a venture into long range shooting

My

wife, Temple, and I were on our way to North Idaho from Las Vegas and had about 15.5 hours of drive time to think, talk and reflect. I got to thinking about my journey into long range shooting. I thought about my successes and my failures. It has been a long journey that began one day while cruising YouTube. I stumbled across a video from Long Range Shooters of Utah (LRSU) where they were shooting milk jugs full of colored water at 10001760 yards. They were having a ball! It intrigued me since at that point in my life, I had maybe shot 300 yards with one of my old 30-06 hunting rifles and most likely missed the target completely.

I started playing around with a few ammunition load combinations trying to figure this stuff out on my own. It became apparent fairly quickly that the road I was on wasn’t going to lead me to the place I wanted to go. Everything was wrong. Wrong cartridge, wrong scope, wrong stock, wrong barrel, etc. So I started researching my options and reading everything I could find. It became my obsession.

On one fateful day, I stopped by a local gun shop in Las Vegas on my way home from trap shooting at the Clark County Shooting Park. There it was, a brand new Ruger RPR chambered in 243 Winchester. I had read about these rifles, and they were promoted as affordable, match-grade rifles right out of the box. For the most part, it boasted positive reviews. To this day, I don’t think my wife had any idea what this purchase would set in motion.

When I arrived home with my new shooting iron, I started looking at scopes. Glass for a long range capable rifle gets VERY expensive, and it gets there fast. I ran across a cool guy on the internet by the name of Aaron Michaud. He ran a sporting goods store in the midwest and was selling a new scope brand, Athlon. After much internal debate, I ordered one. It wasn’t the NightForce I wanted, but it fit the need and current budget. Over the next month, I pieced together my first long range rig on a fairly tight budget.

A Venture Into Long Range Shooting

By Chad Kinyon

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With guidance from a couple of internet friends, William Berger and Eugene White, I started to put together a load to run in my new rifle. This was a somewhat long and drawn-out process with several setbacks. After I got my new rifle zeroed in to shoot a dime-sized hole at 100 yards, I headed out into the southern Nevada desert with my lovely wife. Did I possess the skill to smack a target at distances I never even considered possible? A friend had told me about a popular place to shoot NE of Vegas. After a few shots, I was able to calculate a bullet speed using bullet drop. Ok, let’s give 400ish yards a go. Everything at this point was a best guess. I look back at this time in my life and just giggle. No range finder, no chronograph, inadequate spotting scope. Regardless, even despite those hindrances, Temple and I beat the hell out of a metal can at 400+ yards. It’s like we couldn’t miss. Armed with an exaggerated sense of self-confidence, I entered the 2017 International Milk Jug Challenge (IMJC) in Price, Utah. For the next several months, we would go shooting every time I had days off. Temple had unknowingly become the spotter on Team Kinyon. I continued to change and improve the load I was feeding my RPR and, before long, was hitting steel at a mile. Temple was, too. We were having fun but at the same time experiencing frustration. Golf is a lot like that.

As I drove to Price, Utah, I kept going over everything I thought I knew about long range shooting. It never really occurred to me that I didn’t know much. As luck would have it, I was about to meet a group of guys that could teach me a thing or two…maybe even three or four. After a five-hour drive into the unknown, I arrived at the North Springs Shooting Range. Enter Scott Olson into my tribe. He runs the range in Price and is one of the nicest, most helpful people you will ever meet. If you travel there and are ex-military, take him a unit patch; he has quite the collection. Scott ran down the range rules and pointed me in the right direction. As I walked up to the firing line, I spied a guy with what looked like a really big rifle. Playing the odds, I asked if he was there for the IMJC. He was. Enter Doug Ritter into my life. We became good friends over the weekend. He was kind of new to the long range game as well, so we hit it off. As we shot and visited, more guys came rolling into the range. Enter Bruce Baum and Nick Morrey. The four of us hung out and spotted for each other. We bonded over a shared passion. Friendliest people you could ever want to meet. Of the 20-some-odd guys I met that weekend, I am still in touch with most of them today and consider them all lifelong friends. We are currently considering a reunion shoot, but that’s another story. On the first day of the competition, I was so nervous I couldn’t sit still. I’m what my wife calls very competitive, and I could feel it boiling inside me. Up first was the 1200-yard challenge. I can’t say I remember what round hit the mark, but I was successful thanks, in a large part, to the “Wind Talkers,” Mike Meyers and Michael Langston of LRSU, a.k.a. Mike’ n Mike. These two dudes can read wind as well as anyone I have met to date. I dialed my elevation and best wind guess, listened to what Mike told me to hold for wind, and squeezed the trigger when he said. Michael reported the results. This is actually working! On to the 1500-yard jug! Again, I followed the same recipe that yielded success at 1200, and it worked. I was now 2/2 and gaining confidence by day’s end. Tomorrow, two more jugs, fingers crossed.

As luck would have it, I was 17th in line to attempt the mile jug. I had a good amount of time to stew in my competitive juices, which was good and bad all at the same time. Finally, my turn came, and I was ready to wreck a jug. Turns out, hitting a milk jug a mile away in wind is a real challenge with a 243. Who knew? I followed the recipe that had led to success on day one. As I pulled the trigger on the last round, I realized that it wasn’t meant to be. I hit the 16” backing plate six times, all around the actual jug without rupturing it. I had failed. That feeling sucked.

