Take a Professional Shooting Course to Build Elk Hunting Confidence

We’d found the elk after scanning many of the steep, oak-covered ridges throughout the morning and watched as the scattered herd dipped in and out of the brush a half-mile away. We dove off the ridge and closed the distance as much as we dare with four people. Now the elk were moving out, getting nervous. We were undetected, but elk do not like to be in the open as the sun approaches.

The cow I had singled out looked small in the crosshairs at 530 yards as she stepped into a tiny opening in the brush, difficult to see clearly in the angle of the light. Sitting on my butt amid the branches on our side of the canyon, I dug my boot heels in.

It would take a long shot at a stop-and-go target in the shadowy bush…but I was ready and confident. I adjusted the parallax on the scope, checked the bubble in the level for cant, took a deep breath, and started to squeeze.

I’d just burned two days and many boxes of Hornady match ammo on the same exact property we were hunting, training with the very gun I was holding.

Stay The Course

The precision shooter Elk Hunting Course at Branded Rocky Canyon (BRC) unfolds over the course of four days amid the ridges and canyons of the Rocky Mountains of your dreams in southwest Colorado. This was the climax, where you can fill your freezer and count on what you’ve learned to get it done.

The gun, a murderously accurate Mesa Precision (now Pure Precision) in 6.5 Creedmoor, with one of the tightest actions I’ve seen, had a trigger that seemed connected to my brain. The firearm, complete with a carbon fiber stock and topped by a Nightforce scope, is standard issue at the shooting school, as is the Hornady premium ammo.

A hunting and shooting enthusiast would think that taking a two-day, long-distance shooting school on a stunning high country mountain range and then getting to fill an elk tag on the same postcard-pretty property would be a rather amazing experience. Well, it is.

I am a vocal critic of the long-range hunting wave because very few people do it right. People treat it like a thrill-kill shortcut, not a precision craft to be applied with great respect for our quarry. This was a chance to do it right.

The Program

Brian Jarrell runs the adventure programs at BRC, which include every level of shooting course and ladies-only schools in addition to the one-of-a-kind elk hunt experience. The ranch also offers everything from fly fishing, elite bull elk hunts, four-wheeling and much more. It’s a lux-to-the-max experience, with some of the fanciest food and accommodations imaginable (brandedrockcanyon.com). The property is home to remarkable big bull elk hunting as well, in genuine mountain terrain, not a flat country ranch with cattle running everywhere.

The Elk Hunter Course consists of two days of precision shooter training and two days of cow elk hunting. My favorite aspect of the school? The laid-back, go at-your-own-pace approach Jarrell brings to long-range shooting, without the testosterone-filled air surrounding many such schools. Shooting instruction classes can be intimidating.

On this low-key BRC adventure, it was fast-action, non-stop shooting, yet very pleasant, right down to the silencers on every gun to keep your nerves from getting fried when the person beside you touched one off while you’re squeezing the trigger. We found ourselves cheering for one another whenever someone shot, and got that lovely WOK! sound back from pounding a steel plate a thousand yards away cross-canyon. By the end of day two, everyone was hitting targets at distances that allowed you to take a sip from your coffee between the time the trigger was pulled and the sound traveled back to your ears.

Livening things up was the Spartan Precision team, and their charismatic founder Rob Gearing, on hand to orchestrate the deployment of their ultralight bipods and tripods, with their groundbreaking quick-detach system (see javelinbipod.com). UK-based team members Nick Bailey, Hannah Gibson and Rob “Coffin” Gipson kept things fun and fast-moving in a swirl of cracking British accents because, to quote classic Gearing, they’re “mad as a box of foxes” about shooting and building equipment that aims at making the sport better and easier for everyone. Spreading the gospel and dead serious about their gear,  they’re just about as bloody lovely (sic) a crew as you could luck into having in camp.

The Nuts and Bolts

The school is straightforward with many takeaways but keeps things simple enough to retain mentally. First morning kickoff found us on the stunning range below long cliffs with triple garage doors opening to the shooting area. An amazing facility. Safety review, then an emphasis on D.O.P.E., which is simply data from previous engagements.

