I did not grow up around guns. I had never owned one, never fired one, and honestly never thought about it. I did not know anyone who shot, so when I first went looking, it was not a typical journey. My local gun store, Independence Guns and Ammo (IGA) in Yucca Valley, was the place I got my CA Firearms Safety Certificate, and where I bought my first gun (a Mossberg Maverick 88). It was a fast friendship with John (the owner) and Terry (the friend who happened to always be there), and every visit there was filled with nerding out on new guns, learning about who Jerry Miculek was, and eventually the guys at IGA pointed me toward Hi-Desert Rod and Gun Club (HDRGC). I got curious and looked up the range and found Ladies, Lead & Laughter (LLL) on Facebook. When I reached out, the women in this group were warm and receptive. I mentioned that I was still on my 10-day hold before I could pick up my own firearm, so I wouldn’t even have a gun to shoot at their monthly women’s only range session. They told me to "just come, you don't need anything, we have guns you can shoot".
LLL at HDRGC turned out to be exactly where I needed to be.
I want to tell this story properly, not as a quick brand anecdote, because it is not a quick story. It is the actual beginning of everything Cakes Concealed Carry has become, and it started with a group of women I barely knew inviting me somewhere I was certain I did not belong.
A Club with a Rich History
HDRGC sits at the foot of the Yucca grade in Morongo Valley, California, and it has been there since 1976. The range itself goes back even further. Local shooters and the Yucca Valley Rotary Club first set it up in the early 1960s, and when the Rotary Club's interest faded a decade or so later, a group of regulars stepped in, wrote bylaws, secured insurance, and turned it into the nonprofit club that still runs the property today. Fifty years later, it is still doing the same job: giving high desert families, hunters, competitive shooters, and total beginners like me a safe place to learn. In fact, their 50th Anniversary is this month, Oct 24th 2026!
The facility itself is a solid operation. There are ten covered lanes for rifle and pistol work, with targets set at 25, 50, and 100 yards, plus steel targets out at 200 and 300 yards for the people who want real distance. There is a 5-station trap range for shotgun shooters. Certified Range Safety Officers are always on duty to keep things running the way they should. The club exists to teach the skill, not to sell you gear. This keeps their focus tight.
I like knowing the history, because it tells you the club was never handed to anyone. It was built by people who wanted it enough to write the bylaws, find the insurance, and keep the lights on year after year, back when the area around Morongo Valley was still mostly open desert and a shooting range was the kind of thing a civic club built for its town rather than something a private company operated. That same instinct, showing up and doing the unglamorous work to keep something good running, is exactly what I later watched Peggy, Kim, Melvina, Adrienne, Bernie, Kerri and so many powerhouse women do for newbie women like me, one LLL session at a time.
I did not know any of that history the first time I drove out there. I just knew I was nervous, I did not own a gun, and I was about to walk into a room full of strangers.
Nobody Made Me Feel Small
Here is what I remember most clearly about that first visit: nobody looked at me twice for not having my own firearm. Peggy cleared a safe space for me and another newbie Sheyli. She brought her case of pistols and chose the right platform for us to learn on. Nobody rolled their eyes at my questions or acted like I was wasting their time. I have talked to a lot of women since starting Cakes who describe walking into a gun store or a range for the first time and feeling like they had wandered into a party they were not invited to. That is not what happened to me at HDRGC, it’s not what happened at LLL. It felt more like showing up to a family barbecue where you already knew half the people, except I did not know any of them yet.
That warm welcome mattered. A lot of women never take the first step toward learning to shoot, not because they are not interested, but because the first step feels like it requires proving something before you are allowed to ask a beginner's question. LLL never asked me to prove anything. They just handed me a gun, walked me through the basics, and let me ask every question I had.
I think about that first morning more than people would probably expect from someone running a company now. I remember exactly the beginner lane I stood in. I remember being embarrassed to admit I did not know how to lock back my slide, and I remember nobody treating that as strange. It was just the LLL, a very normal sharing of their love for firearms and shooting, which is held every first Saturday of each month. It was the first day of a completely different life for me, and I did not know that yet.
Peggy and Kim: The Two Women Who Taught Me to Shoot
My partner Marcus and I got our first real firearms instruction there in 2022, and the person who taught us was Peggy Schroeder. Peggy has a way of explaining things that makes you forget you are supposed to be nervous. She walked us through grip, stance, and trigger control the way you would explain something to a friend, not the way an instructor lectures a student. I remember leaving that first session thinking I understood something I had been intimidated by my entire adult life, and I understood it because Peggy took the time to teach it clearly.
Kim Johnson has been just as important to my journey, in a different way. Kim is the club's President and an instructor herself, and from the very beginning she has been someone I could count on, both as a new shooter figuring out the fundamentals and later as the founder of a brand trying to build something real in this space. Kim has supported Cakes at every turn, and that kind of steady support from someone who runs an entire club, and still finds time to mentor individual women coming up through it, is not something I take for granted.
