Charter Arms Pathfinder: .22 kit gun extraordinaire

Sometime during the late '80s, I was living on a farm which had, among other features, a small pond that was absolutely overrun with snapping turtles. On more than one occasion, a buddy and I engaged in the recreational pursuit of turtle shooting, where we would stand side by side, each with a revolver and lots of ammo, and shoot at the turtles that kept popping their heads out of the water to see what was going on. This was challenging because their heads didn't present a very large target, and they didn't keep them up very long, either.
I don't remember exactly what revolver I was shooting. It was either a 4" skinny barrel S&W M&P Model 10 (that I wish I still had), or a 2 3/4" Ruger Security Six (that I also wish I still had) but either way, I was shooting .38 Special wadcutter reloads. My buddy was shooting an RG 14 .22LR snubby revolver with whatever loss-leader ammo was cheapest then. Now, it's pretty hard to beat .38 wadcutters for the odd shot at a turtle or water moccasin in the water, but this wasn't like that. This was a matter of shooting as fast and accurately as possible, then reloading as fast as possible, and so on until you run out of ammo. It seemed that my buddy was having just about as much terminal effectiveness on the turtles with his .22, as I was with my .38 which, as you know if you are at all familiar with snapping turtles, wasn't much because although a snubnose .22 will kill a snapper just fine if you hit it in the head, even a 12 gauge slug ain't gonna keep it from diving to the bottom.
The advantage that .22 had though, was the ability to plop down a ten-spot at the hardware store and walk out with 500 rounds of ammo. Handloaded .38 wadcutters didn't cost too much more than that, especially with bullets cast from free wheelweights and Bullseye powder metered out 3 grains at a time, but 500 rounds of that stuff meant spending some time in the barn with the loading equipment. That's all part of the fun, but it tended to give one pause before expending 500 rounds at one turtle-shooting session!
Of course I had a .22 rifle, but that just wouldn't have been the same. I hearkened back to my teenage years and the time I spent shooting turtles, snakes, rabbits and squirrels with a cheap, chrome-plated RG 10 (THE classic "Saturday Night Special", I definitely don't regret getting rid of that piece of junk). That revolver was marked ".22 Short" but .22 Longs fit it perfectly. The .22 Long was the same case as the Long Rifle, and the same 29 grain bullet as the Short. It was probably loaded to the same velocity as the Short, too. What mattered though was that the LR case would fit, though its bullet stuck out the end of the cylinder. So I bought (or filched from my Dad) .22 LR and shortened the bullets slightly to fit; sometimes using a file, sometimes a pair of diagonal wire cutters. The point (no pun intended) of that was not only that I already had .22 LR ammo, and that it was more powerful than the Long and Short stuff, but also that LR ammo was half the price of Shorts and, when you could even find them, Longs. This, of course, was due to the much greater popularity of the LR.
What was amazing was that even such a cheap, snub-nosed revolver, with such doctored ammo, was still capable of hitting a squirrel a goodly part of the time, not to mention sitting rabbits or the head of a snapping turtle.
So it was that, ten years later, I became impressed with my buddy's RG 14. I don't remember what he paid for it, but it was well under $100. It basically addressed the shortcomings of the RG 10: it was chambered for .22 LR (so no bullet filing necessary), had an automatic hammer block safety so you could safely carry it fully loaded, and no junky chrome plating. What was not to love! I had to have my own .22 kit gun!
But if I couldn't have that specific, proven example (and I couldn't; my buddy wouldn't sell it) then I didn't want another RG. A S&W kit gun was out of the question too; they were just too expensive, as were Colts. I wanted one that was decent quality, with a ceiling price of $150. I was really looking for a High Standard Sentinel, as I had fired a few of them and knew several people who owned them, but I figured if I couldn't find one, a Taurus or Rossi would be OK too. H&R still made their revolvers in .22 and .32 then, and the .22 version was $100 new at the local emporium, but the trigger pull on the examples I tried was horrendous, and I had talked to a few people who said they wouldn't hit the broad side of a barn, from inside. I was about to buy one anyway to see for myself, when I stumbled across the perfect candidate; one I was aware of but had simply forgotten about: the Charter Arms Pathfinder!
Actually, I guess it's understandable why I had forgotten about them. New, while not as pricey as a Smith Model 34, they were still out of the range of what I wanted to spend for a .22; used, they were pretty much nonexistent. Much like the aforementioned High Standard Sentinel, the Pathfinder held kind of a cult status, and those who had one generally weren't selling. So when I happened upon a used one for sale, I was smart enough to recognize a good deal and, after some intensive haggling, escaped out the door with it for only $140, tax and all. The ensuing years have been one of those "happily ever after" stories, but with the carcasses of many rabbits, squirrels, snakes etc. thrown in. I had my .22 kit gun, and still do.
That revolver has never failed to amaze me with its accuracy. I'm not the only one saying that either; the famed gun writer Hal Swiggett had a 3" barreled version just like mine, only with a scope mounted, and wrote several articles about the many rabbits, squirrels etc. he killed with it.
Then a couple of days ago, Jerry at Rimfires and Thoreau (who writes quite a bit about .22s anyway, as suggested by the name of his blog) wrote a couple of posts about .22 handguns, especially revolvers, as a primary survival gun. I commented that I think a Ruger Single Six with both cylinders is an ideal, rest-of-your-life foraging gun and Jerry, while agreeing with me, said that he would like to have a double action. He mentioned the Pathfinder as a possible candidate, but said the "jury is out on its durability".
I hastened to lay Jerry's fears to rest, but then I started thinking, why not write an article about it? So here it is. I am officially recommending the Charter Arms Pathfinders.
In researching on the internet, I found that Jeff Quinn at Gunblast.com has not only written two separate articles about the Pathfinder, he actually has Hal Swiggett's original Pathfinder! You can read all about it here and here.