Roy Sisler taught industrial arts at Waynesburg Central High, with summers off and a way with bird dogs. He grew up hunting in a family of eight, back when hunting put food on the table. He went to West Virginia on a wrestling scholarship and came out a three-time All-American.

He approached bird dogs the same way he approached the mat. He campaigned them at field trials, won the first one he entered in 1962, and was named a two-time National Birdhunters Association Top Handler with the top open shooting dog in the country.

In 1967, Pennsylvania introduced the shooting preserve license. He took it. His wife, Sally, handled the books. He brought in the customers and ran the dogs. In 1986 he built one of the first sporting clays courses in the country.

The current property was an old strip mine in Greene County. The family bought it in 1979 and reclaimed it by hand. Ras worked it as a teenager, then left for sixteen years in Alaska to build a guiding business.

His father came up to hunt brown bear in Alaska about ten years in. On that trip, his father asked him to come home. Ras held the line for five more years to build equity, sold the business, and returned in 2001.

His father had built the demand. Ras built the systems. He repositioned the bird program around wild pheasant hunting on purpose, turned the events business toward fundraising, and the natural gas boom in Appalachia arrived not long after.

Ras had no family generation behind him. He started planting seeds with a customer who had been coming to Hunting Hills for years. The conversation took four years to become a real plan.

The plan is the same one a school teacher had in 1967. Build something that lasts. Same standards. Same crew. Same answer to every customer who walks in.