Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Barsness - "Tough Game" & nitpicking

I really enjoyed this month' Rifle. So much for the fear of losing RS. John Barsness's article "Tough Game" was right on.

But, I reluctently want to pick a nit. It may be true in Montana that non-resident hunters are likely to hunt on horseback or on private ranches, but I doubt it. I bet more non-resident do it the exact same way residents do, and are less likely to have horses than residents are.

John, in most of the west we non-residents hunt just like you residents do. The single exception is that during a long season we are there during our vacation time so we don't have a resident's luxury of taking advantage of the weather. I bet you may have called in to work to take advantage of a fast moving front and fresh snow.

We also use our vacations to come hunt your States, not just our weekends. Where do you go on vacation?

I don't know about everyone, and try not to generalize as a rule. My friends don't carry big caliber guns all the time. The last Elk hunt I was on I had my 7X57 (1 Elk) and my 358 Win. I left the 300 Weatherby and the 416 Rigby at home. Two tags were filled with 7R Mag's.

The year before it was a 270, and a 308 that did the serious work. Our camps are filled with 7Rem Mags, 270's, & 06's. The only 338's, 340's and 450 Marlins' I have seen were in the hands of resident hunters.

In fact the price I pay for tags makes me a bargain gun shopper, where as residents in the west often have some very nice and expensive rifles.

This is truly picking nits I know, because the rest of the article was great. But this resident non-resident thing is more fiction than fact.

I am fully prepared to eat crow on this one in public in exchange for a horseback hunt on a private ranch at a price I can afford.

Sisk

I am a Montanan, and I enjoyed your post.
Its folly to try to paint either all Montanans or all non residents with the same brush.
I have friends from back east that have a cabin here, and across from their cabin, some guys from PA have a cabin. The guys from PA hunt their butts off and get elk every year. My friends hunt much more casually and never get elk.
I know native Montanans that get to hunt on either their own or other ranches almost exclusively and shoot elk as easily as I shoot a doe whitetail. Others, don't have acess to either horses or land, and hunt public land as much as possible with either hit or miss results.
The point I took from the article was that John was trying to dispel the myth that many native Montanans hunt with 270s or like calibers because we have so many opportunities at elk that we can pass on iffy shots. I believe if that was the point he was making that he was dead on. Here's why.
First of all, the cost of a 338 is very little if any more than a standard caliber. No Montanan or anyone else is going to buy an inferior rifle for no reason.
It is nearly a rite of passage (or used to be) for males growing up in Montana to work as guides for a period of time. Many many of these guys seem to be soured on the big rifles. Others swear by them.
Its easy to be awed by elk, their size and the country they live in when you come here from a background of deer hunting- I know I was. It seems logical that because elk are three times the size of a deer, they must be three times harder to hunt and three times harder to kill. Neither is true.
The sucess rate on elk hunting here in Montana is much higher than on deer where I grew up in Vermont. Elk are not much harder to kill than deer with a well placed shot. Native Montanans, being raised here don't have to overcome the awe that we non natives had to. Perhaps that is another reason they don't feel the need for magnum rifles in some cases.
Good hunting, and if you are ever in Bozeman, let my buy you a cup of coffee.

Fred Royce

I liked the article, didn't notice the non-res thing.

What really hurt was reading Towsley's article in the AR and finding out what a pussy I am for not shooting a 300RUM...my wife beats me, too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

The wimps I call hunting partners, all shoot non-mags on excursions except one friend who hunts local whitetail with a mag. He been charged a couple times.

Siskiyou--

Wasn't trying to make any point about non-residents. As Royce pointed out, I was addressing the gun-writer myth that resident elk hunters pass on any slightly iffy shot at elk.

Most of the articles I've read making that claim usually compare resident hunters to GUIDED non-residents. The line usually goes, "Unlike a resident, who can take next weekend off to go hunting again, you have paid several thousand dollars for your hunt, not to mention the cost of a plane ticket and non-resident elk license. You can't afford to come back again for several years. What cartridge are you going to trust for that one fleeting chance you may get in 10 days of hard hunting?"

If I read these correctly, guided non-residents are somehow justified in shooting a 6-point bull in the ass at 500 yards with a super-magnum. This is because they've paid a lot of money for the privilege.

I might hazard a guess as to this reasoning: The articles are written by non-resident gun writers who have only been on guided elk hunts, courtesy of some firearms manufacturer or friendly outfitter. So they don't know the realities of hunting elk on their own--either as a resident or non-resident. They are also generally professional magnum advocates, the reason they claim non-residents can pass up shots with their puny .270's.

