Judman, I think you are very lucky. I hunt the Carpathian mountains, the majority of the hunts going up and down mountains, the trails being covered with mud or ice and snow. Due to the very common brown bear encounters, most of the time my rifle is in my hands or one hand while trying to stabilize myself with the other hand. I can count on dropping or falling down with the rifle at LEAST once a hunt in muddy or snow/ice conditions going up and down those mountains. If you are lucky, your rifle will impact only snow,mud or brush, but there are a lot of rocks and ice looking for that rifle.
What convinced me to epoxy my bases was an incident with a Browning X-Bolt. It has 4 base screws per base and all were torqued properly when installed. After a hunt, my hunting friend took me out of the forest most of the way to my car parked on the hard road. I had a small pack on my back. When I took the rifle off my back, the sling some way got caught on the pack and yanked the rifle out of my hands. it hit the road on the eye piece/left side of the scope and also had scratches on the left side of the muzzle. I had Butler Creek scope flip covers on the Ziess Conquest 3x9x40 and it did not distort the scope eye piece. When I was able to shoot the rifle, bullet impact was about 6" to the right of where it was sighted in for. I removed the scope (QD rings), closely examined the scope bases and I could see a fine line on the left side of the rear base where, it appeared, the scope base had moved a tiny bit. I don't know if that alone accounted for the 6" sighting error or some of it was caused by the scope adjustment changing, but it was enough to convince me to epoxy my bases to the receiver with no release agent. RJ
