WY Report 2005

A17Shooter · Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 12:30 pm Post subject: WY Report 2005

Eight days in the field and if you would work at it there was always something to shoot at. Went to three different locations and did not have to pay any fees for shooting. That is a benefit of fifteen years of making these Wyoming trips. At one of the ranches we drove about ten miles from the county road to get to the big PD town. It was about 600 acres. Since the plague hit Thunder Basin Grasslands and wiped out about 60,000 acres of prairie dogs the raptor population in the area is down quite a lot. There were antelope everywhere, but we only saw a few deer.

Used my 17 AH, 12" Contender for quite a bit of the shooting. It had 200 + rounds fired in WY. Just before leaving for the trip I got a 3 - 12 Burris for it, and that did make a difference. Pushed my longest PD pistol shot out to 289 yds on this trip. Wanted to do over 300 yds, but that didn't seem to be in the cards. One full day was devoted to the Contender pistol.

Also worked the Remington 700 223 pretty hard. Again, 200 + rounds of ammo were fired through it. Longest shot was 540 yards for it. At that range the PD was just a brown oval that could be covered with the fine part of the Leupold 6.5-20X duplex cross hair. While shooting, I took notes on the scope settings so I could construct my own settings table. During the whole expedition I made extensive use of the laser rangefinder and, it seems to help to make that first shot on a PD much closer.

Fireformed about 200 rds for the Browning 204 Ruger on the trip. It seemed that the fireforming load was only accurate enough to use out to about 200 yds. I tried to work with it out much further but, didn't have much luck. I did use the lightweight little sucker as a carry gun while out checking the areas that were concealed from our long range shooting positions. On one of these little walk-abouts I used about 60 rounds of ammo in around 45 minutes. The shots at that point were between 50 and 200 yards. Finally, the other members of the group drove over the hill to retreive me so we could get out to the county road before dark. Find, lase, shoot; find, lase, shoot; a varmint hunters work is never done.

We had great weather on this trip. So, I took the wrong balance of clothing, of course. The week before we went, it was snowing and cold. The week we were hunting it was in the 80's on three of the days and in the 70's on all the other day except one. We did have wind to practice with most (99%) of the time.

PICTURES!!

While driving through Thunder Basin we stopped for an "I've been there" shot.

For you jackrabbit fans, this is the Thunder Basin version. They don't know what people are. This picture was shot was from about twelve feet. Smile

For you big game dreamers. Here are a couple of antelope.

This is one part of the PD town. It is about 600 yds from where I was standing to the rock formations.

Some of the rock formations we drove past to get to the PD town.

Obligatory Splat Shot. 17 AH pistol at 100 yds.

Improvised shooting sticks. three 3/4" dowels and an 0-ring, total cost $6.34. Total time - five minutes in a hardware store. Gets you above the sage brush and steadys you in the wind.

The gang of four. I'm on the left.

Gary

DallanC · Site Admin Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 3572 Location: Utah

Nice story and nice picts. Sounds like you had a great time. I was talking to my dad about PDog hunting monday but we cant due to the closed season on them until mid June (stupid!!!).

The buck antelope looks like he had a hard winter... the doe looks mighty pregnant. You see any coyotes out there?

-DallanC

shrpshtrjoe · Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 1:24 pm Post subject: Re: WY Report 2005

Howdy. Good deal glad to see ya gave those guns a workout glad ya had a good trip Smile

thanks for the pics

Knifeboy · Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 5:33 pm Post subject: Re: WY Report 2005

A17,
Thanks for the awsome post. I love to see pictures of other hunting areas.
I really liked the story as well. Thanks for posting, keep em coming.

Knifeboy