Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting The Cult of the open-country mule deer rifle

I've been using a "plastic POS" Tikka Whitetail in 7mag for over 10 years, with Hornady Heavy Mag 139gr IB's or SST Interlokt's. At over 3200 fps it's performed excellently from 80 to 428 yards. It will print 1/2" groups all day long. Rifles are just a tool to me. I use them hard and the Tikka is up to the task.



Ingwe

Jeff I get the whole numbers thing; figuring wind drift ,energy tables,blah, blah, etc.

But if I were in your shoes(I have been about a zillion times)I'd pay lots of attention to what the cartridge /load does inside 400 yards when you don't have time to play with the windmeter,use a LRF,deploy the bipod,yadayada.

Quite frequently,often enough,killing big mule deer has a whole lot less to do with fancy ballistic calculations than it does with your ability to get a bullet into vitals with seconds on the clock.And this gets truer the bigger they are.

There are a multitude of reasons for this,but they mostly have to do with big mule deer being a completely different critter from the smaller ones that inhabit the same region.

Rancho Loco is right when it comes to the glassing part,and you can kill them with about anything if you can find them first.But the biggest mule deer bucks I have seen in the last decade or so were incapable of being glassed by anyone,from anywhere,given their bedding locations and nocturnal propensities.I have hunted the big sage and juniper country of southern Utah;it will hide bucks for days that are impossible to glass up unless they stand up during hunting hours.Careful glassing may find them, given time and patience.But then you gotta kill them.....

So, maybe you are gonna have to go get them at some point;sneak right in where they live,and it will not always be a simple matter of finding, ranging, and shooting.You may have to move on them,and in so doing,may easily get "made".

Nice to sit here on the computer and contemplate that if you bump them you screwed up,but such analysis is not "real world" because if it was,and if no one ever made mistakes,everyone would have a bunch of big ones, which they don't....so....

What's my point? Simple....I have never hunted another big game animal that offered a wider range of shooting circumstances than a trophy class mule deer.And the chance to sureptitiously snipe one at distance is only about 10-15% of the total equation, at best,and is accorded about that much consideration, by me anyway.Fancy and complex ballistic considerations are a tiny part of killing trophy class mule deer.

You better learn to be fast enough....and good enough....to stick a bullet in a basketball at 20 to 400 yards in under 5 seconds,under stress.That is, if you want to kill many good ones.Choose rifle and load with that in mind.

JMHO and FWIW

I am but a fraction of the man you are, Grand Poobah!

I've been using a "plastic POS" Tikka Whitetail in 7mag for over 10 years, with Hornady Heavy Mag 139gr IB's or SST Interlokt's. At over 3200 fps it's performed excellently from 80 to 428 yards. It will print 1/2" groups all day long. Rifles are just a tool to me. I use them hard and the Tikka is up to the task.



When I grow up, I wanna be JG!

The horn color on that buck is very special. Beautiful Buck