The idea was to spend time doing something different for a new column that's a little different.

Remember the Boise Walkabout, a 2002 series of columns in which a different neighborhood was trodden and written about each week? The idea is similar, except this column isn't about people and their neighborhoods. It's about people and how they spend the time they treasure.

We sleep. We work. We have obligations. The rest of the time, when we do what we want to do, is what I'll be writing about on Mondays for the next few months. The subjects are wide open — anything from geocaching to gardening. If you have a pastime you love and think others would enjoy reading about it, I'd love to hear from you.

For today's column, I spent time at Blacks Creek with a Cowboy action shooters group. It seemed to make geographic and visual sense. These guys evoke our Western heritage and — let's be honest — people blazing away with six guns are more colorful than, say, calligraphers.

Never having been to a shootout, I had only the vaguest idea of what to expect. What quickly became obvious is that these folks are bugs about authenticity. Their clothes look like they raided Wyatt Earp and Calamity Jane's closets: Old West hats, coats, gowns, vests, chaps — everything but manure on the boots. All of their guns must have been designed before 1897. Except for the cars and trucks parked at the Blacks Creek Range, it could have been 1897.

With typical Western hospitality, they insisted that I blaze away with them. All of the action shooters have aliases — Jughandle Jack, Homestead Hanna, you get the idea. Bill "Grubslinger" Bivens lined me up with an alias (Mark Twain), a six-shooter on each hip, and the morning's instructions:

"You're at the campfire cookin' beans when the bad guys ride in. Your job is to dispatch them."

But not just any old way. The bad guys are targets. You have to dispatch them in a prescribed order, using specific weapons. You shoot the first five bad guys with a rifle. Then you run to a second position and shoot more bad guys with pistols. Then you run somewhere else and blast away with a shotgun. This assumes that you don't trip over your spurs, land in the unaccustomed plethora of weapons and turn yourself into a human firing range.

It also assumes that you know how to load, fire and unload vintage weapons, which in "Mark Twain's" case was a large assumption. No one actually ducked, but there was some highly impressive blanching. The county's most feared gunman didn't shoot anyone, however, and actually managed to hit most of the targets in something under 90 seconds.

Then Paul "Wogg" Cooper came along. He hit all of the targets. In 21 seconds.

Cooper was Idaho's 2003 and 2005 Single Action Shooting Society state champion. A professional gunsmith, he rarely misses a target and fires so rapidly that two of his ejected shells are almost always in the air at the same time. He actually wears guns out.

"I practice dry (without live ammunition) 10 to 12 hours a week, plus two to four hours of actual shooting," he said. "I've been doing this for eight years and have gone through seven different rifles, four or five shotguns and seven or eight pairs of pistols."

Elaine "Shameless Sonora" Cooper, his wife, "likes everything about shooting — the outfits, the guns, the fact that it's a family hobby. How many women do you know whose husbands buy them a new gun for Mother's Day?"

Their 6-year-old, James "Tadpole" Cooper, is a registered single action shooter and a cool hand with a cap gun.

Real guns for action-shooting competitions aren't cheap. Most shooters have several thousand dollars invested in their weapons.

For Linda "Homestead Hanna" Lake, it's mostly about the clothes.

"I love the Civil War ball gowns," she said. "The Victorian gowns, the hats, the jewelry ... A lot of women don't like guns, but they love dressing up. And as they get familiar with the guns, they realize they aren't going to kill themselves, and they get better at the shooting part of it."

Sharon "Six Gun" Wright was a heartbeat away from dead last when she joined the club and went on to take first place in the women's traditional shooting category.

"But the big emphasis isn't on shooting," she said. "It's on safety. Safe, fun gun handling."

I'm not a gun person, but it was hard not to like the action shooters. They don't hurt or kill anything. They obviously have a good time.

And every single one of them, when asked, said the best thing about their hobby is what may be the best thing about any hobby — sharing a bond with friends.

"We all grew up watching the TV westerns, and it's fun to dress up and play John Wayne," Grubslinger said. "But the best thing about it is the people. Except for the targets, there's no bad guys here."