I reported yesterday on Jon Lacorte’s mule deer hunt in Wyoming. We followed it up today with a hunt for pronghorn antelope with Table Mountain Outfitters out of Cheyenne, Wyo.

The weather forecast promised gale-force wind and strafing snow by noon, but we planned to be done hunting before the weather turned on us.

Lacorte, marketing manager for Nikon’s sport optics division, made it clear when we loaded into the pickup before sunrise that I had the first shot. That meant I got to ride shotgun, and take my pick of pronghorns. It also meant I had to open what seemed like dozens of ranch gates.

Every antelope we saw in the morning was wearing track shoes, running full-tilt at our approach, even at a distance of a half mile. One of the hundreds of pronghorns wore a handsome heart-shaped pair of horns, the tips of which almost touched. That was the antelope I wanted.

We put together a pair of great stalks, but both ended the same way, with flared white rumps of fleeing antelope tearing across the prairie.

Nikon’s Jon Lacorte has never killed a mule deer, but he’s hoping this is his year. He’s having a legendary season. Lacorte killed a Cape buffalo in Africa and last month arrowed a monster 156-inch Kentucky whitetail.

He’s hoping to break his mule deer bugaboo here in southern Wyoming, hunting with Table Mountain Outfitters out of Cheyenne. The ranch we’re hunting is known for producing heavy, wide muleys – Remington’s Eddie Stevenson killed a 35-1/2-inch-wide mule deer here last year – and Jon is hoping to shoot a good, representative mule deer.

Of course, I’m also hoping for a good deer. I’ve spent the last three weeks chasing mule deer and whitetails with my bow in my home state of Montana and then invested two weeks in a British Columbia moose hunt, but have yet to draw blood. Jon and I will be hunting together with Angie Denny, the better half of Table Mountain’s ownership team.

Here is 8-year-old Will Herald posing with this nice buck he shot with a muzzleloader just a couple days ago. Father Tim Herald gave this account:

He took this 9-pointer at about 50 yards. We filmed his hunt and since the deer came in over an hour before dark, we got a great video hunt. He is on top of the world, and I was pretty excited for the little guy myself.

I had to know about the gear he used (of course). The rifle is a .50-caliber T/C Endeavor that was loaded with 250-gr. shockwave bullets over a full charge of 777 powder.

“It knocks him for a loop,” Tim said. “But he doesn’t care.”

Looks to me like Will is following in dad’s footsteps.

Good job, Will!

—John Snow

I’m at a new product seminar being hosted by Remington and its sister companies Marlin, DPMS, Bushmaster and H&R. At this morning’s session we learned about a lot of new items on tap for 2009, one of the most interesting being a cartridge that Remington has developed for big-game hunting with an AR.

It is called the 30 Remington AR, and as you might have guessed it is a .30-caliber round with the same overall length as a .223, meaning it will function in the R-15 line of rifles, which is much trimmer and lighter than the larger AR-10-sized R-25 rifles.

The idea behind the product is to give .308 Win. type performance in an AR-15 sized upper. The ballistics charts for the new round show give figures for a 125-gr. round in the 30 Rem. AR—or .30 RAR as I’ll call it here for short—versus a  165-grain bullet in .308 Win. Velocities are about the same for both rounds. The .30 RAR exits at 2,800 fps vs. 2,700 fps for the .308 Win. At 400 yards, the .30 RAR is going 1,816 fps to the .308’s 1,966.

The big difference is in energy. The .30 RAR in this bullet weight has about 500 ft-lb. less of energy than the 165-gr. .308 at any distance. A substantial amount less and one that will certainly have an effect on game in the field—but how much of a difference we’ll just have to see once we start killing some deer with it.

The good news here, however, is that AR fans who want a lighter weight rifle in a big-game cartridge have a new option to look at. The R-15 is said to weight about 7.5 pounds, a full pound less than the R-25 in .308 Win.

I’ll post some pictures and give a bigger report once I get back from the range this afternoon.

