Reading this thread reminds me that "mountain rifles" have lost a pound or two since the days when JOC popularized the rifle and the term; or when Elgin Gates hunted up to 16,-17,000 feet in the Pamirs of Central Asia with a 300 Weatherby Magnum that must have weighed all of 8.5#s.Warren Page's 7mm Mashburn,Old Betsy,weighed "....an ounce over 8 pounds, scoped, slung, and loaded...".
Back then (in the dreaded days of blued steel and walnut) the target weight for a 270 or 280 (scoped) was about 8 pounds although some weighed a bit less.
Of course the people of those days did not have access to the technology we enjoy today,so made do with what they had and who knows what they'd carry today?. I do recall one Asian sheep hunter who felt that, when dealing with the huge, windswept basins of Asia, a guy was nuts to lug anything less than a 300 magnum of reasonable weight....that's how they dealt with distance and wind in those days.I bet a long shot would be easier to make with such a rifle than some of the anorexic designs out there today.
These guys were real trophy hunters of mountain game in some of the world's remotest areas,and their lifetime accumulation of exotic mountain game they made would make the bags of most of today's hunters look mundane by comparison.
There is no real reason to carry more than you need to up a mountain, but if you have a rifle weighing 7-8 pounds all up,you should be good to go.
