Berm construction and maintenance, range cleanup, target frame work, and earthwork on Canadian shooting ranges and sporting clays courses.
Shooting ranges and sporting clays facilities are fundamentally earthmoving and maintenance operations. The earthworks are ongoing — berms erode, bullet traps fill up, access roads deteriorate, and sporting clays courses constantly need terrain modification to create new presentations. A skid steer is the right-sized machine for most of this work: maneuverable enough for the tight course layouts, powerful enough for berm construction, and versatile enough to handle everything from post installation to debris cleanup.
Canada has hundreds of regulated shooting ranges under provincial authority, plus thousands of private farm and rural ranges. The National Firearms Safety Course and provincial sport shooting associations (Shooting Federation of Canada, provincial federations) set range safety standards that have direct implications for earthwork requirements — particularly for berm geometry and lead management.
Berms are the defining physical feature of any shooting range. They stop projectiles, provide backstop assurance, and define the safe shooting angles. Building them right matters for safety certification; maintaining them matters for both safety and range longevity.
A standard pistol or rifle range berm needs to be tall enough and deep enough to reliably capture all projected trajectories. The standard in Canada (often derived from NSSF range design guidelines and local municipal approval requirements) is typically a backstop berm 3–5 metres tall with a slope ratio of 2:1 or shallower on the rear face to prevent projectile deflection. The construction process:
A 72-inch GP bucket moves fill efficiently in the building stage. A dozer blade handles the shaping work on the face — pushing material to achieve the right slope without over-cutting. The plate compactor attachment is important for berm integrity; an uncompacted berm settles unevenly and develops channels that eventually let projectiles through at unexpected angles.
Side berms on rifle ranges — the earthen walls running along the sides of bays that contain ricochets — are lower (typically 2–3 metres) and need the same construction care. A 6-way blade that angles makes shaping side berms faster than a straight blade.
This is the environmental issue that most range operators deal with eventually. Lead accumulates in berms over years of use — a busy pistol range might deposit hundreds of kilograms of lead into a berm per year. Eventually, the concentration becomes high enough to trigger environmental review requirements, and at that point berm reclamation becomes a major task.
The reclamation process involves excavating the contaminated soil from the berm's impact zone (the front third or half), segregating it for lead reclamation or disposal as contaminated material, and rebuilding the berm. Environmental regulations in Canada governing this work fall under provincial soil contamination standards — BC's Contaminated Sites Regulation (CS Reg), Alberta's Environmental Protection and Enhancement Act, and equivalent provincial regulations.
A rock bucket or heavy-duty GP bucket handles the contaminated soil excavation. Material is typically loaded directly into trucks for transport to a lead reclamation facility. The soil itself isn't particularly difficult to excavate — the issue is contamination control (keeping workers from inhaling lead dust during excavation) and proper disposal documentation.
Lead exposure risk: Dry excavation of lead-contaminated berm soil generates airborne lead particles. In most provinces, this qualifies as work requiring specific lead exposure controls under occupational health regulations. Wet suppression (spraying water during excavation), PPE requirements (N100 respirators), and air monitoring are typically required. Check with your provincial WCB/WorkSafe before starting berm reclamation work.
Trap and skeet fields require relatively minimal earthwork — mainly maintaining the apron around the shooting stations and the surrounding drainage. But sporting clays courses are a different story.
A well-designed sporting clays course presents 10–15 stations across varied terrain, each with different clay presentations (crossing, incoming, rabbit, tower). Course designers deliberately use natural terrain features — ridges, creek beds, woods edges, open fields. Maintaining and modifying these presentations requires ongoing earthwork: cutting paths through brush, building shooting mounds, clearing sightlines, adjusting terrain profiles to change presentation angles.
A mulcher is genuinely useful on a sporting clays course — cutting new trails, clearing shooting lanes, maintaining the natural areas between stations. A 60-inch drum mulcher chews through the scrub brush and small trees that encroach on shooting lanes without leaving the slash debris that a chainsaw crew would. The mulched material creates a tidy, permeable surface that reduces mud at shooting stations.
Building shooting mounds — the elevated pads where shooters stand for certain presentations — uses a standard GP bucket and a dozer blade for shaping. A 5000 lb mound of compacted fill creates a stable, well-drained station that doesn't turn into mud during a fall competition. Compact the fill in lifts.
Permanent clay thrower posts, tower stands, and holding frame anchorage requires post installation. An auger attachment — specifically a 9-inch or 12-inch round bit — handles the post holes. In the typical Southern Ontario or Prairie soil that most ranges sit on, a 9-inch bit drills a fence post hole in 30–90 seconds in reasonable soil. Rock in BC or Shield country in Northern Ontario requires carbide or rock auger bits.
For the tower structures common on sporting clays and five-stand facilities — 20–30 foot steel towers that present high crossing or descending targets — a pallet fork is often used during erection to set base sections before the crane picks the top.
Pallet forks also handle the constant supply movement on a range: clay target pallets (a case of 135 targets weighs about 20 kg; a skid holds 50 cases), propane cylinders for trap machines, lumber for berm edging and station structure, and general range supplies.
Sporting clays fields accumulate enormous quantities of broken clay fragments. A busy course might shoot 50,000+ targets per season, generating several tonnes of powdered and broken clay. The fragments are non-toxic (modern clays use calcium carbonate and pitch, not coal tar like older clays) but they do accumulate and affect ground surface drainage.
A sweeper attachment — a rotary broom style, 72-inch width — collects clay fragments from gravel aprons around trap houses and shooting stations efficiently. For larger accumulations in rough grass or around field targets, a bucket or grapple moves material to a compost or disposal area. The clay fragments themselves are often welcome at landscaping operations as low-cost soil amendment; many ranges give it away or sell it cheaply.
Spent brass and shot from rifle and shotgun ranges doesn't typically require skid steer cleanup — it's collected by hand or left in place. Lead shot in the fall zones of trap fields is subject to the same lead management considerations as bullet berms at rifle and pistol ranges.
Rural shooting ranges — and most Canadian ranges are rural — typically have gravel access roads that need regular maintenance: grading washboard out, adding material after washouts, clearing drainage ditches, and placing signage and barriers at seasonal road closures. A dozer blade or grading blade handles most road maintenance. See our guide on road and driveway maintenance for the full rundown on blade selection and grading technique.
Seasonal road barriers — at ranges that close winter access roads — use large concrete blocks or log barriers that a skid steer with pallet forks can place and remove. 1-tonne jersey barriers fit within mid-frame skid steer ROC; jersey barriers can be rigged with forks using the pre-cast fork pockets on the underside.
Building a new range from a raw site is primarily excavator and dozer work — grading the range floor, building the main berms, clearing trees. But once the main earthworks are done, a skid steer takes over for finish work:
For range development projects, the land clearing guide covers the initial site work, and our guide on landscaping attachments covers finish grading and topsoil work.