Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i Petersen's Hunting

More years ago than I care to count, Mike Schoby and I sat around a campfire, sharing a bottle of cheap whiskey while a fresh backstrap roasted over the coals. We were a couple of years out of college, starting our careers cranking out copy for Cabela’s. Dream jobs for a couple of young guys who wanted nothing more than to hunt and fish. Mike soon left for greener pastures, but I toiled for another decade or so, until the cubicle walls of the corporate world started closing in. In 2010, with the simple goal of making enough money to feed myself and a voracious black Lab, I quit to become a freelance writer. By then, Schoby was running this magazine, and when he heard I’d left, he tried to…

HISTORY Driven primarily by GA Precision and the PRS (Precision Rifle Series) competition crowd, the 6mm Creedmoor is nothing more than a necked-down 6.5 Creedmoor. The very popular 6mm version has just been legitimized as a factory cartridge and will be offered by Hornady. While it’s based on the 6.5 Creedmoor, its ancestry harks back through the .30 T/C to the .300 Savage, which provided the original parent case that eventually became the most popular precision cartridge available today (6.5 Creedmoor). APPLICATION Particularly efficient courtesy of its powder chamber shape, the 6mm Creedmoor has a short case that enables long, sleek bullets to be seated well out so they don’t intrude on powder capacity. Extremely low recoil enables shooters to spot their own impacts through their riflescope, particularly when paired…

Do-it-yourself hunting is becoming harder each year. Access dwindles, human populations rise, and competition for good areas intensifies. As a result, obtaining tags for areas with good genetics, high game populations, and quality habitat has become daunting. Plus, at least here in the West, young, single, passionate outdoors-men hunt harder, longer, and with greater sophistication than ever before. Trail cameras and shed hunting are great educators. Even so, adventure still awaits in the West, particularly for hunters willing to do their homework and travel out of the way in search of opportunities. Many of those adventures are out of the norm—unique, if you will. The good old days when eastern hunters could burn rubber down Interstate 70 and across the Colorado line; stop in at a gas station for ice,…

Roll out a Land Status map of any state in the West and you’ll be greeted by a rainbow of colors arranged in geometric patterns. From vast blocks of green and red to a mishmash of yellow to isolated blue squares, the West consists of a conglomeration of state, federal, and private lands. The yellow and green? That’s Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service land respectively. It’s your land, and it is open to hunting, fishing, and other uses. Those blue squares? That’s state trust lands. Whether or not it belongs to you depends entirely on whom you ask. Although it is owned by the state, it is not considered public in most western states. What’s more, the agencies that oversee trust lands aren’t a typical government agency.…

When it comes to gadgets for beating a buck’s nose, I’m a skeptic. A whitetail’s sniffer contains 297 million olfactory receptors, and in 30 years of bowhunting, I haven’t seen them deceived by many things other than the wind and the rut. That said, I try to hunt as “scent-free” as possible. Recently, I’ve heard some old-school whitetail hunters rave about a company called Ozonics that makes portable ozone-generating machines touted to mitigate human odor before it reaches a deer’s nose. Because it’s my job to test these things, I lugged an HR-200 model to various stands last season. More about those results in a bit, but first, here are some facts about ozone, its uses, and caveats. WHAT IS OZONE? Ozone (O3) is a gas molecule consisting of three…

To me, the Stone sheep has two attributes. Both attributes are arguable—to each his or her own—but I believe the Stone sheep is the most beautiful of all the world’s wild sheep and lives in the most beautiful country on Earth. Those were my thoughts when I first hunted Stone sheep in 1973 and had no point of comparison, but since then, a lot of sheep hunting in a lot of mountain ranges has reinforced my opinion. The Stone sheep is found at the northern terminus of the Rocky Mountains and in adjacent smaller ranges, essentially the northern third of British Columbia and extending into Yukon. Their country isn’t as high or as dramatic as the southern Rockies or as harsh as the mountains of northern Yukon and Alaska. The…

MANY OF THE STATES in our glorious nation provide great hunting, but only a few have the whitetail genetics to regularly produce typical giants scoring 170 inches, or nontypical behemoths that measure 195 inches or more—the minimums to make Boone & Crockett’s all-time record book. The Top 10 trophy whitetail states featured here are the best of the best in terms of B&C entries over the past ten years. Several of these states always have and always will be in the Top 10; others have earned their current position via careful game management, favorable climatic conditions, and other beneficial factors. While these rankings reflect what the best-available information indicates, trail cameras, aggressive management, shed-antler hunting, and other trends now provide hunters with more information and a clearer picture of habitat…

BULLET BASICS Designed to dominate today’s competitive long-range hunting market, Federal’s new Edge TLR (terminal long range) projectile is a streamlined, high-BC version of the outstandingTrophy Bonded Tip bullet. It features a heat-resistant hollow-core composite tip, a generous boattail, and a specially grooved shank to aid aerodynamics, along with a computer-engineered sleek profile that flows easily through the atmosphere. The advantage it offers over popular long-range hunting bullets is reliable low-velocity expansion coupled with unequaled toughness by virtue of its solid copper rear half and bonded-core front. TESTING GROUND A mature blue wildebeest was shot at 80 yards with the bullet pictured. Fired from a .300 Win. Mag., the 200-grain Edge TLR impacted the quartering-away animal at an estimated 2,700 fps. FIELD PERFORMANCE Blue wildebeest are known as the “poor…

When it comes to UTVs, there’s a time and place for small and nimble, but it’s not when a few buddies and a couple of dogs want to chase pheasants; or when an elk camp needs to be hauled into the woods and quarters out; or when groups of hunters in search of antelope head across the prairie with bipod-equipped long-range rifles, high-powered optics, and large coolers. It is easy to see that in many hunting situations more is well, frankly, more. Polaris recognized hunters’ needs and met them with its 2017 Ranger Crew XP 1000 EPS. The Crew model seats six hunters with dog kennels in back and has enough guts to tow a pretty large trailer full of extra gear. THE MACHINE The Ranger is available in multiple…

THIS ISN’T A CONDEMNATION OF HUNTING VALUES. IT’S REALITY. IT WAS a perfect, well-executed deer drive. I sat on a rock at the base of a long ridge while my buddies walked the ridgetop toward me. The buck appeared suddenly and never saw me raise my rifle. He went down at the shot. It was a moment of triumph and jubilation. It was my first whitetail ever. The buck’s size didn’t diminish my excitement. He wore two points on each side with an outside spread of maybe 10 inches. When I got home I called my buddies with the good news. Today, many folks would be embarrassed to show off a little buck. In fact, he would be illegal in many states and hunting units because he didn’t meet minimum…