RECREATION : Blasting Away in Spirit of Fun Ojai Valley Gun Club Offers Members Myriad of Recreational Shooting Options on Rugged 53-Acre Range in Rose Valley

Edd and Helen Haverly of Ventura enjoy camping in the Los Padres National Forest for a lot of reasons: the vistas of snow-capped mountains . . . the clear-running streams . . . the nightly ceiling of stars . . . the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

The Haverlys are members of the Ojai Valley Gun Club, which offers a 53-acre playground for recreational shooters. For $25 a year, they get to use the spacious Rose Valley facilities as often as they want for camping and for blasting range targets--doing both activities with their kids.

“To me,” Helen said, “the club is a family-type thing.”

Helen, a 53-year-old office manager, is president of the club and is sensitive about its image. It is not, she says, a paramilitary organization for trigger-happy yahoos armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. Gun safety is stressed. Automatic weapons are banned. So are convicted felons. Strict rules are enforced.

“You just can’t go off in the bushes and start plinking,” Helen said, adding that in the club’s 32-year history, “We’ve never had an accident on the range.”

For its nearly 800 members, the club is a refuge from politically correct attitudes, a place where Americans can go to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms without being bushwhacked by gun-control advocates. But it’s also a showcase for responsible gun owners, people who don’t get involved in drive-by shootings and gang-related murders.

“We’re not cruds. We’re bankers and church-going nice people,” said club member Cecil Blackwell, 53, a retired telephone company employee from Ventura.

The club, which rents the land from the U.S. Forest Service for $730 a year, is affiliated with the National Rifle Assn. and has played host to several NRA championships.

“They’re one of the biggest and best clubs in California,” Fred Romero, the NRA’s Southern California field representative, said of the Ojai group.

The range has an inherently peaceful outdoor setting, which softens the destructive nature of the sport. Anybody who has ever fired a few rounds at an indoor gun range knows how claustrophobic, smokey and deafening it can be. But the Ojai range feels like a wide-open campground, with only an occasional crackling salvo interrupting the tranquillity.

On a recent Sunday morning, Blackwell and about a dozen other men looked like golfers schmoozing at the tee, even sharing the same goal: shooting a birdie. At the command of “pull,” orange-colored clay pigeons were released from an automatic trap house, sailing toward a mountain until shotgun pellets interrupted their flight, sending shards raining to Earth.

“Hand-eye coordination is really important,” said David Delgado, a 40-year-old concrete contractor from Westlake Village. “You don’t know exactly where the bird is coming from or what direction it’s going to go.”

Trap shooting is one of several disciplines practiced at the range. Others include black-powder, skeet, pistol and high-powered rifle shooting. The respective ranges are separated by earthen berms and, for safety, generally only one range is in use at a time.

Some ranges have metal pigs and chickens on pulleys for silhouette shooting. There’s also a metal ram on a railroad track for large-bore weaponry, including the club’s half-scale 44-millimeter Civil War cannon.

Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are allowed to use the club’s 600-yard range, a long, narrow corridor devoid of vegetation. Sitting on a cinder block, their Gerande rifles resting on a concrete bench, riflemen sight through scopes and pick off targets when they pop up some six football fields downrange.

Black-powder shooting is one of the more popular sports at the club. The discipline gets its inspiration from the American fur traders of the 1830s and 1840s, who wore buckskin and used percussion cap rifles, which had replaced flintlocks.

Black-powder shooters use the “primitive” range, which is marked by a sign that proclaims: “If it don’t smoke, you can’t shoot it here.” Helen Haverly, one of approximately 40 women in the club, is also one of the group’s better black-powder shooters. She uses a muzzle-loading .50-caliber Hawken, which her husband Edd built.

Every year, the club holds a black-powder “rendezvous,” which attracts hundreds of enthusiasts from around the country. Some of them stay in RVs, which turn the 600-yard range into a parking lot. Others camp out in tepees in the primitive area, wear buckskin and throw tomahawks into a sturdy log target.

The club has an active junior program, with 12 to 15 kids currently enrolled. Rifles and ammunition are supplied, along with transportation and a coach. Haverly feels that children who are taught the proper use of guns are less prone to misuse them.

“You see a kid involved in a shooting with all that blood and gore,” she said, “and you wonder if that kid had had any idea what a gun can do to another person. My son has a healthy respect for a gun, but he’s been shooting since he’s 5.”

Ringed by mountains and pine trees, the club looks like the setting for a John Wayne Western. It even has its own mountain man, Herman Korf, 80, a retired Coast Guard warrant officer who serves as the club’s caretaker, living in a trailer on the premises. A club member “for quite some time,” Korf became caretaker four or five years ago, after the club was damaged by vandals.

“I happened to be at loose ends and they asked me to take care of the place,” said Korf, who has a fluffy white beard.

Korf patrols the grounds with Pinky, a 4-year-old mutt that Korf found, covered with red mange, on a Navajo reservation. Even though the job can get lonely and cold in winter, Korf enjoys working at the range. “What better life could a person have?” he said.

Indeed, he’s got the mountains, the streams, the stars, and the smell of gunpowder in the morning.