descriptions and you are closer to the truth of it.

We are speaking of one man’s dream in this world of nightmares: to offer family vacations built around the good life, with the chance to taste life and death along the way.

It all traces back to a matter of nine miles, nine insurmountable miles.

You see, experts say that you have to build within 25 miles of an airport if you want a successful multistar resort in the Rockies. Beginning a decade ago, Thomas S. Forman scouted out 11 states and Canada before he settled on his dream property: 275 acres of aspen groves and evergreens at 9,000 feet on the western slope of the Colorado mountains, up a remote road between Montrose and Telluride. He named it Elk Mountain Resort. But Elk Mountain is 34 miles from the airport -- nine miles too far for a standard vacation destination.

“The consultants said I needed a ‘hook,’ ” Forman recalls.

The hook became Valhalla -- the word arising from the Great Hall in Norse mythology where warriors feasted.

Thus, on a vista overlooking a dozen 14-ers, those fang-toothed 14,000-foot peaks in the neighborhood, Forman created ranges for wing-shooting: clay-target trap, skeet and five-stand.

“They told me, ‘If you don’t build the clay shooting, don’t build the hotel,’ ” Forman says.

A 6-foot-4 obsessive with 30 years in the martial arts, Forman wasn’t the type to leave matters there. A shooting range needed a clubhouse. So why not add a pistol range? Why not make it the most realistic live-fire pistol range this side of Baghdad? Why not have “scenario” rooms where vacationers can shoot it out in a bar, in a mock bedroom, in the first-class cabin of a jetliner, in a subway, in a darkened hallway, and ... well, let’s not give it all away. In the steel-lined, 16,000-square-foot building, shooters can use real bullets against paper and three-dimensional mannequin targets, or they can choose nonlethal air guns and shoot against one another.

Forman’s theory is that people will travel to the mountains to enjoy cigars and brandy in a wood-scented smoking lounge overlooking a trout-stocked pond. They’ll go horseback riding in the aspens. They’ll hang out and play Scrabble with the family in two-story, three-bedroom log-faced “cottages.” They’ll get married in a log chapel. They’ll dine at the resort’s Pyrenees-Alpine restaurant, with its award-winning chef and a wine cellar as big as two container trucks.

Along the way, for fun, they’ll wander over and descend into the belly of the beast and battle for their lives.

As Elk Mountain advertisements put it: “Today, you rescued the plane, prevented a carjacking and shot your way out of a crowded subway station ... and you never left our resort.”

For those occasions when you might find yourself unarmed, Forman also offers nonlethal training in practical rape deterrence, in child-abduction prevention and in traveler’s self-defense using 500-year-old martial arts techniques of Korean cane fighting.

“There’s nothing like this on the planet,” says Rob Pincus, Elk Mountain’s shooting director, a former police officer and security consultant with a shaved head and the kind of oversized, intense eyes that identify him as someone not to be fooled with.

The coffee table in front of the colossal stone fireplace at the Valhalla clubhouse suggests the target audience for these diversions. Millionaire magazine is stacked up alongside a magazine called S.W.A.T., Weapons, Tactics & Training for the Real World.

At this point, perhaps, the question comes to mind: Just why?

Why venture into the tranquillity of the mountains to go indoors and confront the set-stages, props and sound effects of contemporary urban violence?

For one thing, Forman figures there’s a little James Bond in many of us. “Yes, you’re escaping your reality when you come here,” he says. “But your reality is always there in the back of your mind. The fact is, home is always back there in your thoughts. Coming here will make you feel better and more confident about going home.”

So far, Forman’s theory is untested. Construction and landscaping crews are scrambling to finish in time for Elk Mountain’s 21-room, 17-cottage opening June 4. The Valhalla Shooting Club has begun operations already but chiefly for police and bodyguard training and as a draw for those who are serious about their pistol-craft. The larger appeal of gunpowder instead of golf as a high-end resort entertainment amenity awaits the test of time.

Guns are everywhere

In the lobby of Valhalla, one is confronted with guns, naturally enough. Guns under glass in the counter display. Pistols, shotguns and rifles encased on the walls.

From behind the steel-lined doors comes the sharp pop-pop-pop of guns in use. Among the many things that divide Americans into quarreling polar tribes, quite simply nothing matches a gun for power to send people from zero-to-rage in a heartbeat. The fascinating circular logic of guns -- social menace; defense against menace -- is seldom discussed anymore, and seldom with curiosity. We choose our slogans, that’s that, or we find something else to talk about.

Valhalla enters the conversation -- that is, if we allowed ourselves one -- at an interesting point. If you’re going to have a gun and presume it to be protection, the rest of us who happen to be in the vicinity would be better off if you know how to use it when your blood is up in a crisis. After all, 40% of American households have guns, with 65 million handguns in private ownership, as reported by the Washington, D.C., Police Foundation. A quarrelsome old bumper sticker put it this way: “Gun control is being able to hit your target.”

An ordinary, fixed-target pistol range will accustom people to the recoil and noise of shooting and eventually make them better marksmen. Valhalla’s instruction begins at just such a range. But that’s only for familiarization, novices and experts alike. In real life, threats seldom stand stationary in bright light at 30 yards.

Having studied surveillance-camera videos of actual violent encounters, shooting director Pincus devised drills that attempt to account for a person’s instinctive reactions to a lethal threat. For instance, he teaches students to shoot while lurching backward with both eyes open. Videos prove that people rarely hold still in the face of a threat, and they’re unlikely to remember to close one eye to aim.

Then, one at a time, he follows shooters into the maze-like array of scenario rooms. Wearing ear protectors and safety glasses to guard against the spray of frangible bullets, which disintegrate rather than ricochet on impact, the pair proceed down the dim and threatening hallway, all thoughts of snowcapped mountains, aspen groves and trout ponds a thousand miles away.

So how did this writer fare as James Bond? Three targets, six shots -- five into the chest and one in the head. But alas, slow. Pincus wheels one of the bar’s mannequin customers into the corner of the saloon and offers a sobering lesson. He raises the Glock. What sounds like a “bang” is actually four bangs -- a shot every one-fifth of a second, opening a fist-sized pattern in the dummy’s shirt in the same interval of time it takes to put the period at the end of this sentence.

Oh well, didn’t someone mention a quiet cigar lounge nearby? With brandy and a view of mountains?