mod7rem;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope you're getting the weather you need in your part of our beautiful province and you're well.
Since you didn't mention what you were hoping to be chasing whilst using said lightweight tripod and scope, I'll offer a couple thoughts while they're semi-recent in my old guy memory.
This year an old friend and long time hunting partner drew one of two any ram tags on the mountain behind our house, which happens to be home for the Vaseux herd of California Bighorn. Honestly he's never hunted sheep and wasn't all that amped up, but he'd gone to school with the former outfitter from the area who'd hunted sheep there for his entire life and he's also buddies with a former guide from here who also worked with his late father.
We're still a pretty rural and relatively small place out here, so we all knew each other socially as well from the gun club, etc.
Rounding out the group was buddy's nephew who is an avid hunter but had never been on a sheep chase before.
For the past 3 weeks then in any spare time we had during the week, for the first 5 days of the season and all weekend, there would be 5 guys planted with spotters and tripods getting a bad case of "spotting scope eye". So help me last Friday night coming down I could not get my right eye to focus for at least half the way down and was glad I wasn't driving!
To the point of my sheep story though sir, is that I believe a tripod which will allow you to use it standing and all the way down to lying down is the way to go. I'm running some kind of Slik that got spray painted camo and grey primer the day it came home, but it's aluminum, has the over center lever locking system on the legs and will extend to nearly 5' tall. If I had to guess, I'd say I've had it for close to 30 years now, having bought it to replace a cheap twist lock one that stopped locking reliably on one section. Likely they both came from London Drugs back when??
I'm only 5'6" so that's enough for me, but I did notice that the taller fellows in the group looked a wee bit uncomfortable using it like that.
Terrain and then brush and grass meant we couldn't always use them in lower positions, so a few times the young fellows much shorter tripod meant he wasn't able to use his spotter.
Anyway sir, while weight is a factor for sure, the ability to use it in various conditions would trump an ounce or two to me.
Hopefully that all made some sense and was useful to you or someone out there.
Good luck with the tripod search whichever way you decide and good luck on your hunts this fall.
Dwayne
