Posts about how hard your humble scribes work to bring you the latest and greatest gun industry news are invariably boring and self-serving. Why should the average member of the Armed Intelligentsia give a rat’s ass how long or cold a day it was in Boulder City, NV today? You just want to know what’s cool and current, hold the extraneous BS, please. Normally we’d skip all that horse hockey and dish the news about what we saw at the SHOT Show’s ballistic bacchanalia (a.k.a., Media Day at the Range). But this year’s conditions were anything but normal for southern Nevada . . .

Boarding the first bus headed for the range this A.M., we knew we were in for frosty conditions and had dutifully layered up. Instead of the usual average high of somewhere in the mid 50s this time of year, we enjoyed temps in the low 20s. But it was the constant 15-20 mph mistral ripping through the NSSF’s best laid plans that really made trudging from booth to booth the uniquely enjoyable experience that it was today.

This was the scene all day long around the only working heater in one of the two chow tents as media members and manufacturers there to man their booths instead snuck any chance they could take for a break from the arctic gusts. 

But even with occasional respites from the icy winds blowing down from Mordor, the conditions proved to be too much for some — and one of them was RF.

That’s him, above, seated in an ambulance being monitored and ministered to by an EMT after developing a case of the shakes that made the Loma Prieta quake feel like a speed bump. Even his hearty nor’eastern upbringing wasn’t enough to ward off a case of desert-induced hypothermia. Maybe I should have told him to remove his badge to prevent asphyxiation . . .

But enough about human frailty. We’re made of tougher stuff than that. We went there knowing full well we’d be muzzled (and were we ever) and figuring we’d freeze. And now that we’re back in our toasty hotel room with our core temperatures steadily on the rise, keep refreshing for news of some of the best schtuff we’ve seen so far.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

22 COMMENTS

  2. Contact Algore- you can probably reach him through that other Al, Al Jazeera. Tell him to send some global warming your way.

  4. Is that emt holding a lottery ticket? Yeah, that wind can be brutal. And it take surprisely little time for exposure to work its magic. Buck up RF and think of Isreali supermodels. You’ll get thru this.

  6. Is this man praying? Were the goodies so goody that he had a religious experience? On a more serious note, is that hot Gatorade? Is that his bookie taking down the numbers?

    The last is was in Vegas was 27 years ago, I think, and there was a snow storm of 2″ and it got very, very cold with a wind. I took ill with a fever. Of course I still looked better than Robert. But that’s just good genes.

    Hope you are OK Robert and you guys take care out there in the wild west. Remember Harry Reid is from that area and you saw what it did to him.

  7. Anybody who goes to Boulder City and passes up the Hoover Dam tour in order to keep us informed about the latest and greatest is aces in my book!

  9. If you don’t like our weather, then take your complaint to the service window, so that by June you can complain about the heat.

  11. I hate Boulder City. It’s still a dry town, and I’m not talking about rain. It’s also the Chicago of Nevada — maybe the most firearms unfriendly place in the Silver State.

    Boulder City was built to house the workers on the Hoover Dam, and those workers didn’t live up to the high standards of ethics and morality set by Nevadans such as Mayme Stocker, Benny Binion and later, Bugsy Siegel. Hence the ridiculous laws.

  12. Hope you feel better RF, you big wuss. Just kidding. The human body is a strange device sometimes.

  13. You’re breakin’ my heart here, gettin’ to shoot all manner of new firearms and the like (conceding grudgingly hypothermia is serious). Let me move on to more write-ups on the horror that is SHOT media day…

  15. I hope you feel better, that sucks. FYI for everyone, dehydration can accelerate hypothermia so make sure you are hydrated before freezing your ass off.

  16. Those are common conditions for winter in Nevada.

    200 miles north of you, in the “high desert” (north of US 6 in NV), it’s been getting to sub-zero at night.

Comments are closed.