I also want to mention Melvina Johnson-Paige, who was steadfastly watching all of us at almost every LLL, ensuring we were all safe. She runs her own brand, Unity Arms, and she actually taught me how to be an effective Range Safety Officer (RSO) myself. She is another instructor in my corner as I have grown as a shooter and as a business owner. Of course we had Bernie as RSO as well when she grew from a shooter to an officer at HDRGC herself, always passing by with her jokes and laughs and keeping us on our toes.
Adrienne and Kerri are another story, they are competitive shooters disguised as sweet ladies. They pushed me to keep shooting outside of the one day per month we all got together at LLL. We started registering for competitions together, we started showing up to steel matches together, we were building our skills together. Of course they don’t just shoot for fun, they bring home 1st place to hang up at the range. Adrienne has come to support Cakes at several events even before we were a well known brand. She didn’t need to be asked to come with me on Cakes trips, she just asked “which flight are we taking?”.
Between all these amazing women, I did not just learn how to shoot. I learned what it looks like when women support other women without ego, without gatekeeping, and without making you feel like you should have already known the answer.
Cakes Concealed Carry did not start with a business plan. It started with a group of women who decided teaching a new girl at the gun range mattered.
There is a version of this industry where the instructor's whole job is to move you through a checklist as fast as possible so the next student can get on the line. That was never what I experienced at HDRGC, or at LLL. Peggy would stop and re-explain something rather than let me nod along and pretend I understood. Kim, even while running the entire club, made time to check in on how Marcus and I were progressing. That kind of attention is not something you can fake, and it is not something every new shooter gets. I think about how differently my relationship with firearms might have gone if my first instructor had been impatient, or made me feel foolish for not already knowing the difference between a centerfire and rimfire. Instead I got patience. That patience is the reason curiosity had room to turn into real competence instead of quietly turning into embarrassment I would have walked away from.
Ladies, Lead & Laughter
If you want to understand why HDRGC became more than just a range to me, you need to know about LLL. It is the club's monthly women-only shooting event, held on the first Saturday of every month starting at 8 a.m., and for that morning, the range belongs entirely to women.
The club describes it simply as a chance to build shooting fundamentals and confidence while spending "fun social time" with other female shooters, and that description undersells it a little. NRA certified Range Safety Officers are there to help with basic training and safety tips at no extra charge, so a woman who has never fired a gun in her life can show up with nothing but eye and ear protection and leave having put rounds on a target for the first time. You do not need a membership, and you do not need any prior experience.
I have been on both sides of that morning. I came through LLL as someone who needed to learn, and I have gone back as Cakes’ Founder to support the next wave of new women. Standing in front of a group of women at the same range where I once stood not knowing how to hold a gun is the kind of full circle moment that reminds you why community matters more than credentials in this world. Every woman in that room is somewhere on the same path I was on, and a lot of them are exactly where I was, nervous, curious, and one Saturday morning away from realizing they belong there just as much as anyone else.
It is also worth saying that HDRGC is not building this community as a favor to Cakes or to any other brand that shows up to speak. LLL is the club's own event, built and run on its own terms, and the sisterhood that has grown around that first Saturday morning belongs to HDRGC, not to Cakes. The community itself, the regulars who show up every month, the friendships that started on a shooting line, the confidence that gets passed from one woman to the next, all of that is LLL’s own doing.
Look at what actually built that community, piece by piece. The club made LLL a fixed, recurring date, the first Saturday of every month, so women could plan around it instead of waiting for an occasional special event. It waived the usual barriers on purpose: no membership required, no experience required, and certified Range Safety Officers on hand to teach fundamentals at no extra charge, so cost and skill level never became a reason not to show up. None of that happened by accident. A club has to decide, on purpose and then keep deciding every month for years, to hold a door open. That consistency is the actual work behind the word community. It is not a slogan HDRGC put on a flyer. It is a monthly commitment they have kept long enough that women now build their calendars around it.
I mention all of this because it matters to get credit right. This is their community, built through their own decisions and their own follow-through. I am just lucky to have been part of it at the start of my journey, and lucky to still get back and visit.
Independence Guns and Ammo
Once I really started to shoot steel and compete more frequently, I found my way back to IGA in Yucca Valley. This was my go-to local shop, the place I would stop into for supplies and advice as I moved from complete beginner to someone building an actual routine around shooting. A good range teaches you the fundamentals; a good local shop keeps you equipped and supported in between range days. Having both, within a few miles of each other in the high desert, made building a real habit out of an occasional hobby a lot easier than it would have been otherwise.
