It will compute the winning shot to within one centimeter from the firing line over a mile away. They are also putting in place an electronic distance-measuring device of the type highway surveyors use. Roughly 15 friends and family members have caravanned here to erect a pop-up tent amid the alkaline hummocks and spiny shrubs. Inside Case’s van are tools, spare parts, a sleeping bag, food wrappers and his family dog, Buddy. He works year-round every evening computer-modeling ways to get more energy into the arrow.” “This guy is unbelievably committed to getting this done,” says James Martin, standing alongside a worktable Case has set up next to his minivan on the flats. Building your own and tuning it precisely is onerous. You can’t just buy a footbow at a sporting goods store. There’s another reason for the lack of popularity: the equipment. By then they’d succeeded in firing an arrow some 900 yards. In the United Kingdom, they’ve tried competing on airfields.Īmong history’s greatest archers were the Turks, as in this 15th-century picture.
BOW AND ARROW SUDOKU FULL
Arrows get lost in flora-filled parks-also full of people. But where do you find a space wide and empty enough to practice and compete? Beaches are windy and often full of people. A handful of archers around the world, though, imagined there might still be records to set.
Once popular, distance shooting in America waned when it was believed that an arrow had been shot as far as it could go. Footbow archery, or “flight shooting” or “flight archery,” has no following.
BOW AND ARROW SUDOKU PATCH
Vast, dry and with good visibility, this patch of central Nevada also suits the long-distance archer because of what it lacks: people and trees.ĭespite the heat, one might assume that archery fans would be thronging to the desert to witness such a milestone. This article is a selection from the December issue of Smithsonian magazine BuyĬase, at right, holds a footbow while James Martin, a physicist who is also a flight shooter, stands with a more conventional longbow he uses for practice. Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 “After about four or five practice shots I start to have fun,” Case says. At 55 years old, Case is Drake’s age at the time. It is nearly 50 years to the day that Drake set the record. The champion used a muscle-powered device called a footbow, similar to the one Case is warming up with this morning 6,100 feet above sea level at Smith Creek Dry Lake. Alan Case, a bemused engineer and designer from Beaverton, Oregon, has spent the past 15 years chasing that distance record, which was set in 1971 by an archer named Harry Drake. “This is about to get interesting,” he says with a nervous laugh. He is preparing to shoot arrows out into the thin desert air, one of which he hopes will break archery’s worldwide distance record of 2,028 yards, or 268 yards beyond the one-mile mark. Between his upraised legs he will cradle a contraption akin to a medieval crossbow, and point it at an angle of roughly 40 degrees in the direction of a hazy mountaintop some four miles away. In a few moments he will lie down on his back. His head is wrapped in a makeshift keffiyeh scarf to protect him from the sun. In an ancient white salt flat, 30 miles south of Nevada’s Route 50- “The Loneliest Road in America”-a man is looking up into a blue sky.
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