Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting The Cult of the open-country mule deer rifle

And as long as one practices properly with his rifle, 7Mag or .30-06, at the ranges one intends to shoot, they're close enough to not matter.

Wouldn't that be a hoot if jeffy actually considered that..

Of course his would..its the best in the world....

ingwe

Jeffy, I'm going to give you some advice that I've taken from VERY successful open country Mule Deer hunters. These are top shelf western style hunters..

Forget the rifle, you've already got it.

Work on your glassing skills. Be able to sit on your ass for DAYS behind glass, and know what you're doing when you're looking through 'em.

That's how you kill book Mulies in trophy units.

Johnny...dats a BIG 10-4....

Nine days on the glass till this one walked into it...

A while ago.....




Ingwe

Holy chit!

That's NOT a dink... I knew Ingwe lived on the dark side in the past...

Great deer!

Kent

+1, what was the spread on that dude?

take the money you were gonna spend on a rifle and buy a pair of 15x56's and a tripod.

I've killed mulies with a .243, a 7Mag, a .25-06 etc, and they all work well.

I love the 7Mag, and I love the .25-06. I don't think you can find a more ideal mulie cartridge than the .25-06. I find that the 7Mag doesn't need to come out unless I'm after elk or moose, anymore. And Alberta isn't known for dink deer

Honestly, Jeff, get whatever turns your crank. If we're talking ideal mulie gun, I'm thinkin' .25-06. If you just want a rifle that makes you sweat, get that Kimber in 7WSM and launch a 140TTSX

That's a nice one Ingwe!

I'm gonna guess 28" on the inside.

I bought a 300 weatherby to do just that...long shots with great ballistics. The first rifle I bought was a Weatherby Accumark in 300 WBY, but it just didn't shoot 180 grain bullets well.

The next rifle I boughtwas a Sako Deluxe and I had Peter Noreen in Bozeman, MT put a muzzle brake on it. I had Mark Gustafson float the barrel, bed the action and put on a Decelerator recoil pad and went hunting.

The gun is capable of sub 1 inch groups all day long with 180 grain bullets. This target was nothing more than checking zero after it had been in the safe for several months...



I was then convinced to get a 30-378 Weatherby in an Accumark. It would shoot a 200 grain Accubond bullet to an inch at about 3250 FPS. I shot some game with it, but it was a big gun and I soon tired of it, but was able to make some long range kills with it. This deer was 800 yards...



I bugged the guy that bought my Sako to sell it back to me and I am convinced the 300 Weatherby is the best cartridge considering long range and energy at those ranges. With a Nosler 180 grain Ballistic tip bullet at 3200 FPS, it will kill elk easily at 700 yards and if you run into something closer, it still works.

Elk at 450 yards...



Elk at 660 yards...



Antelope at 650 yards...



It still works at 100 yards too...

I'm still trying to figure out why your considering 200 gr bullets at 2700 fps out of an 06' as a dedicated "long" range mule deer load.

Load up some high BC 150's at 3000fps or so, or some 165's at 2850-2900. THEN your talking a dedicated long range muley load.

Sometimes your logic baffles me.

Don't know why I said that, your logic would baffle most normal people anytime....

Given equally accurate loads, the 200-gn Accubond at 2740 fps is a significantly superior long range load to a 165-gn NBT at 2900 fps or a 150 at 3000 fps. I'm not talking drop, nor retained energy here... talking wind drift mainly. Drop is easy to correct, etc.

However, I don't know if I'll be able to get both that kind of speed with the 200's and great accuracy. That's still an unknown. My last try with RL17 yielded as-advertised speed (in my .325) but not great accuracy.

Anyway I won't argue against the 30-06. I love my 30-06; it's on it's second barrel as a 30-06, if that tells anything... I've run at least (400) 165-gn NBT's through that rifle in the last year, mostly at longer ranges, and you bet, they work. I would tend to agree that 165's are near-nirvana in a 30-06... but RL17 may goose the 200-gn enough to change things a bit.

And finally.... the rifle loon in me can't help but figure ways that I could do this job better than the 30-06, which happens a lot, I gather, to other loons too.

155 scenar, have your cake and eat it to.

200's @ 2740 out of an '06? okay, your all over that but will start a 100 page battle over a 162 @ 2700 via 7/08?

Sometimes your logic baffles me.

Lol, fair enough, though that wasn't what that battle was about.

I'll bow out a while here. Don't want to argue, I just hope to hear folks talk about their thoughts on open country mulie rifles... whether I buy or build or just tote my '06, half the fun of an upcoming hunting adventure is plotting gear upgrades... grin....

Since you've ruled out the 'best' choice (270 Win) you'll just have to settle for 'second best' (280 Rem).

Jeff I get the whole numbers thing; figuring wind drift ,energy tables,blah, blah, etc.

But if I were in your shoes(I have been about a zillion times)I'd pay lots of attention to what the cartridge /load does inside 400 yards when you don't have time to play with the windmeter,use a LRF,deploy the bipod,yadayada.

Quite frequently,often enough,killing big mule deer has a whole lot less to do with fancy ballistic calculations than it does with your ability to get a bullet into vitals with seconds on the clock.And this gets truer the bigger they are.

There are a multitude of reasons for this,but they mostly have to do with big mule deer being a completely different critter from the smaller ones that inhabit the same region.

Rancho Loco is right when it comes to the glassing part,and you can kill them with about anything if you can find them first.But the biggest mule deer bucks I have seen in the last decade or so were incapable of being glassed by anyone,from anywhere,given their bedding locations and nocturnal propensities.I have hunted the big sage and juniper country of southern Utah;it will hide bucks for days that are impossible to glass up unless they stand up during hunting hours.Careful glassing may find them, given time and patience.But then you gotta kill them.....

So, maybe you are gonna have to go get them at some point;sneak right in where they live,and it will not always be a simple matter of finding, ranging, and shooting.You may have to move on them,and in so doing,may easily get "made".

Nice to sit here on the computer and contemplate that if you bump them you screwed up,but such analysis is not "real world" because if it was,and if no one ever made mistakes,everyone would have a bunch of big ones, which they don't....so....

What's my point? Simple....I have never hunted another big game animal that offered a wider range of shooting circumstances than a trophy class mule deer.And the chance to sureptitiously snipe one at distance is only about 10-15% of the total equation, at best,and is accorded about that much consideration, by me anyway.Fancy and complex ballistic considerations are a tiny part of killing trophy class mule deer.

You better learn to be fast enough....and good enough....to stick a bullet in a basketball at 20 to 400 yards in under 5 seconds,under stress.That is, if you want to kill many good ones.Choose rifle and load with that in mind.

JMHO and FWIW

Sammers, you are pretty good...the only measurement I ever took on him was right after that pic was taken....to see if he was bigger than one I had on the wall.The one on the wall was 26.5 on the inside, the one in the pic was 28.5.....


He went on the wall too...


Oh, BTW: the " open Country rifle" was a Rem . Mtn. Rifle in 7x57 with a Leupy 1-4x..

Ingwe