Leupolds are fine within their limitations..... the alpha glass is the next level, like it or not.
I am a Leupold user myself and love to hate the damn things. But quality glass with accurate adjustments is the shizzle for precision rifle work. And as hunters we should all strive for precision.
Now if you shoot deer at 300 yds or less you don't need alpha, but it wouldn't hurt. Better is better.
Many here get very provincial with regards to their local hunting environment, Blackheart is the perfect example, he thinks a M94 with open sights is the bomb and if you can't kill deer with it you are an inferior hunter, he doesn't understand western hunting with limited tags etc......
So maybe chill a bit.... read and learn... Dingo has strong opinions based on his experience.... I suspect even an Eastern hunter could benefit from quality gear? no?
We have limited tags here. The most I can get is 7 per year and only two of those can be bucks. I'd have sworn when I was in Montana you could get four deer tags per year, 2 each for whitetail and mulies ? Plus you guys get to shoot pronghorn, elk, bears too no ? l do really like my model 94's and have killed a bunch of deer with them but my most used deer rifle and probably my favorite is my scoped {Leupold 1-4x20} Marlin 336. This despite having a safe full of scoped bolt actions. What is apparently hard for some here to fathom is stepping off the road into dense forest, still hunting all day and not stepping out of forest again until you come back out onto a road. The idea of thousands of acres of State forest, unbroken except for an occasional beaver pond/marsh is apparently hard for some to imagine. I have probably shot somewhere around 80 deer in the last 20 years. I can only think of one that was over 100 yards and most were inside 60 yards. I have yet to miss a shot opportunity during our legal hunting hours of sunrise to sunset due to any inadequacies of my scopes.
BH...
Montana allows one buck ,either a whitetail of mule deer each year. We can get doe tags, but we need to travel to different hunting units for each one. Since wolves the days of several doe tags in an area is long gone.
When our season opens elk, deer and bear open at the same time, so theoretically you could shoot all three in a day, but that would be almost impossible.
When we head to the woods we could be facing a grizzly bear or a 700lb elk. And the range can be point blank to as far as a person can shoot.
We have millions of acres of mountains with elevations from 3000' to 11,000'
When you head to the mtns you are always prepared to spend a night out, survival is not a game around here.
And a pic of me a few years ago you might enjoy
![[Linked Image from i.postimg.cc]](https://i.postimg.cc/CLLTnG5k/IMG-1302.jpg)
