Judy Carpenter

That championship spirit.

Our journey of a thousand miles began with a single shot. It was the late ’70s, and Judy Carpenter discovered a box of shotgun shells in her car, left behind by a friend. Yet because sport shooting was really just for men—or so the world had led her to believe—she had to be coaxed to give it a try.

Finding out she was—in her words—“pretty good” led her to want more and greater challenges. She chose trap shooting over skeet shooting because it was tougher and less predictable. She chose a gun designed for precision, but harder to master. She competed less to beat others than to strive for her own ideals of excellence. To everything she tried, she brought the spirit of a champion.

It was that same spirit—along with her ideals of equality and inclusion—that would ultimately lead to the founding of Lucky Clays Farm, Judy’s own 5-stand shooting destination. One day, as Judy was teaching her assistant, also a woman, to shoot at a local gun club, the young woman made a rookie, but common, mistake: she shot the Trap House. After the two were shouted out by the Club Pro there, the rest is history, as they say.

That might have been the end of the story, had shooting been Judy’s only passion. But a deep connection to the earth had made her an avid environmentalist—a challenge she took up just as willingly and successfully as every other, evolving Lucky Clays into Juneberry Ridge. And while it takes ups and downs to build every ideal—some occasional “shooting the roof”—Juneberry lives up to the example Judy set.