Jack O'Connor used to say that 7.5 pounds was about perfect for a mountain rifle.

And this was in part because that's about as light as you could get a wood-stocked traditional hunting rifle of his era.

Now imagine a rifle that shoots sub-MOA groups,

is chambered for a cutting edge long-range hunting cartridge and weighs more than a pound less than that.

I'm Joseph Fawn Benedict and this is the backcountry hunting podcast.

Now, let me apologize first for going silent for 10 days here.

I've been on a much needed family vacation.

I took the crew, all six of us to Alaska for eight or nine

days. We traveled all around the country. We spent several days with good friends on on the Kenai Peninsula

exploring. We spent some time in the Matsu Valley and then we went up to

Denali and explored for a while and camped and oh gosh I saw a band of 15 or 16 doll sheep

including several big rams, just inspiring stuff.

Now we're home, we're trying to dig out,

you know, there's a lot of stuff going on

that we're dealing with,

but I wanted to get right on this

and bring you another podcast episode. This is not going to be the

full story of my recent backcountry Bear Hunt with Adam Weatherby in northwestern Montana.

That should come out next.

We're trying to circle up and get the final touches put on that one.

So I figured I'd kick off a type of podcast here that I've been wanting to start with for a while and this is just to do a straight up product review of an item or in some cases this may be several items.

Could be rifles, optics, boots, packs, and so forth.

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