First trip to dogtowns this weekend

[rayfromtx]

We checked it out yesterday after a 13 hour drive. The rancher was great and showed us a number of places on his 10k acres. To bad the season is not yet open on the 20k acres of public land he leases. We're headed out this morning. hehehe I feel like a kid on christmas morning. Pics to follow.

[acloco]

Come on...we are on the edge of our seats!!! Did you bring enough ammo???????

[rayfromtx]

Holy Moly! Skippy had a terrible day today.

I'm exhausted. We wore out two dog towns today. I shot 440 rounds. I'm glad I loaded so many rounds. My longest hit was 466 yards. I had several over 400 but it required a lot of dialing in. Sam hit two at once with a 6br shooting a 65gr vmax and one flew 15 feet one way while the other flew 5 feet the other way. The vmaxes are impressive bullets. I chose the bergers for accuracy at long range, knowing I would give up some display quality. The bergers do devastate but the vmax is a monster bullet for skippy aerobatics. I had very few misses inside 250 yards and even with a 10-15 mph cross wind the hold off was very small or I held right on out to 250. From 250 to 350 I was probably 50% with the tricky winds. Both of my hunting buddies will be building 204s now as the 204 is the gun of choice in the dog towns. The ease of spotting for yourself meant that I shot more rounds than both of them put together and I had a much better percentage of hits than they did even though they had benchrest quality guns.

My Savage was very impressive. I probably cooked the barrels. The ice water towels helped as did the the two guns. The pivoting bench is a must have and the scopes were great. Cranked to 6.5x, I could scan about a 270 degree angle and then zoom in when needed. We set up in the middle of the towns so that we were completely surrounded by dogs. The 20x was used on anything out past 150 or so and it's ability to allow me to read the mirage was a great help in the accuracy department.

The wind was 2-22 mph(measured) and changed direction several times through the day. One of our shade canopies with Sam under it took a direct hit from a powerful dust devil that sneaked up on us when we were shooting the other way. No one was hurt but the canopy was toast.

The rancher came out with his cute as a button 11 year old daughter and they both killed a few from our fancy setup. As we drove out as it was getting dark, the little girl was seen by herself unloading her horse to go move some cattle from one pasture to the next, having just driven the duelly and horse trailer from the ranch house 5 miles away. She will be a very capable woman some day. The rancher is the real deal. He branded 400 cattle yesterday over a wood fire in a little over 3 hours in the morning with 50 of his neighbors riding and roping and him branding. That seems impossible but I have no reason to doubt a word he says. They'll be doing it again on Tuesday.

I didn't take nearly enough pictures but maybe I can do better tomorrow. I have so much to tell but I am exhausted and tomorrow is another full day with two more towns to clean out. I'm still so impressed with the 300-400 yard shots on the young dogs that are impossibly small at that distance. I tried a few shots at 916 yards with a cross wind. I was holding over something like 15 feet and holding off about 10 feet of windage and dropping them right next to the dogs before I gave up. I'm not sure if I will screw on the 243AI barrel or not. Maybe if the wind dies down later in the week I will try the long shots again.

More to follow.

[Rick in Oregon]

Ray: Now, this is my kind of fun! Thanks for the excellent write-up of the first part of your adventure. We're eagerly waiting for some photos now...... Action in a hot PD or squirrel patch is about the most fun a guy can have with a rifle, and I can tell this will NOT be your last trip out there!

It appears you guys have come to the same conclusion we have: The 204 IS the hot choice for precision rodent removal, period.

We want more!

[glenn asher]

It's oafishal now, yer ruint fer life Welcome to the club, it's not very exclusive, but it's a fine place to be!
Even though I had nothing to do with it, I'm glad you had a good time on that first day, I'm sure you're in for more fun, too.

[rayfromtx]

I'm home after a thoroughly exhausting and wonderful trip to SE CO. It was beautiful and was the definition of a target rich environment. We generally shot one area in the morning and moved to another in the afternoon. The most amazing thing was the performance of my Toyota Prius. Sam left after a couple of days and left Arnold and I there in the Prius with a huge amount of gear. The Prius looks small but this thing not only took us across miles of open prairie, it got us there in comfort and the worst mileage we got was over 40 mpg. Here are a few pictures of what we packed into the car for the trip home. We faced a head wind and drove 78 mph and got 41 mpg. With gas at 4$ a gallon, the Prius is almost as logical a choice as the small and deadly 204! All the coolers and suit case and even the microwave oven are full of stuff in these pictures.








The area we hunted was great. We had thousands of acres and multiple dogtowns to choose from. The dogs were never really hunted before other than the rancher taking the odd shot for grins from time to time with his 204 savage. The first 2 hours we were on a site the dogs were just everywhere. We usually set up in the middle of the town and shot in a 360 degree area. Often we would have 20 dogs to choose from at a time. We took too many shots at over 400 yards for fun even when there were closer shots available just for the challenge. I shot 1250 rounds of 204 ammo, often far too fast for long barrel life but it's hard to stop when they are out there begging to be shot. I made some shots with the 243AI on the last day at 740 yards but despite hitting very close to the target, I decided that pursuing that further would have toasted my barrel because I find it difficult to pace myself. It really reaches out there though. Here are a few pics of the area we hunted as well as a few of the guys I was with. No pics of me.






