Kip’s Canyon Madness

December 13, 2021 - 11 minutes read

Kip Rahmig, the firearms specialist at Canyon Madness Ranch, talks about shooting activities, other outdoor adventures, and the incredible landscape of northeast New Mexico.

ED: What’s your role at Canyon Madness Ranch?

KR: I’m the firearms specialist here. I take care of all the range activities. We also have a Cerakote room where we color guns, customize and send those out.

ED: Do you personally interact with guests, or do you have other people that do that?

KR: I do most of the guest work as far as I’m on the ranges. My background is in firearm safety. I spent many years training in law enforcement. And then I had my own company in Nevada for teaching concealed weapons courses. Because we have such a small number of guests able to visit the ranch, I am able to customize any kind of firearms adventure that guests would prefer.

ED: What are some of the firearm activities that guests can do when they visit the ranch?

KR: We meet with the guests when they first arrive to find out what their skill level is and then we build through the safety of the types of firearms that they’d like to shoot. So we have a little class on where to and where not to point to firearms. At the range we go through firearm safety again — safety is paramount here. We have target shooting, we have sporting clays, we have quite a few different activities for them to do. We’re not going to have crazy Wild West stuff. We want people to come out and enjoy themselves and not get hurt. That’s the biggest thing.

ED: What sort of firearms are available?

KR: We have marksmanship pistols and standard everyday pistols that guests would be able to go in and purchase. We have the same in rifles, but also some extreme rifles. We have a 50-caliber BMG ([Browning Machine Gun]. That’s about the largest round that you’re going to shoot from a shoulder-mounted rifle. And then, of course, we have the .375 CheyTac (Cheyenne Tactical Rifle). That one has been rated out to about three and a half miles on a three-by-three target. These are pretty extreme firearms.

ED: Can guests bring their own guns?

KP: Yeah, they can bring their own firearms. They’re never turned loose on the range; it’s always supervised. No matter what they do, they’re going to be down there with one of our firearms instructors.

ED: Do you have a favorite firearms activity on the ranch?

KR: Right now my big passion is working here in the Cerakote room and just making custom guns. I love tearing them down, painting them up nice and then sending them back out. The finish that we use here is actual Cerakote, which is a ceramic coating. Once you put it on the fire and bake that coating on, it’s just bullet proof. I mean it is really good stuff.

ED: How do the firearm activities work?

KR: We take the guests all down in our Humvee and then we go run through the pistol and rifle ranges. And then we can move on down the road just a little bit to the sporting clays. And incorporate the UTVs (Utility Task Vehicles) into that. The UTVs we load ‘em up and then we can go up through our sporting place is kind of an off road. It’s a little adventure going back to all of our shooting sites back there. We have 12 different shooting sites on the sporting place. Each one of those sites has two throwers on it, so we spend a lot of time back there shooting at the sporting place.

ED: Beyond the firearms, why should someone visit Canyon Madness Ranch?

KR: The first thing everybody sees when they get here is just the beauty of the place. Driving in here is kind of blasé from any of the airports or coming from out of town. Once you get on to the ranch road, it all turns into canyon land and we have like our own little mini Grand Canyon that runs all the way around our property. Once they get here, they walk out onto the deck of the lodge and they’re just dumbfounded with the way it looks.

ED: And other activities?

KR: The UTV rides are phenomenal. Some of them are a little bit advanced, going up and down the hill, going into the canyons. It can get a little hairy. We also have horses, and you can have as long a ride or short a ride as you want. We generally try and get our rides around two hours because that’s generally what most people can take. Riding on a horse — if they’ve never done it or if they’re not used to it — you get a little saddle sore. Going down into the Encierro [Canyon] is one of the big favorites for visitors. They love going down there.

ED: I hear the food is also pretty good?

KR: We have a brand-new chef that just started. I’ve been able to sample his foods and it’s amazing. It’s endless of what you can do while you’re here. He’s actually from here in New Mexico and one of his ideas is building a mud oven and start doing Indian breads, things like that out in the yard. That’ll be real big plus.

ED: Would you say the ranch is family friendly?

KR: Okay, yeah. We’ve had families come in from all over the place. One family in particular was from Chicago, New York, and L.A. They all met here kind of in the middle. A lot of them were not gun enthusiast by any means. But every single one of them had a great time shooting once they found out that it isn’t “big mean guns.”

I think a lot of people see firearms on the website and they’re like, “Oh, no. We don’t want to.” They’re quickly turned away. But at the end of their stay, if they were willing to try shooting, they’ll often say that was one of my favorite activities. They had a hell of a good time on the range. We want to portray to people that you don’t have to come out here for a firearms retreat. It’s just a fun day. It’s a great sport.

ED: How do you coax non-shooters into trying the firearms?

We start ‘em out on the smaller firearms and get ‘em comfortable with the smaller stuff, little .22s, things like that. Once they’ve shot those and found out that it isn’t terrible to shoot these, then every one of them has always wanted to go bigger and bigger until we get to the 50 cal.

ED: Can guests shoot as much as they want or are there limits on the amount of time, guns, ammunition, etc they can use?

KR: The one thing about our range, the part that is not included in the whole package, is the bullets for the firearms. We have to charge per box or per bullet as they shoot those.

We’ve been setting up packages for people and we try and put it up all the way across the spectrum of all of our firearms. If somebody wants to come in and they don’t know what they want to do, we can sell them a package that is all set up and ready to go. But most of the people kind of want to set it towards their wants and likes. So if they say they don’t want to shoot the .22 which is in the package then we just sell them by the box or by the round.

They get to set their experience up for what they like to do. If they’re an experienced shooter and they really don’t wanna play around with the .22 or things like that, we just sit down with them and say, “Hey, this is what we offer. How many of each would you like to shoot the first time you go out?” We’ll take them out, get them all acclimated with the area. They get to go out and play with stuff. And then the next time we go out and shoot, they’ll say, “No, I just want this specifically.” And that’s what we do. The activities are tailored to the person and not to something we’ve set up and think they should do.