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I've killed elk and European red stag with '06s � and have seen 'em travel farther than I liked even after "clean one-shot kills." Elk are tough � noticeably tougher, in my experience, than the larger caribou and the much larger moose. I prefer something bigger than an '06 in diameter, weight, and delivered energy. (Never killed any big game with muzzle energy.)

At ranges beyond about 100 yards, bullet weight, diameter, and ballistic coefficient are worth a lot more than muzzle velocity would lead you to believe. Dissatisfaction with current options led me to design better cartridges for clean kills on elk at the ranges that you're contemplating.

.338-06 minimum (good alternative: .35 Whelen)
.338-.280 Improved still better
.340 Howell best of all

BARREL � special contour: 0.580 (.338) or 0.600 (.35) muzzle, increased straight taper to larger-than-usual diameter near the chamber reinforce, 20 to 22 inches minimum, three grooves

SCOPE � 1x is my favorite. 1.5x to 4x almost as good. If you can shoot with any skill at all, you don't need a lot of magnification on elk no farther away than 300 yards. Lower magnification gives a wider field of view. Fixed-power scopes are lighter, more reliable, and easier to get used-to than variables.

If you're looking forward to the maximum of good eating, remember that it's impact velocity that ruins lots of meat. You gain both stopping power and a few more pounds of good eatin' meat when you use a heavier, larger-caliber bullet � with little or no sacrifice in trajectory and none in lethality.

9.3x62 ....ask & answered!

If you can't kill it with a .30-06 and good bullets, you need a LOT more gun. I still say, 24-25" #3 for an all around gun. You WILL get more velocity with more barrel length. The Ti stock isn't my choice of stocks (far from it) and I would sell it in a heartbeat. The action will take care of the lightness factor and a slightly heavier contour will aid in shootability. A Douglas #3 for the .30-06 is hard to beat.

Ken, I think you needed different bullets and you needed to hit bone <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" /> Of all the elk, moose and buffalo I have shot, NONE made it 5 yards. I take out the shoulders and have only recovered a couple of bullets under the skin on the off side. Like I said, if you need more gun than a .30-06, you need a LOT more. Flinch

Oh, I hit bone, all right. One bull in the Sapphire range SE of here went on, apparently unhurt, for three days after a 220-grain CoreLokt from my .30-06 Ackley broke two ribs and blew the top half of a shoulder-area vertebra away. The arm-size wound channel and gaping exit wound were healing when I shot him again three days later. He was still tough to kill despite the damage from the earlier wound. I've made easy kills, too. The first elk that I shot, a spike, fell dying within a few yards of where a 180-grain .30-06 Bronze Point penciled through like a knitting needle, leaving hardly any wound channel. That was a hot load, and the range was well shy of fifty yards. It's not the successes of my '06s that made me move on and up but the failures � my own and others'. As a young game biologist checking hunters' game at western Montana checking stations, I saw a lot of illogically easy kills and a lot of equally mystifying failures with .270s, '06s, and a variety of magnums.

After all the years of course work, lab work, and field experience in anatomy and physiology over more than half a century, I think I'm moderately competent at evaluating bullet placement and tissue damage. After all the data and testimony that I've collected on cartridge and bullet performance from my own and countless other hunters' experience, I think I have a pretty good handle on what it takes to kill elk quickly and cleanly almost without failure. All of which led me long ago to choose a cartridge appreciably meaner out yonder than the .30-06.

Killing a big game animal is in a very limited way akin to spanking a brat � a moderate paddling is enough to show the brat that you're unhappy with him but not enough to make him regret his misbehavior, and a merely fatal shot is not per se enough for the quick, clean, decisive kill that I want no less than. In both the spanking and the killing, a good bit more delivered energy is necessary unless you're satisfied with just making the brat mad and more rebellious and making the critter eventually dead. I'm not that easily satisfied. Many hunters are.

Ken,
I've thought for a while that a bullet can be driven too slowly to be really effective. Do you think that perhaps the saem bullet driven a little faster would have performed better? Now I'm not talking 30-378 speeds, but a 220 gr bullet is a pretty big load for a case the size of an '06.

These arguments are difficult to really come to any consenus. For example, the longest and shortest tracking jobs I've had came from the same rifle and bullet combo.

Better than the tissue damage that I described above? How? The handload that I was using was hot, hot, hot, and the range was short, short, short. As a result, the impact velocity was probably greater than if the bullet had flown farther from a faster muzzle velocity out of a .30-.378.

More important, perhaps, do you see what you're doing? You're arguing conjectural theory to explain away unsatisfactory field results in defense of the long-popular notion that the '06 is enough for any North American game. The final, bottom-line fact is that very often, elk are hard to kill, out of all proportion to their size relative to other big game.

If elk had the fearsome reputation of my ol' friends the Alaskan bears � or any dangerous game of Africa or India � nobody would think of hunting them with anything less than a .375 H&H Magnum (which many would consider marginal, at that.) Experience with deer, caribou, moose, and buffalo (bison) doesn't apply in equal or comparable fashion to what you may well encounter when you shoot an elk.