It took a Craig quite a while to "discover" the .270 was actually quite capable of killing big game larger than deer. For elk he firmly drew the bottom line at the .30-06.
I kind of did too, which was pretty common among our generation (Craig and I were born about two weeks apart). However, I got over it due to growing up in Montana, where there's more opportunity for residents to hunt elk than for a non-resident gun writer. But the instance that really convinced me the .270 is a great hunting round took place 30 years ago this coming September, when my wife drew a Shiras moose tag on her very first application.
She'd heard stories about how moose don't react much even to good shots, so actually contemplated using my .30-06 with 200-grain Partitions, rather than her .270 with 150 Partitions--which she'd already used successfully on elk. But one shot with the .30-06 changed her mind back to the .270.
We found her medium-sized bull (the kind she wanted, for eating) on opening morning, just after dawn. It stood in a willow bottom at about 125 yards, quartering away. She aimed for the far shoulder and at the shot the moose took a slow step-and-a-half before folding up dead. Despite not being a really big Shiras, it was still bigger than any bull elk I've seen on the ground, and have seen a few here and there from New Mexico to British Columbia. The bullet was found in the meat of the far shoulder, so the bull died so quickly due to a lung shot.
The muzzle velocity of her 150-grain handload, by the way, was around 2850 fps. It's pretty easy to get 2800 with 140's in the 6.5 Creedmoor, and in fact the latest Speer manual lists 2855 from a 24" barrel, using Reloder 26. Maybe the extra 10 grains and .013 inch of bullet diameter in the .270 makes a real difference, but my experience makes me doubt it.
“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.” John Steinbeck
