Of littering and brass

[wawhitey]

Looking through the incrementalism thread, i started thinking about brass left in the woods, and felt like it was worthy of its own discussion without hijacking a thread

Now im about as rabidly anti-littering as you can get. I cant really explain my stance on the subject without getting red-flagged. But for some reason that i cant explain rationally, i view spent brass (in a hunting situation, not a gravel pit mag dump thing) as an exception to the rule. When im out in the mountains and find 1 or 2 empty pieces of brass, im picking them up, looking at the head stamp, trying to figure out where the shooter was standing, and where he was pointing, what he might have been hunting. Its something i get a real kick out of.
I almost feel like leaving your brass behind on a hunt is a favor to future hunters in the area, kind of giving them a hint, or at the very least, akin to primitive man making some petrogyphs on a boulder. Most of the time i pick my brass up, if i can find it, but sometimes i leave it there as maybe a message to future hunters, "yes, this is a spot that things can happen". Am i wrong here? Am i a hypocrite for being enraged at the sight of a beer can or a jerky oxygen absorber packet, while fibding spent brass to be an interesting mystery? Am i just a weirdo for giving so much thought to the subject and you think i should be on meds?

[Lefty]

I found tree graffiti where a local guy branded his initials date and deer or elk kill,,, some of the carvings are really cool,

Found a few of these in the Arco desert,,,

I was told they were shooting at these,,, practicing for Japanese zeros

[Swede]

I will hand it to you Whitey. You probably qualify as a weirdo, but I agree with your thinking about the brass. Maybe that makes us both weirdos.

[Jhg]

I found a deer skin once, folded square like those stacks of new shirts in a nice clothing store. The legs were arranged in a neat row next to the skin.

It was a message left by a hunter to only another hunter who would walk the same game trails and secret traces deep in the forest.

[Jhg]

Zoom in to see brass

653915A6-4360-4530-855F-44D13445E263.jpeg (201.75 KiB) Viewed 650 times

[saddlesore]

Being an avid reloader, I usually catch my brass as I eject it, but I sure didn't hunt for it in a foot of snow or a bunch of weeds if I didn't. I never attached too much significance to finding a piece of brass or leaving mind there for others.

[forkyshooter]

I've always thought its bad to litter and it makes things look like you wouldn't want to go there if there is garbage all over. I have never thought about brass.

[Swede]

As a Forest Service employee, I left thousands of plastic cards stapled to trees and even more chunks of surveyor's tape. It was not considered littering because it had a purpose. I worked on crews marking trees with paint. We threw the empty cans away. It was littering, but we thought nothing about it for years. We finally began packing them out. Loggers left cable and other things in their work areas for years. We finally began requiring most of it to be hauled off it they did not do it on their own. It is like the kid finally being told to pick up his room. After a while the place looks disgusting. Cans along the road, junk at our camp location etc. all add to the clutter. Now I pack it all out, but if someone wants to leave a small item as a souvenir for someone later on, I have no problem with that. I see Whitey's point. If everyone managed their trash like he does, the forests would be a lot better and that one piece of brass would be a special find.

[7mmfan]

I love finding brass in the woods, especially old brass. The stuff that is oxidized black and has been weathered for decades really gets me excited. As a young hunter, I can remember finding them occasionally and standing there looking around trying to visualize what the hunter had experienced. I also try to grab my brass when I can as I reload, but if I forget it or can't find it I'm ok with that. I hope that some kid sometime in the future stumbles across it and has the same dreams I did of what went down at that spot.

In one of my favorite saddles in the mountains of Central WA, we've killed several animals. We have a particular tree we sit by that offers a good view of the saddle and the open hillside above it. Of course I thought as a kid that we were the first people to ever sit there. One day while sitting with my dad I was farting around in the loose soil/sand/pine needles I was sitting in and unearthed an old piece of brass, 30-30. In the coming years I spent some time sifting around and found 2 other calibers of brass there. For me at the time, it was eye opening to recognize the history of the area and that spot in particular.

[Lefty]

I confess:
I try to always pick up spent rifle and shotgun shells, I dont want others to know I was there!

As a kid I use to pick up spent .22 , a pint milk carton bought me a box of .22 shells

[Jhg]

...As a kid I use to pick up spent .22 , a pint milk carton bought me a box of .22 shells

We sure did crazy things when we were little...

[Lefty]

...As a kid I use to pick up spent .22 , a pint milk carton bought me a box of .22 shells

We sure did crazy things when we were little...

It wasnt crazy back then, My brother and I (1969) I was 13, and we sis lots of scrapping. We knocked on farm doors and got permission to go through their junk pile, Copper was $2.00 a pound Between newspaper routes, selling bait,shov4ling snow, bucking hay, picking rocks mowing lawns and corn detasseling
I had a banner year, bought 2 Ruger 10/22, Ithaca 37 A, Mec reloader, two Redfield scopes, Remington 700 , baseballs , new baseball glove, traps and a mini bike and ammmo