Shooting an arrow more than a mile.
The Quest to Shoot an Arrow Farther Than Anyone Has Before
In dogged pursuit of an exotic world record, an engineer heads to the desert with archery equipment you can’t get at a sporting goods store
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innov...ore-180979009/
In an ancient white salt flat, 30 miles south of Nevada’s Route 50—“The Loneliest Road in America”—a man is looking up into a blue sky. His head is wrapped in a makeshift keffiyeh scarf to protect him from the sun. In a few moments he will lie down on his back. Between his upraised legs he will cradle a contraption akin to a medieval crossbow, and point it at an angle of roughly 40 degrees in the direction of a hazy mountaintop some four miles away. He is preparing to shoot arrows out into the thin desert air, one of which he hopes will break archery’s worldwide distance record of 2,028 yards, or 268 yards beyond the one-mile mark.
“This is about to get interesting,” he says with a nervous laugh. Alan Case, a bemused engineer and designer from Beaverton, Oregon, has spent the past 15 years chasing that distance record, which was set in 1971 by an archer named Harry Drake. The champion used a muscle-powered device called a footbow, similar to the one Case is warming up with this morning 6,100 feet above sea level at Smith Creek Dry Lake. It is nearly 50 years to the day that Drake set the record. At 55 years old, Case is Drake’s age at the time. “After about four or five practice shots I start to have fun,” Case says.
