Brown wins Overall Top Gun, division at End of Trail

Not only did Lori Brown win her division at the End of Trail mounted shooting competition, but she also won the Overall Top Gun competition among the division winners.

Brown’s End of Trail competitions, which also included a team shoot, were on a new horse, Ben.

“It’s nice when you have a horse like that under you, because it makes you look good,” Brown said. “Everything went really smoothly.”

End of Trail took place at the Founder’s Ranch in Moriarty, NM, about 20 miles east of Albuquerque. “It was really pretty out there. It’s quiet. You feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere, because you really are,” Brown remarked. “It’s actually nice to be out on the open range in the Old West, so to speak.”

The Brown family left Rainbow on April 26 for the competition, which began April 28. The trip included the purchase of Ben. “Part of the reason why we went is Jim Hanson and Andra Olson were coming there from Minnesota,” Brown noted. “We thought we’d go over to New Mexico to get him.”

Hanson and Olson are partners in AJ Horses. The Browns had previously purchased Ben’s brother, Bud, from AJ Horses.

Ben was the 2004 Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association overall reserve champion at the CMSA nationals in 2004. “He’s very similar to Bud in a lot of ways, which made the transition easier, but he’s quicker,” Brown said.

“He’s quicker to respond,” Brown noted. “It really cuts seconds off my time because I just tell him and he does it,” she explained.

Brown also no longer has to share Bud with her father, Jerry. “Bud was supposed to be for my dad anyhow,” she said.

Jerry Brown rode Bud for End of Trail and placed third in Men’s Level 1 and third in the team shoot.

Reuniting the two full brothers also has benefits for both of the horses, as well as their riders. “They’re just really excited, so I think Bud is happy that his brother’s here,” Lori Brown remarked. “They were just really happy, and it made the transition easier for Ben.”

The Browns arrived at the Founder’s Ranch on the evening of April 27, giving Lori Brown some limited practice time on Ben before the actual matches. “I got to ride him a little bit to get the feel of him,” she noted.

End of Trail is sanctioned by the Single-Action Shooting Society, and Brown competed in the Ladies Level 3 division. “It was just a lot of fun to be able to win,” she said of winning her division.

The division matches consisted of six stages April 28-30, with each run including ten balloons to shoot. Brown was successful in shooting all 60 balloons. “On the way over I focused on road signs and stuff as they approached,” she noted. “For some reason that really helps, just trying to get in the mindset.”

Brown’s previous competition was the Trailtown Roundup and Old West Jubilee in Norco April 9-10; although she won the Ladies Level 3 division in that match sanctioned by the Cowboy Mounted Shooting Association, she missed four balloons in six stages.

“My concentration was lacking in the last match,” she remarked.

Brown and Ben adjusted to each other between the first and sixth stages. “I was beginning to get a feel for him,” she said.

“Each stage I was able to take it up a notch,” she noted. “By the end I was really pleased with it.”

The team shoot consisted of two randomly-selected shooters on each team. The two-stage contest took place on April 30. “It was more runs for me to get a feel for the horse,” Brown said.

“It was real kind of casual and laid back,” Brown noted. “It was fun because it kind of takes the pressure off.”

Brown did not know her teammate, who was a Ladies Level 1 competitor. Although she didn’t place in the team shoot, she relished the experience, especially the helter-skelter format of the first stage. “It was hard to strategize until you were going into the arena,” she explained. “It was kind of fun to figure out how to do it spur of the moment.”

The division winners competed in the Overall Top Gun competition May 1. The shooters with the top six times from the first stage advanced to the second stage, and the three top competitors in the second stage advanced to the final round.

“They were all stages that we had primarily shot during the match,” Brown noted.

The specific stages were drawn at random, and the instructions on going through each stage were different than those during the matches.

Brown shot all ten of her balloons on the first stage. “The first stage was smooth, clean, and I was pushing a little harder,” she said.

She missed one balloon on the second run. “My time was still fast enough to make the cut,” she noted.

Even with the five-second penalty, Brown was third among the second-stage shooters, giving her the final spot for the third round. The times were not cumulative, so the shooter with the fastest time on the final ten balloons would earn the Overall Top Gun title.

Brown’s final run was slower than that of Jim Rodgers, who is one of the founders of mounted shooting, but Rodgers missed a balloon on the final stage. “When he missed that balloon, I was in,” Brown remarked.

“When I won I was quite surprised,” Brown said of capturing the Overall Top Gun competition. “It was just a lot of fun and an honor to win.”