Colorado Parks and Wildlife Purchases the Colorado Clays Shooting Park in Adams County

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has closed on a real estate transaction for the purchase of the Colorado Clays Shooting Park in Adams County.

CPW will take over ownership of the shooting park and will manage it as a state recreation area. The agency entered into a concessionaire agreement with its previous Vice President of Marketing, Cory Kraft, who will continue to run the facility under CPW ownership.

“This ties directly into our mission to provide safe, responsible, and accessible recreational sport shooting opportunities and education,” said CPW Northeast Region Manager Mark Leslie. “We look forward to a seamless transition out there, as the public will continue to enjoy the offerings they previously had available to them at Colorado Clays.”

Located just 30 minutes northeast of Denver and near Barr Lake State Park, Colorado Clays Shooting Park offers the region’s most complete shooting range experience.

“We have high demand for safe places the public can go to shoot along the Front Range and the purchase of this established range helps with safety concerns,” Leslie said. “It will continue to provide a safe and professional shooting experience and we felt it was important to continue to offer the public those opportunities at this first-class facility.”

Situated along a cottonwood creek bottom, overlooking Colorado’s snow-covered peaks to the west, Colorado Clays is open to the public and specializes in accommodating both competitive and recreational shooters of all ages and abilities. It hosts the region’s widest variety of clay target shooting, including sporting clays, skeet, and trap, as well as both rifle and pistol shooting.

This past year, Colorado Clays hosted over 30,000 visitors and threw over four million clay targets.

“We are excited to partner with the state to continue to offer a safe, convenient and affordable recreational shooting range for local Coloradans,” Kraft said. “We look forward to collaborating with Colorado Parks and Wildlife on expanding educational and program opportunities while continuing to ensure that the facility is available for our state’s outdoor enthusiasts for the next 26 years and beyond. We are thankful for all of our past and future patrons and we look forward to seeing you at Colorado Clays.”

Colorado Clays is open to the public and memberships are not required. All staff is CPR/First Aid certified and are NRA Trained Range Safety Officers.

Colorado Clays is named as a nod clay target shooting. Clay pigeon shooting is the art of shooting at special flying targets, known as clay pigeons or clay targets, with a shotgun. Clay target shooting has at least 20 different forms of regulated competition called disciplines. These can be roughly divided into three main groups: trap, skeet, and sporting clays.

This property also boasts a state-of-the-art rifle and pistol range that includes a comfortable, heated, semi-enclosed, shooting canopy with 10, 100-yard rifle lanes and 10, 25-yard handgun lanes. The shooting canopy has natural ventilation and individual illuminated shooting stalls. The range is fully baffled, with no blue sky, allowing the shooter to enjoy natural light and ventilation.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s northeast region is a member of the Northern Front Range Recreational Sport Shooting Partnership (NFRRSSP) with the U.S. Forest Service, Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland and Boulder, Clear Creek, Gilpin, and Larimer counties. Its purpose is to develop a landscape-level, multi-jurisdictional strategy to provide safe, responsible, and accessible recreational sport shooting opportunities.

The purchase of Colorado Clays Shooting Park was made entirely with grant funds awarded to CPW by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through its Office of Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Programs (90 percent) along with Great Outdoors Colorado and the Colorado Lottery (10 percent).

CPW closed on the purchase on Tuesday, Dec. 21.