Optics

Old West-style lever guns used to be deer hunting mainstay. From Florida swamps to Alaska woods, they’re great brush guns—but they can be so much more.

I found this to be a great optic and experimentally determined it to be exceptionally precise and overbuilt as most Nightforce optics are. I would trust my life in the wilderness with it if I were hunting dangerous game and I would put my faith in it if I were shooting benchrest competitions.

This reticle was created for combat, competition, and hunting scenarios. It’s clearly made for fast, accurate holds.

While sheep hunting, you are in truly rough country and I had no trouble getting distances from objects and structures that I normally would not be able to get them from. The Leupold RX-2800 proved itself a valuable and effective tool for hunting.

A couple of months earlier, Jones and I were on the phone talking about two of our favorite things–hunting and shooting. Jones told me about a friend with a ranch located in the Texas Hill Country north of San Antonio, and the guy was having problems with hogs and had given Jones an open invitation to come out and kill as many as he wanted.

Burris recently announced their brand-new Oracle rangefinding bow sight, a one-of-a-kind device that provides both the exact distance to the target and exact point of aim. We got our sweaty little fingers on it at this year’s NRA Annual Meetings & Exhibits, and it looks like it could be a game-changer.

I still remember the moment. A package arrived at my remote home amidst the rough, high-elevation mule deer and elk habitat of my youth, dropped casually on the porch by the United Parcel Service driver. We lifted it, my brother and I, to a place of honor on the kitchen table, and carefully removed the contents from the packaging. Dashing to the back porch we pointed the new marvel at a distant hillside and exclaimed with glee at the result. It was the first laser rangefinder we owned, and it changed our hunting and shooting lives.

As Vortex’s entry level rangefinder, the Impact 850 outperforms its price point. As someone who does a variety of hunting, I look for diversity in my gear. I want equipment that’s going to function whether it’s spring or fall, archery season or gun season, and good conditions or poor. When it comes to a rangefinder, I’ll be looking for optics that can function for bowhunting deer, shotgun hunting turkey, and rifle hunting elk.

When you’re planning a hunting trip there are few very important considerations — what gun are you going to take? What does the weather look like? How much will the tags cost? Equally as important as what firearm you’re going to take is what binos will you take? For a mid-range 8X binos, the Vortex Viper HD 8×42 are hard to beat.