Lessons learned from 10 days scouting and hunting in Rockies.

Walter and Donny recently wrapped up 10 days scouting and hunting in Colorado for elk and mule deer. Both Walt and Donny notched their tags and were successful in filling their freezers and learning a thing or two along the way. Here are the footnotes:

There is no replacement for shot placement. Hitting the vitals is the single best thing a bowler can do to ensure an animal dies quickly. Walter would rather shoot a deer in the lungs with a 17 HMR than in the liver with a .338 Lapua.

6mm rifles shooting Match Bullets are very effective at taking game and offer a great balance of lethality, external ballistics, and recoil that’s very tough to beat. Walter shot a bull elk at 550 yards, dropping him in his place with a 6 Creedmoor with converted Sig Fury brass and a 109 ELDM doing 3175 FPS. Donny shot a 28-inch mule deer at 400 yards with factory 6 ARC 108 ELDM’s doing 2500 FPS out of a 16-inch Minifix with a Noveske barrel. Both Walter and Donny were able to spot their impacts.

Bullet selection is far more important than caliber selection. Match bullets have very destructive wound channels and expand rapidly but often don’t have exit wounds. Would you rather have a bullet that fragments and incapacitates but doesn’t have much of a blood trail because of a lack of an exit wound, or would you like to have a less violent wound channel but with an exit and wound channel? The best way to recover an animal is to have it make it less than 30 yards before expiring.

300 Blackout continues to impress and amaze Walter. A cow elk tag was notched with a 188 Discreet Ballistics projectile at 120 yards. The cow, shot through the heart with a wound channel that would make a .300 Win Mag shooting a mono bullet blush, made it less than 20 yards. When combined with the soon-to-be-released 120 HOTLOADS, a short, lightweight 300 blackout with 188 subs and supers is about as flexible and lethal of a package as a bowler can get.

Stability in the field and getting there quickly should be practiced more than shooting prone or from a bench at the range. Not a single animal, from a yearling spike whitetail to a 400-inch bull elk, gives one shit what group your hunting rifle shoots from sandbags on a bench. What matters is the bowler’s ability to accurately and quickly hit targets from positions they will actually use in the field. Ditch the bipod and the shooting bag and embrace the tripod and rear support from trekking poles with the wiser precision quick sticks. This setup is super stable and can be used for glassing and packing out meat. For a tripod, Walter recommends the RRS or the Aziek Ridgeline if a bowler is concerned with size and weight.

Walter is a firm believer in the notion that everyone should try hunting. Short of hanging out at the local convenience store parking lot at 3 in the morning with a rental car filled with bags and packaging repurposed into bait from the dumpster behind the local Apple Store and waiting in the nearby bushes in a ghillie suit with a taser and waiting for chaos to ensue, hunting provides bowlers rare levels of excitement and experience akin to our ancestors’ lives. If you will it, it is no dream!