Sam and Arnold reloading in the field. They should have brought more ammo.


Arnold Jewell working on the trigger to one of my rifles.


Arnold trying out my setup. He'll be building his own before he hits the field again along with at least one 204. He already appropriated one of my Zeiss conquest scopes to replace his premier reticle Luepold. Thanks to this site I had a great set up for my first trip to the dog towns.



Just a couple of shots of the carnage. I'm not too keen on these shots but this is what the 40 grain Bergers are capable of. I thought I would be giving up some downrange fun to the vmax. After trying both, I don't think that's valid. The SBK39s were also great performers and gave me much better velocity with the VV133 powder. Doesn't everyone take a chronograph to the dog towns? The SBK39s are on sale right now at Midway so I think I will pick up a few thousand of those.



I'll post the pics of the two rifles I shot on the thread that is devoted to that as I've never gotten around to that. Here they are to close out this post.

[glenn asher]

Well, you should have known PD shooting is hard on barrels It's the barrel industry's dirty little secret that they sponsor ranchers raising prairie dogs to create demand for new tubes That's my story, which I just made up, and I'm sticking to it It's a fun disease to have, and relatively harmless, except to the check account.
If you're like me, you're wondering why it took you so long to make that first trip out to shoot PDs, and vowing to make up for it in the future.

I have to take at least three centerfire heavy barrelled rifles when dogging, with a couple others (.17HMR and a little .221 Fireball) to help take the pressure off when cooling down the heavy guns. No, it doesn't really help much but I don't have to quit shooting, either, and it's fun to do the sneak and peek with the HMR........... My real treat is to take a windy day (are there any others?) and get downwind of a mound, I can shoot directly into the wind and the PD pups can't even hear the shots, you can clear off a mound easily enough, and it's a hoot, besides. Do consider an HMR for an additional rat rifle, they add a lot to the fun!

[rayfromtx]

As long as I was using two rifles it wasn't too bad but Arnold was having a tough time seeing the dogs with his Leupold so I gave him one of my Zeiss conquest scopes and he started having a ball. I've already replaced it. I called cameralandny.com on the way to the dog town on wednesday and my wife said it arrived on friday. BTW, my best guess is that I nailed about 400 dogs. As you know it is often hard to tell if you made a hit or not if they don't fly. Investigating afterward would often show no dog but a bloody trail leading down into the hole which I would count as a kill. After a couple of hours it would get annoying to keep being fooled by seeing the dogs out there that you had already killed. Often a second shot would clear them from the field of view. I'm a sick sick man.

BTW- Arnold Jewell is the funniest man alive. He must have told a couple of hundred jokes while we were there. I don't know how he remembers them all. The funniest one to me was the sickest. I called my wife and asked her to have shrimp ready for us when we got home last night. He said I love shrimp. I said I like crabs but had a heck of a time getting rid of them. He said he had a sure fire way that works every time. You shave a strip down the middle, set one side on fire and stab them with an ice pick when they run across to the other side. Thank God I wasn't drinking milk at the time. I'm still laughing.

Moderators- feel free to delete or modify this post.

[Captqc]

Ray, great story and pics! I can't believe you stuffed all that load into that poor Prius Gary

[glenn asher]

Ray, great story and pics! I can't believe you stuffed all that load into that poor Prius Gary

Gary, that's the new Prius Pickup, you mean you haven't heard about them, yet?
Oh, yeah, saw the first Prius breakdown on the side of the road yesterday, I'd hate to get the repair bill on whatever was wrong with it.

[rayfromtx]

Probably ran out of gas.

[Rick in Oregon]

Glad you had a grand time, Ray. One trip and I knew you'd be hooked for life. Now I'm sure you are familiar with the terms "cooling rifle", "peeker", "splat factor", "launch altitute", "dragger", and of course the "helicopter". The most fun you can have with your clothes on!

By the way, by the looks of what you guys took, you may want to consider picking up some military surplus .50 cal ammo cans....... all those lose ammo boxes.....worlds are colliding!

[rayfromtx]

Those are great terms Rick.

I took a big box that held all the ammo. It rode home in the truck. The Prius has a large storage area under the rear deck above the spare tire that held all the empty ammo boxes on the way home. The live rounds rode home in the suitcase and the dirty laundry was crammed in all the extra nooks and crannies. We really didn't know if we would have to leave some things there until we were finished cramming it all in. A lot of that stuff rode up there in the truck and rode back in the prius.

I'm thinking of another trip in late August or early September. I've got a lot of reloading to do in the mean time and my buddy needs to build a couple of 204s.