—John Snow

John Snow reported in this space last week about my experience moose hunting in British Columbia, and he raised a question every hunter faces: Do you shoot the first animal you see, or do you hold out for a larger specimen?

If you’re hunting close to home in an area with abundant wildlife, that’s usually a pretty easy decision. Unless you’re hunting meat for the table, most of us would hold out for a mature male, and some of the most memorable experiences in the field are passing on animals that are within range. The question becomes more difficult the further you roam, and the more investment you have in the trip, and whether the locale is known for producing trophies.

It’s the quintessential hunter’s dilemma: Are you willing to settle for any animal or hold out for a single specimen, even if it means you don’t kill anything? It’s a luxury of our age to even have the choice, and after I passed my moose I thought about all those subsistence hunters who would scold me for my selectivity.

Here are some photos from the trip to northern BC’s Babine Mountains. This bull pictured above is the one we called into 15 yards the first evening of the hunt.

This guy came in from about a mile down the valley, grunting and raking trees the whole way. He sounded like a Panzer coming through the spruce, and I was sure he was a shooter. But when he entered the clearing, I knew immediately I would pass. He just wasn’t what I was after – which was a 45-inch or better moose. The area I hunted produces plenty of 48- and even 50-inchers, and I reckoned this bull went about 42 inches. I wanted him to grow another year.

I felt great about my decision to pass, especially because it was the first day of the hunt. The next morning we set up about two miles up the valley and again called in this young bull, which brought a younger friend along. Here are photos of these two bulls.



I figured we were in tall cotton – action on the first two days of the hunt. You know the rest: we didn’t see another bull in eight more days of hunting. Was I regretting my decision to pass these bulls? Only a little. That’s hunting, and it’s the price you pay for early selectivity. Would I have shot that bull on the last day? That’s hard to say, but it raises the second hunter’s dilemma, one that I’ve debated with friends and guides the world over. There’s no consensus on this one, but the majority opinion says that you should never shoot an animal on the last day that you would pass on the first.

What do you think?

—Andrew McKean

Here’s Chad’s moose. The guys in the picture are (from left), guide Mike Rivet, cameraman Lanell Ashley, me, John Rivet and Chad Schearer.

Just watched the footage that Lanell got and it is going to make for an incredible show. The bull came in from over half a mile away looking kick some ass. When he finally popped into view his head was down and he was rocking his antlers from side to side. He walked to within 40 yards before Chad made his shot.

I’m up next. John Rivet and I struck out tonight but the temperature is dropping (and it’s raining) so we’re expecting some better response to John’s calling in the morning.

—John Snow

My hunting partner Chad Schearer, the host of Shoot Straight Television, scored on a nice bull today that was called in by his guide, Mike Rivet with Great Canadian Adventures. I was off in a different part of the Swan Hills region, but it sounds like it was a very exciting hunt. The bull came in with his head down looking for a fight. Mike had to give him a loud bull grunt to get him to lift his head so Chad could shoot.

A single shot from Chad’s CVA Accura muzzleloader did the trick. He was shooting a .50-caliber, 444-grain Powerbelt bullet over 100 grains of American Pioneer Powder. The penetration on the frontal chest shot was awesome. The bullet went through the heart and liver and way back into the hind portion of the moose, which is a lot of animal to traverse.

I’m using the same setup and can’t wait to see what kind of performance I get. I’ll get a picture of Chad’s bull posted in a bit.

—John Snow

I’m off to Alberta for the second time this year, this time for moose. My friend Andrew McKean, Outdoor Life’s hunting editor, just returned from a backcountry hunt in British Columbia and saw one moose, a 42-incher, early on. He passed on the animal and, as sometimes happens in this game, didn’t see another critter for the rest of the hunt.

The back half of his hunt was spent in search of mountain goats, but that didn’t work out too well either. If you’ve been around the high country much (the very definition of goat habitat) you know that mountains can make their own weather.