Don't know the break-down on how many non-residents hunt elk in Montana with outfitters versus those that don't. But the guaranteed tag that comes with an outfitted hunt these days has to affect that ratio. And it's the guided hunters who tend to bring the big rifles, I'd guess because they're the ones who read the articles written by the gun writers who've only gone on guided elk hunts.

I also don't know the precise percentage of resident hunters who use horses to set up a back-country camp, but it's very low. Many of these are also what I call "horseback road hunters," meaning they mostly ride around on trails, regardless of wind direction, hoping to bump into an elk in the open. In my experience, most Montana hunters who have horses leave them at home until the elk is dead. Only then do they trailer them into the mountains to haul the carcass out. Even this is a very small percentage.

I certainly agree that non-resident elk hunters work harder than the average resident. The average resident elk hunter never leaves his pickup if he doesn't absolutely have to.

You're right. When the right weather comes in, I phone myself and say, "John, it snowed six inches last night and you better go up the hill instead of writing today." So I do. I also have the luxury of living approximately 30 minutes from the trailhead where I start most of my elk hunting.

I haven't taken a real vacation (as in 2 weeks off to do exactly as I want within the limits of my bank account) in at least 25 years. Generally if my wife (another freelance writer) and I get a few days to do something, we go to a small city and eat at fine restaurants, sit in a hot tub, and do other indoor things.

Admittedly, this is because I spend over half the days of the year in the outdoors--but then again, I planned my life that way. Luckily it worked.

I don't know what you would consider an affordable guided elk hunt. In my experience, however, almost none of the ranch hunts take place on horseback. The pony rides are reserved for public land. Also in my experience, you stand a lot better chance of success hunting elk on your own than booking an "affordable" horseback hunt anywhere. This is because a relatively cheap horseback hunt is mostly a pony ride, with very few elk involved.

Good hunting,
MD

What Mule Deer sees in Montana, I see in Idaho. Residents don't pass up shots, and yet most of them go home empty handed.

We are part of the "damn the horses" group, too. I hunt with my father-in-law, and they keep 4 of the nags. I'd rather pack an elk out on my back than drive back to the farm (3 to 4 hrs each way), load up those ill-tempered beasts, drive back, change out three flats on the trailer, burn up a tranny, get bit, get kicked, darn near fall off the side of the mountain going in. Then, when you finally get to the elk, have a little rodeo trying to get the critter loaded, and drag yourself back to the truck, all the while hoping against hope that the stupid gelding doesn't decide to roll trying to get the pack off. When you finally get out of the mountains, by flashlight, you damn near have a wreck loading the ignorant horses back in the trailer.

In general, I only see two kinds of people on horseback. Guided hunters, and trail riders with a gun. The trail riders are true horsemen, but they are horsemen first, there to pop an elk if they happen to see one. However, they are there for the ride in the mountains with the elk hunt thrown in as a sweetener. JMO, Dutch.

I had the fortune to pack way back in a wilderness area with a first rate horseman and hunter.
As we were passing some foot hunters with backpacks on one of them accused us of cheating. My guide replied," Maybe so but we are eating steak tonight. What kind of noodles you eating." With a smile on his face the guy called us bastards.
Them horses are alot of work though.

FWIW:

In my experience, horseback hunters are horseman with a rifle. So I agree with the post.

But, those MULE guys are hunters. If they have MULES, they can (and do) hunt well and hunt hard.

Don't know why, just seems to be true.

BMT

Thats a good one, haven't heard one like that in awhile. Thanks! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

MtnHtr

I thought it was one of the best articles in a gun magazine I'd ever read. Informative, thought provoking and entertaining! My copy will eventually be dog eared, wrinkled and torn from being lent out as "source material" when hunting buddies of mine ask what I think about which cartridges are the best for which game.

In the other article, where John coined the word "practice wife" do describe an "ex" - I nearly spewed my soup I laughed so hard. I'm a really slow learner, as I had two "practice wifes" before I got it right! LOL!

Thanks for working as hard as you do John, to produce articles that go far beyond the descripter "worth reading" - yours are almost always "worth keeping"!

With all respect to Mule Deer, who is great and wise. Consider the plight of the gun writer. If he were to write "Modern bullets are so good you can kill elk as well with a 7mm/08 as a .338 RUM, provided you can shoot and are willing to work," would people be interested? Would you sell magazines? Would you get angry letters to the editor? Would you keep your job? Oh hell no. The second biggest elk I've ever seen--an absolute draft horse of a bull--was shot dead with one .280 bullet by a woman hunter who could shoot. But I will never refer to this in print.

