Hi all,

Background:
Spot and crawl Wyoming Antelope. I say crawl since I was hunting second rifle season, a Type-2 tag, and the area was highly pressured and the Antelope were very skittish so I had to do a good amount of crawling to get shot opportunities.

My rifle: For this hunt, I decided to bring along a LH New Haven produced Model 70 Classic Stainless rifle, chambered in 300 win mag. I had put about 200 rounds through this rifle, mostly at the range, and had found a factory load that was shooting less than 1" at 200 yards and closer to MOA beyond that.

For safety sake, I would always carry the rifle with the chamber empty and the safety on. I would then only chamber a cartridge and put the safety back on when I was crawling the last few yards to potentially shoot an Antelope. If no shot presented itself or if I passed on the Antelope, I would eject the cartridge, put the round back in the magazine, slide the bolt back over the cartridge and put the safety back on. This was repeated a few times.

Incidents:
When it came time to shoot a nice buck, I pressed on the trigger only to have it feel stuck, as though the safety was still engaged. The rifle would not fire. I flipped the safety back and forth and the only way it fired was when I ejected the cartridge that was chambered and chambered a new one. The buck went from being alert to running scared and I f'ed up and fortunately had a clean miss at 230+ yards when the rifle finally went boom. At that point, I should have tried to figure out how that could happen, but I chalked it up to dust or sand in the action and did a quick wipe and kept hunting.

The second time, I think that I only had to partially eject the cartridge (lifted the bolt handle, pulled back some amount and re-chambered) after turning the safety on and off a few times. This last time was even more of a 'sheetshow' since I was getting anxious and the buck was curiously looking at me from about 150 yards out and about ready to run with his buddies. I finally got the rifle to fire and shot the buck through the left shoulder and as he quartered to me wondering what was stirring up so much dust in the sage.

I've since learn that the issue can be repeated by cocking the rifle and engaging the safety fully to the rear then lifting the bolt straight up until it stops. Then, if you try to disengage the safety and fire, the trigger won't pull. None of my other Model 70 rifles have this problem, but some production runs did. I learnt some obvious lessons and I should have pressure tested this particular rifle in mock hunting scenarios beforehand.

I now have a really awesome custom riflemaker who will build me a new rifle where this won't be an issue. I was fortunate in having the rifle fixed by that same riflemaker on my drive back so that I could finish out my season hunting blacktails and black bear.

Anyone else experience this issue?