That is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to treat a first range visit as the whole story and skip over everything that has to happen after it for a hobby to become a habit. Learning to shoot once does not make you a shooter any more than one good workout makes you an athlete. It took a local shop that knew my name, a range I kept coming back to, and instructors who were willing to keep teaching me past the beginner stage before any of this started to feel like mine.
From First Shot to CCW
Learning to shoot changed the trajectory of my life in ways I did not expect when I first walked onto that range. It did not stop at fundamentals. It led me toward pursuing my concealed carry permit, because once you know how to handle a firearm safely and confidently, the natural next question becomes how you carry it day to day, not just how you shoot it at a range.
That question is exactly where Cakes Concealed Carry came from. I started designing bags because I needed a way to carry that did not force me to choose between function and looking like myself, and that need became a business. You can see where that thinking landed in our current concealed carry bags collection, and I am now working on a new bag built specifically around what I have learned since getting my CCW: what actually needs to be true about a bag once you are carrying daily, not just training at the range. Every stitch of that design traces back to lessons that started with Peggy showing me how to hold a grip correctly.
The two experiences are not as separate as they might sound. Range training teaches you how a firearm behaves in your hand. Daily carry teaches you something different: creating the habit of situational awareness, learning how a firearm needs to sit against your body, how quickly you can actually get to it, and what a bag has to get right so that carrying stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling like a normal part of getting dressed. I would not have known to ask those questions if I had not spent real time at the range first, learning the fundamentals before I ever thought about what I wanted to wear. That order matters to me, and it is part of why safety and training come before any product conversation in everything Cakes puts out. The bag is downstream of the training, never the other way around.
In 2026, Cakes was named the Gundies Emerging Brand of the Year, recognition I am genuinely proud of and one I do not separate from where this all began. A brand does not get built in a vacuum. Mine got built because a club in Morongo Valley let a nervous, gun-less woman borrow a firearm and try. Everything after that, the training, the permit, the business, the award, traces back to that afternoon.
Why This Story Matters Beyond Me
I am telling this story publicly because I know I am not the only woman who has stood outside a gun range, sure that she needed permission or equipment or experience she did not have, and talked herself out of walking in. If that is you, I want you to hear this directly: you do not need anything to start. You need a place that will let you ask your first question without judgment, and instructors willing to answer it patiently. That combination is rarer than it should be, and when you find it, it changes what is possible for you.
I also think there is a version of this story that gets told wrong, one where a woman shows up to a range once, has a good experience, and the story ends there as a nice memory. Mine did not end there, and I do not think it should have to end there for anyone else either. The reason it kept going is that HDRGC and LLL did not treat that first Saturday as a one-time favor. Peggy kept teaching. Kim kept checking in. Melvina reminded me that training is not all about runnin’-and-gunnin’. The club kept holding LLL every single month, whether or not anyone was watching or writing about it. A single good experience can start a journey, but it takes an institution that keeps showing up to actually finish one. That is the part I think gets lost when people talk about representation in this space in the abstract, as if the goal is just getting more women through the door once. The goal is building places that keep the door open long enough for a woman to become the kind of shooter, and eventually the kind of instructor or business owner, who holds the door open for the next one.
HDRGC gave me that. Peggy Schroeder, Kim Johnson, and Melvina Johnson-Paige gave me that, each in her own way, as instructors who taught because they wanted more women confident and capable with a firearm, not because it was required of them. LLL keeps giving that to new women every single first Saturday of the month, whether or not they ever start a company because of it. You can find the club itself at hdrgc.org and see the same event calendar and range details I first found through a friend's casual invitation.
Find Your Own Version of This
If you are anywhere near Morongo Valley or Yucca Valley, go find LLL. Show up on a first Saturday, bring eye and ear protection, and let the Range Safety Officers walk you through the rest. If you are somewhere else entirely, look for the version of HDRGC in your own area. Our own find an instructor page is a good place to start looking, and the USCCA maintains a broader directory of certified training if you want a second source to check against.
Once training is underway and you start thinking about how you will actually carry day to day, that is where our does it fit checker earns its place, confirming your exact firearm model works with the bag you are considering before you buy it rather than after. And if there is ever a firearm in your home, review Project ChildSafe's guidance on secure storage. It costs nothing, and it matters regardless of how or why you carry.
And if you want a place to ask those questions before you ever set foot on a range, that is exactly why I built a community around Cakes in the first place. Reach out, tell us where you are starting from, and let us point you toward instructors and ranges in your area the way HDRGC once pointed toward mine. I promise you, someone in that group has stood exactly where you are standing now, and she will be glad you showed up.
I still drive out to Morongo Valley when I can. The lanes look the same. The Range Safety Officers still greet newcomers the same way they greeted me. And every first Saturday, a new group of women shows up not knowing how to load a magazine, the same way I once did not, and someone teaches them anyway.
Thank you, HDRGC. Thank you, LLL. Thank you to all the women who made this growth as rewarding as it has been. This entire journey started with you.
