Now there is some good common sense hunting advice. Take your kestrel, Chronograph, ballistics calculator, certainly a tripod and sandbags, and maybe a Sherpa to help you carry all your crap up the hill.
Practice with your rifle, if you plan to shoot farther than 400 yards practice from field positions, not a gosh darn bench, a lot more than you think necessary. Then invest in a rifle scope with a reticle that makes the drops easier to shoot with confidence. I like the Zeiss Z600 but you can pick from a bunch. Adjust your zero to hit at 200 when you arrive at altitude and give your mind a break from this ballistic monkey spanking.
Windage estimation at ranges over 500 yards make clean kills unlikely with any amount of mountain wind blowing. The altitude and barometric pressure wont matter inside 400 yards. Use a rangefinder with angle calculation to save another headache.
The most high tech dedicated elk hunter i know who has killed bulls over 700 yards with his fancy 30-378 and all the special long range gear missed 4 times cross canyon just over 400 because of the wind.
Spend your extra time running stairs or hiking hills instead of worrying about ballistics -the results will be noticeably better.
Special Needs,
What an interesting knot of contradictions you offer, without answering the OP's question. He asked a question for reasons that are important to him.
The nature of the question suggests limited experience with long range shooting, so it is good he has asked, and it would be even better to try to help him succeed.
His profile says he is from Fredericksburg, Virginia. So he is coming from sea level with high temps.
Going to 7,000'+ and temps that will be somewhere between 50 - 100 degrees colder will result in some very different trajectories for him from his home range.
Re-zeroing the rifle once on location is a good start, but only the beginning of making an accurate adjustment.
You suggest carrying a rangefinder and even one with an angle function; prudent suggestion to add that tool, or a cosine indicator on the rifle will work also if he does not wish to buy a new rangefinder.
Once he has an angle or cosine reading, what is he supposed to do with it next?
Most folks are going to have a phone on them these days. Adding a ballistic app adds no weight, but does add knowledge, which ups the likelihood of making a good shot including windage and angle correction. Some are free and others are very modest in cost.
He can run some numbers at home, print it out, and stick it on the rifle, with some pretty close estimates of the environmental conditions.
A Kestrel weighs 2.3 ounces. As you correctly observe, wind is the biggest challenge and a Kestrel adds an objective metric to that variable. If an extra 2.3 ounces is a deal breaker, there are bigger challenges present and better resolved with your suggestion of hitting the stairs. A check during a slow time can provide information, which can be useful later if a shot needs to be made in a hurry.
Missing four times at 400 yards illustrates the value of actually having the ability to use some objective metrics coupled with actual understanding and practice rather than just a SWAG as your friend apparently did.
Guesses causes misses, as your friend demonstrated. Odd that he did not make a correction after the first miss, or second, or third.
Even with a Kestrel, winds can do strange things on slopes with valleys or rises in the middle. There is no substitute for practice, and on that we agree.
The chrony is not to lug up a mountain obviously, and he can leave it at home. It was just a suggestion if there is room and he is driving to remove another guess at another variable. His ammo will have slower velocity, how much will depend on the temp at which he worked up the load and the load itself. If he is using factory ammo, the info on the back of the box usually is just optimistic marketing hype with only vague correlation to reality and some factory fodder can have significant temperature sensitivity.
OP, as a fairly reliable alternative, find someplace near where you will hunt to take some practice at distances at which you expect to shoot. Actually confirming dope out to 500 or 600 yards out near where you will be hunting should produce accurate enough results. True statements are needed even with ballistic estimates.
Using a ranging reticle or a BDC turret will require correlation to actual conditions, the rifle, load, and some general environmental conditions. As long as there is some actual practice and correlation, they can work well. Personally, I prefer to dial elevation and hold wind, but that is just a general preference.
Anyway, good luck to all of you.