Some of us can't afford a horse back hunt, but just do it anyway. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I must say I really enjoyed both of MDs articles in that issue; I'm afraid he might be kicked out of the GunWriters' Union for saying some of that stuff though.
Mark

I do have to pass on comment here on the latest Rifle magazine.

The articles in it are very, very, good. An excellent read all the way around and I hope John will pass this on. Dave's S. comments on the 325 WSM compared to the 338 WSM were excellent as all the other tech and hunting/rifle write up's.

Maybe it's just me, but I keep seeing Rifle, Handloader, and SH improving upon each issue. Not by any means were these publications bad in any way, not at all. I keep finding them more applealing. It seems Dave Scovill has not rested on past or current success. I see diligence and hard work in supplying a good read for more experienced readers. The guy knows what he is doing and what he is talking about.

Thanks,

"and do other indoor things" <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />
so, how do you pronounce Barsness. All these years and I still have not a clue, even met you in person once (in glenrock with jay lesser)

In the last few years, I have read two EXCELLENT articles about individual, exceptional elk hunters. One article was by Keith McCafferty about Joe Gutoski in Field & Stream. I believe it was titled "Toughest Man Alive" or something to that effect. Joe lives here in Bozeman, and at 70 plus years, he still goes into the mountains for days at a time with his pack and hunts, often solo. A couple of years ago, he broke his leg and crawled out four miles. Keith had to go retrieve his pack. Joe is NOT the typical Montana hunter, though.
Another great article about a Montana elk hunter was in Field & Stream, and was written by John Barsness. This hunter is from Ennis, Montana, and hunts from a horse. If I am not mistaken, a picture from that article is now a background for the Burris ads. This hunter is not typical of Montana hunters, either, but both are great articles about good hunters.
As for Mr Towsley, I realize everyone has to make a living, but he lost some of his credibility with me when he took the then new 300 Ultra Mag on a deer hunt and shot a yearling doe at less than 100 yards, and therefore proclaimed the Ultra mag to be a terrific deer cartridge.
Or perhaps it was when he wrote about killing his first elk on a hunt in Wyoming with Ron Dube. On the ride into camp, they spotted a bull elk, he piled off his horse and shot the elk behind the ear with a 338 Heavy Magnum load. Surprise surprise, the elk prommptly expired, proving (somehow) that the only thing that would kill an elk was a 338 with the high energy loads.

Royce

Now, why would anyone who is a trophy hunting gunwriter shoot a bull Elk in the head????????? Helluva mess for the taxidermist, IMHO.

I'm hoping Barnsness doesn't get blackballed from the gun writers union for that article. It was refreshing to see the way it is in print.
My thoughts on taking a horse hunting runs to the nope side. It took a while for me to realize that going on vacation (that's what my elk hunt is) and having to get up a couple hours early to do chores sort of defeats the purpose of the vacation in the first place. The other thing that occurred to me is my horses are a pretty important part of my ranch operation, and I'm not sure with all the goofs with big friggen magnum rifles running around, some don't know the difference between moose and elk, I'm not sure I want to expose any of my horses to the excellent killing capabilities of the newest wonder magnum, loaded with the finest bullet money can buy. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Ranch13
I think you have just discovered the reason for the "bigfriggenmagnum" rifles!!!
These guys need a round powerful enough to shoot 600 yards, go through a Decker pack saddle and folded up wall tent and then still have energy enough to drop the "elk" before he runs off with the lead rope.
Maybe we can even get Bryce Towsley to do an article about "Bullets designed For accidentally shooting Horses, Mules, Schools Buses, Llamas and other things encountered on Wilderness Hunts."

Royce I actually stumbled on to that one about 15 years ago when I rode out of a patch of timber into a meadow, and discovered 2 stainless steel rifle barrels glinting in the sun pointed right at me. One of the orange caps behind the scope said " boy its a good thing you come out from behind those quakies, we thought your horse was a big ol elk"
Guess the didn't realize elk don't have don't shoot wrote on their legs and necks with furox, or maybe they figured it was just a trick those wiley elk pull. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Do you know where I could see a copy of this article? I grew up in Ennis, and know pretty much all the locals and I can't really think of a hunter that I'd be in "awe" over when it came to elk hunting...