2018 Trip #9
A three day trip with three friends from Denver. First off August isn’t a great time to shoot prairie dogs. It’s to late in the year, they’ve been shot at a lot. It’s either very HOT or it’s raining. We got some of both.
The first day we traveled to Torrington, WY to a ranch I haven’t shot on for well over a year. Wasn’t very good; it’s late in the year and they had been shot heavy. As soon as we stopped the trucks they went down.
Off to Wheatland, WY to a ranch I had shot only two weeks before, much better. These guys weren’t into the numbers game, just fun shooting. We all set-up together and went to shooting.
I started off with my 223 AI Rem. It was a standard factory Remington 700 SPS in 223 Rem. I’m not a real fan of the SPS stock so that was the first thing I swapped out for a Hogue over molded. Then my gunsmith took the barrel off and cleaned it up a bit and put it back to gather and installed a muzzle break. I know a lot of folks don’t like muzzle breaks, I want to see my hits and maybe a few misses. I also use high power scopes 6 – 24 x 50, 5 – 30 x 56, I want to see what I’m shooting at. I didn’t do a thing to the trigger except I had my gunsmith adjust it a bit, it’s going to have to go; I don’t like it. The wind wasn’t to bad that first day, maybe 10 mph. We shot until around 7:00 pm and headed to our motel rooms.
Tuesday started off good, didn’t last, the wind got up around 20 – 25 mph and the dogs didn’t like it. Our shots started stretching out to 300 – 400 yards and of course all the good shooting was crosswind. I use all mil-dot scopes so I didn’t have much troubles, the other guys did. The ones that could estimate holding a foot high and a foot into the wind did OK. It got to be funny at times. For me and them, I missed also. The dogs couldn’t pick us out with the wind blowing so hard so I guess that was an advantage. A couple times I aimed at one dog and hit the other, damn the luck. Two of the guys got doubles at 400 yards, one at 396 yards, the other at 406 yards. I got one double at 340 yards with my 6 x 45. They were shooting 204, 22 BR, and a 6mm-250. I traded off between my 223 AI and 6 x 45 all day.
Storms started heading in so we left the field around 5:00 pm, just in time. By the time we got to our motel room the storm had slid South of Wheatland. It rained a little during the night enough to get the windows on the trucks messed up, not a lot.
We hadn’t plan to do much shooting the next day and we only stayed about three hours. The ranch we was shooting got heavy rain and limited us somewhat. I finished up the trip with my 6 x 45 because the wind was around 30 mph. The 6mm bullets do a little better in the wind, I do love my mil-dot scopes.
We didn’t do bad at all for a late in the season prairie dog shoot. Keeping a good of a count as we could we shot nearly 700 dogs for the trip. My count was 168 for the trip. We had lots of fun and we all got out for three days of shooting, how bad can that be!!!
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