Beginning

Our (Brad and myself) interest in long range shooting developed out of a tradition we started in 2007. Our dad had died in 2005, and one of his favorite things to do was to go shooting. On fathers day weekend in 2007 we headed out to some national grasslands and spent most of the day shooting in his memory. We continued the tradition next year up here in Wyoming at a range that stretched 500 yards. Most the time we spent was with shotguns or pistols. But I had brought a rifle and we tried to hit a couple of soda cans at about 415 yards, just for the fun of it. We found this to be quite enjoyable, to say the least.

Our set-up, if you could even call it that, was a 270 win. rifle with an 8-32x44 scope on it. The person not shooting spotted with a 4x scope on the back of a 10/22. Not ideal, but we managed to hit those pop cans after about a dozens rounds each. For ammo we used 150gr. Remington Core-Lokt. We laid down in prone, or something close to it, and fired off a bipod. Before we ran out of ammo the result was the following:

Neither one of us has any formal rifle training. We both have a good knowledge of physics and of guns (safety, operation, ammo and so on.). Hitting those cans was probably half luck and half persistence. But what we experienced was a great amount of excitement when an orange explosion of soda greeted us after many rounds of trying to hit the cans. I find reactive targets have that effect. And so began our interest in trying to hit things at great distances with a rifle.

-Steven Kipp