Drive. The facility itself is about 20-30 minutes outside of Pahrump, NV and perhaps an hour from Vegas. These times vary depending on your driving habits, traffic, and weather. The roads are all paved until you get to the facility itself, where they are gravel, so a typical rental car/sedan should fare just fine. The gate doesn't open earlier than the advertised start time so there's no reason to show up crazy early.
Lodging. We chose to get a hotel room at the Saddle West hotel/casino. Saddle West offers a Front Site discount; be sure to ask for the "first family" rate if you're a lifetime member, but even if you're just attending a class they'll throw you a bone. They are semi firearms friendly; they'll have you sign a dry practice waiver and ask you not to carry in the public areas of the hotel. Front Site has camping but it looks pretty bare bones; I'm not even sure if they have water available.
Food. Saddle West has a good breakfast buffet that they threw in for us as a promo so that worked great. For lunch, you have a few options. First, Saddle West will do a box nasty for you. Next, Front Sight has an arrangement to get a box nasty delivered. Both box lunches are ok; nothing really to write home about, but filling and fairly reasonably priced. There's also a truck (like you'd see at a fair) with burgers, dogs, and so on.
Some folks "rolled their own" lunches from groceries at the store. We ate leftovers from dinner a few days; there's no fridge available for students but it was winter so it was fine to leave leftovers in the car during the day. For dinner, Front Site will give you a list of suggested restaurants where you can get a good discount. We tried the Italian place and were pleased. There's also all your standard small to mid-size town places available in Pahrump. As a note, Front Site makes coffee, tea, and water available; the coffee was pretty good (and I'm a snob), and they had premium Stash Tea, so this was nice.
Check In. Check in was smooth and efficient. You park in the large lot and go to a conex conspicuously marked with a "1" (one). Here they check your ID against a roster and verify what class you're enrolled for. You then go to station "2" for weapons inspection. They briefly check your weapon to ensure it is safe and run a magnet over your ammo. Like many ranges, they don't want steel core ammo that will damage their targets, and they don't want you using cheap steel cased ammo that might malfunction and create liability issues for them. There's then a quick admin brief in the main classroom building then off to your ranges!
Facilities. The center of the facility is a large classroom that can hold, say, a couple hundred folks. It is climate controlled and has a decent AV system. They also have a "comfort station" (washroom with flush toilets, sinks with hot running water, etc). The ranges themselves have port a johns so the comfort station is nice to have. The roads are generally covered in gravel, but they do have a water truck that wets it down to keep the dust down.
There's one nice, landscaped walkway with palm trees and nice facades on the walls. This is probably what you'll see in advertising copy. The rest of the place is more utilitarian. Still, don't let the conex boxes and rough landscaping turn you off. Heather and I concluded that the facility was pretty impressive overall.
Some of the facility highlights include "M16 Canyon" (a walking course for live-fire carbine engagement of steel and paper targets in a "popup" setting; they cleverly used a canyon to avoid building too many berms), a thousand yard precision rifle course set up on a scenic lookout point, a cool looking ropes course and zipline (again making use of a canyon for additional elevation), and a pair of "shoot houses" set up in conexes. There are numerous pistol ranges out to 25-50 yards and rifle ranges to 400 yards.
Conclusions. At first, Heather and I were kind of underwhelmed and didn't think that the place qualified as a "world class" shooting faciliy. Then, we realized that we were really spoiled with Birchwood up in Alaska. Many of the other folks at Front Site had not been to rifle ranges with areas longer than 100 yards to shoot, or pistol ranges with multiple bays. One visitor from the UK remarked about the horrid conditions of the few remaining ranges in his home country. So, ok, I guess in contrast the Pahrump facility is pretty good. The logistics are smooth and efficient and there are reasonable options for food and accommodations conveniently nearby.
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