I arrived at the NRA Whittington Center at about 2pm on Wednesday and checked in. Raton has had much much more precipitation this year than recent years, so the whole environment was transformed by the flora compared to last year. Strong thunderstorms rolled through the Whittington Center every day of the match around 4-6pm, and temperatures were moderate to cool, as opposed to the sweltering heat of last year's match.

The general outline of the match was: 8 stages, three Thursday, three Friday, and two Saturday. There were 16 squads of approximately 8 shooters each. Each squad shot one time slot, and had one time slot's worth of downtime before the next stage. I was on squad 8, starting on stage 8. Some others in my squad included: Curt Monnig (Trijicon), Ron Adams, Darrell Humphrey, John Sternberg, Kelly Neal, and Stewart Lewis.

In addition to the main match, there were two side-matches: the machinegun match run by Alan Samuel of MachinegunTours, and a long-range precision match run by Mike Kolar.