In the West, shot opportunities are often hard won.

And this is particularly true for DIY public land hunters.

Mule deer, coups deer, prong horn antelope, big horn sheep, even, and sometimes especially, elk.

Now there's such a thing as too far, but that's a discussion for another time. Today we're going to talk

about rifle characteristics that optimize the hunter's lethality in open

country because if you've worked hard for a week or 10 days sometimes to earn an opportunity

at a big game animal in the backcountry and it's across a big canyon or a big

wind swept flat. You owe it to yourself and to all that effort to be properly prepared and to have a

have a tool that's capable of helping you make the most of that hard one

opportunity.

Now, before we dive in here, I just want to note I'm on the road currently and I've been

on the road a ton lately.

So it's been difficult for me to outline, create, record, edit, and so forth.

Full-blown podcast episodes with the segments that we generally like to do,

the backcountry bounty, the backcountry printess, and so forth.

And it's going to stay that way for another week or two.

Next week, my son William, who hosts our backcountry printess segment, has a youth muzzle odor prong horn tag here in our home state of Idaho and so

we're going to be spending quite a lot of time prowling around trying to get him close enough to cleanly shoot

his first antelope buck.

For the time being, we're going to dive into this episode and the situation being what it is. I want to

dedicate this episode to Silence or Central, one of our great sponsors here and appropriate for this topic because a good

suppressor so often increases your hunting rifle's accuracy as well as makes it makes you more effective in the

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