That helps you understand just what your cheat sheet for adjusting your turrets is really all about. Emphasis on cant, parallax adjustment, alignment on shoulder, use of a squeeze bag, trigger motion and staying on target was next. Bone-on-bone stance building (muscles are squishy) and watching your eye relief were covered. 
Key fundamentals were made simple through repetition, because the modest-sized class allowed us to shoot…a lot.

We zeroed our guns and mastered the range first, banging away at steel plates and targets to 600 yards. In the afternoon, we switched up partners and spread out along the sides of the flat bottom of a steep canyon. Plates with  animal shapes were scattered throughout the brushy hillsides, and we learned to deal with sunlight shining in the wrong places. Students were free to bang away at targets of choice, circles and plates and rabbits and deer and coyotes planted from 300 clear to 800 yards in shale slides. Rob Coffin and I murdered the coyote target, a skinny one at 500 yards that forced the shooter into an awkward stance and angle. It was a really fun confidence booster, and by the end I could just throw the gun down over my pack like I was doing a hasty field shot. That kind of thing pays off on a hunt, as we would see.

Some guys had monstrous custom guns, but most of us shot the Mesas, and everyone got noticeably better. Whatever positions we wished to create—prone, standing on sticks, off a rock, against a tree, incorporating a back rest—we practiced over and over with the excellent Spartan gear.  The school is not a regimented, by-the-books, range-driven experience.  No pressure, with plenty of advice if you wanted it.

Suppression and Impressions

We all had silencers, so there was none of the tiresome banging that can wear anyone’s nerves down. Just firing at will, at your own pace, learning your D.O.P.E. and mastering the craft of precision rifle shooting. Shooting this much will get you over any trigger anxiety you might have. Lots of joking and even the option of picking up the gun to shoot freehand if you’re feeling saucy. I shot a full-sized elk silhouette freehand to show off.

Evenings were a joy. We relaxed and soaked up the beauty of the lodge beside a large trout pond with aspens in golden fall glory all around, perfect weather in one of the nicest places you could spend time in the fall.

Day two would involve some crazier shots, the varsity stuff. We lined up along a steep ridgeside jeep trail and engaged steel anywhere from 350 yards to over a mile at all angles imaginable. We had shy teenage shooters in the group banging steel routinely at 800 yards. Don Trump Jr. took a 1,680-yard shot, tapping out the dial on the turrets for mils. Confidence grew as we all tried new shooting positions, succeeded (WOK!) and tried something else new. I took some freehand shots, and Don one-upped me by standing on a canyon rim and shooting a much smaller target profile of a bull elk facing the shooter (a narrow bit of steel) and doing so four times straight at 425 yards, completely off-hand. Impressive.

“I used to compete,” he said, with that famous grin, by way of explanation.

Positional Shooting

This is critical to success in the field, because shooting well off a bench at fixed distances teaches you almost nothing about how to shoot as a hunter out in the bush. I asked veteran instructor Kaleb Kramer about why some people at these types of schools excel and others struggle.

“The most helpful thing a guy can do to not only be proficient at engaging targets but also to make good shots while hunting is get yourself into as many awkward positions as possible on uneven ground and learn how to get stable when you don’t have a bench,” he said.

Amen. On this trip I had reunited with my old buddy Kramer, who I’d chased elk with here 14 years prior on a hunt with Weatherby. On that adventure, I had gotten an unlikely steep downhill shot at a whopper bull at 389 yards in high winds, only to draw blood but never find the animal. Kramer decided the bull either ran off a nearby cliff—something he’s witnessed twice since—or was only hit in the brisket. Either way, it was a terrible heartache because in decades of chasing elk at that time I had never killed a really big one (nor wounded one), and it was a rare opportunity on a big bull back then when the ranch was under different ownership and 5 out of 6 elk killed were raghorns. Now, the ranch is crawling with big bulls, and we saw many.

