2018 Trip #10
A two day trip with Ash and myself. The first time out since August. Something just kept coming up. First me with my cataract surgery and then my wife started having problems with her knees.
We started the trip off on Sunday because weather was moving in on Tuesday, it’s that time of year in Colorado. Spring and sunny one day and snowing the next. Plus the fact in Colorado over the years Halloween has been anywhere from sunny and nice too rainy, windy, and snow.
We got to the first field we wanted to shoot on around 10:00 AM. In late fall the prairie dogs don’t get out of their holes until 9:00 or later. As soon as we pulled into the field prairie dogs were everywhere.
With so many prairie dogs most of my shots were under 250 yards; not a problem. With no wind and sunny skies the shooting was great. We figured with a cold front moving in they knew it. The prairie dogs were eating as much as they could. They would be in their holes for a few days if bad weather came in. Most of them just didn’t pay much attention to us. If we shot one next to another it just kept eating, weird.
I started off with my Rem 700 light varmint 221 FireBall and shot it for about four hours. Between the two of us we shot over 400 on Sunday. I did good with 202 of them according to my counter. Not the kind of number we would get three or four years ago, but not bad. Took up my Rem 700 222 Rem for the rest of the day. The wind came up and made it a little harder to hit such a small target with a 15 mph cross wind.
Sunday didn’t start out very good. The temperature dropped 20 degrees with a 5 – 10 mph wind. We had to scraped ice off of the windshield to start the day. We went to a different field first thing. Not much moving. They were staying close to their holes and not getting out eating.
I started off Monday with my Rem 700 light varmint 221 FireBall again. For a small caliber the 40 grain Nosler HP travels at around 3,300 fps with my re-loads. About an hour or so later I was shooting at around 200 yards; something caught my eye. A coyote came running out and picked up a prairie dog I had just shot. I couldn’t get a shot because he went over the hill. We took off to cut him off and here he came up the hill about 60 yards away. I shot and hit him center chest. He dropped and didn’t move. The 40 grain Nosler HP made a little hole going in but nothing came out. Just like that it turned into a “coyote hunt”. The rancher had said earlier if we saw coyotes to shoot them.
The weather started getting much worse. Used my Rem 700 222 Rem for the rest of the day. We stayed until 4:00 PM and headed home.
2018 Trip #10 total was 320.
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