In the afternoon, the wind picked up and we took on Thunder Gap, a shooting site that allows you to try just about anything you want. It’s full of elk, deer, sheep, wild hogs, wolves, and all manner of targets. You can shoot two miles here and we all tried. The wind picked up and we learned to deal with it, waiting for lulls and holding far off target. A real-world education, and we were allowed to shoot until we didn’t want more…most unusual for a shooting school. After a course on field cleaning guns, we were ready for the hunt.

The Chase

The morning held a suspenseful air, as it was time to make our new skills count. Winding up the steep canyon jeep trails, some of them very high in pucker-factor, we stopped and glassed ridge after ridgetop in the predawn. This is cross-canyon shooting country at its best, and the silhouettes of feeding elk appeared atop these high spines of the Rockies, then faded from view.

Kaleb told me how his daughter had shot the heart out of an elk the year prior at 900 yards with his .338 Lapua, mentioning it was a necessary attempt. Dubious of that claim—I always advocate getting closer—it was now easy for me to see why this terrain could call for such an attempt. To try to get closer to an elk on a far ridge, you have to crawl into the bottom to hike across, where you can see nothing until you are up the other side and much too close to the animals to pull it off. And that’s just dodging the elk that you can see. They were hidden everywhere.

We were watching the herd move toward the top of the ridge. I hastily dug in the hillside in the oak brush and got set up. The bipod helped steady the crosshairs, but even with my pack under my armpit in semi-reclined pose, I was 90 percent there in getting a steady hold. But I was not prone, and that is not 100 percent. I knew from my newfound experience that this setup wouldn’t get me to 100 in these field conditions. So I improvised, like I’d been taught. I grabbed one of my Black Diamond trekking poles and built a tripod by bracing it laterally against the bipod and leaning into it. 
Now I had it.

“The lone cow down in that slight opening below that larger tree,” Kramer whispered. “The one to the left not the right, right?” I asked.

Impacts

“Yes. Whenever you’re ready,” he said, with subtle urgency because we ALL knew the elk were moving uphill, getting further away and soon to fade from sight like they all had. “Shooter ready.” “Spotter ready.”

The cow I was zeroed in on at 530 yards stayed put just long enough, and that perfect trigger on my rifle tripped at  the right moment.

“Good shot! Hit her again,” Kramer said after the animal did not move. I complied. “Perfect,” he said. “Again.” He could clearly see the impact of the bullet striking mid-shoulder, but the elk was unimpressed and showed no sign of being hit. My next shot was slightly low.

“Go straight up the leg,” he said. “Break the shoulder.” I tried and pulled the next shot little high-left, clipping her spine. She dropped like a flyswatter from God.

“Or THAT works,” he said, the tension fading already. We we hugged it out.

Celebratory Reminders

I reminded myself that the 6.5 Creedmoor is too light for elk at distance, and I’d known that. Overconfidence in that gun? Maybe. The first two shots were perfect and the elk died in her tracks, but the Creedmoor was just not enough gun. Yet I was relieved, and thrilled, with elk meat on the way to my freezer. I had never hunted elk with the 6.5 Creedmoor, and never will again, but we had a happy ending. The evening was a celebration, after hooking some big trout on the fly now that the hunting was done.

Like the Eagles song, I had a peaceful, easy feeling the entire drive to my house six hours east, having reconnected with a great friend and made many new ones. Knowing my family is going to be raised on fresh organic meat from the field is a big deal to me as well. When I reflect on the whole Branded Rock Canyon experience, I think of it as a shooter’s nirvana, a grownup kids’ summer camp with next-level accommodations and all the right things emphasized.

An un-rushed shooter’s class where you didn’t feel like you would be doing push-ups if you blew the shot, with some ex-SF guy bereft of social cues pacing judgmentally behind you. The endless high-country canyons offer by far the best ranges and targets setups I’d ever seen, with shot opportunities running well over a mile in many spots, so much better than a long, flat Midwest range. I was coming home with meat, and a new fearlessness with a rifle.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway besides the check-down list was simply that we should all shoot as much and as often as possible, with the best equipment we can get our hands on (including Spartan Precision’s). Then shoot some more. You won’t have trigger anxiety or target panic when you simply do it enough. That, and be ready to improvise and adapt your shooting position in the field, even if you must create a tripod from a bipod.

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