As I collected up my gear for what I felt was the walk of shame back to my pickup, Mike Meyers pulled me aside. He said, “I’ve been doing this for quite a while, and I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone lay down a consistent pattern like that at a mile with a damn 243. Good shooting.” I’m certain he didn’t know what those words meant to me. Maybe I don’t suck? Maybe I was expecting too much of a 243? Maybe I was asking too much of a production rifle off the shelf? I finished up day two with success at the 1000 yard distance. Final score 3/4, so, you guessed it, down the rabbit hole I went, head first at full steam. I can’t even put into words the basic knowledge that I came away with from that weekend. Lou Smith IV introduced me to a computer program called Quickloads and the whole concept of Optimum Barrel Time (OBT). My mind was blown. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it entirely for another couple of years. Mike Meyers taught me the importance of chamber temperature and pressure, as well as the basics of shooting in rhythm with the wind. Jim Mehl—decisively, the best actual marksmen I have ever met—taught me not to overreact to a missed shot and that the next shot deserved more attention than the last one. I left for home with a whole host of new folks I call friends. I’ll go back, and when I do, I’m going to get that last jug. After what seemed like exhausting research, I decided that I wanted to have a custom rifle made and wanted MasterPiece Arms (MPA) to make it for me. I was on the phone with Al Oliver of MPA in Georgia, and we hatched a plan to build a “switch lug” rifle. This new rifle would be chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor and 7 SAUM. It would require two interchangeable bolts and barrels, made possible by a locking split nut between the action and the barrel. The two calibers would share the remaining components. Just one question, how to sell the idea to Temple? As it would happen, she wasn’t a hard sell. She asked what I wanted for my 50th birthday. Well, since you mention it, check this out. She went for it. When my new rifle showed up, I was beside myself with excitement and the possibilities. I started looking at Precision Rifle Series (PRS) and planned on taking in some events with the 6.5 setup. This notion was fairly short-lived. As an old guy with a bad hip, sketchy knees, and a herniated disc in my back, the yoga positions they wanted me to shoot from just weren’t my cup of tea. At times, they were just painful. I still believe that there is a market for a PRS style competition without the positional stuff. Let us old brokedown guys shoot either prone or from a bench and be done with it. I digress… Through a friend of my brother’s, I secured a new NightForce ATACR 5-25x56 scope with the Tremor 3 reticle. This was the scope I had only dreamed of owning to this point. Lou Smith IV introduced me to this reticle, and once I understood everything going on in that little glass, I fell in love with it. This rig is really starting to come together. This new gem was superior to anything I had ever looked through.

You know that old saying, “once you go ________ you can’t go back.” Yep, that applies to rifle scopes, too. NightForce will top any and all of my future rifles. Whenever possible, I always support the guys back “home” in Idaho. Back to Price I went with my buddy, Doug, in 2018. We had both retooled and upgraded. Due to the number of competitors that year, we only shot the 1500 and 1-mile. I was successful on both counts. The mile jug that had eluded me the year before fell on the 16th shot. I was the only shooter to hit the mile that year. I had completed all the Milk Jug Challenges. That was a good feeling. What’s next? My friend Michael Langston had been pushing the 7 SAUM cartridge well past 2000 yards, which got me thinking about and researching Extreme Long Range (ELR) as a discipline. This is where I belong, no yoga. Time to find an event to test myself and see if I have the skill to make it happen. I started practicing with Temple out in the desert and made shots out to 2600 yards. It wasn’t a slam dunk, but a hit is a hit, right? I entered the 2019 High Desert ELR Challenge in Oregon. It’s really just an additional thousand yards…right? My first experience in ELR was VERY educational, to say the least. The majority of the shooters were sporting these massive shoulder-fired cannons based on the Cheytec and 50 BMG cartridges. They separated the shooters into two groups, making 338 Lapua Mag the dividing line. My little short action 7 SAUM put me in the light gun class, but hands down, mine was the smallest cartridge in the entire group. Sometimes size does matter. The night before the shoot, we all sat around discussing our rifles. Enter a new bunch of friends into my tribe. I met a guy that actually lived in southern Nevada like me by the name of John Rawlings. We were visiting over a couple of beers. He invited me to take in the monthly match in Boulder City, Nevada. I remember telling him I met a guy from that club a year prior but couldn’t remember his name. I described him as Phillipino or Latino, bald, and just the nicest guy. John quickly spouted, “You mean Joe.” Yep, that was his name. Enter Joe Cabigas into my life for the second time. We’ll circle back to Joe. The day of the shoot came, and, you guessed it, the wind became vicious. I remember that the last target I hit was at 2400ish. I also remember that my scope elevation was maxed out, and the windage was maxed out to the right. I had to hold an additional eight mills of elevation and six mills right wind. Pu-ting! I was surprised by the hit. I ended up with a second-place finish in class and seventh, overall. Maybe I don’t suck? Maybe I just don’t have quite the right equipment to win…YET. Wait. What do you mean there are prizes? Hey, I like this deal. Sure the prizes are donated by manufacturers and generally require you to spend some money to use them, but not always. Usually, they are nice discounts on shooting products you wanted to buy or try anyway. And, as I’m sure you already guessed, I went shooting down that damn rabbit hole again. I had a certificate for 50%-off on a Peirce custom 10X action in my hot little hand. Shoulder-fired artillery was now on my agenda.

I made some good friends that weekend. Kasey Jones, Stan Cutsforth, and Terry Fisher (who makes THE best tri-tip steak in the world). I learned what I needed to be competitive in the ELR game and set the wheels in motion to make that happen. If you’re going to play, you need to play to win, or at least I do. When I returned to Las Vegas, I used FaceBook to look up Mr. Joe Cabigas. True to his nature, he invited me down to Boulder City, Nevada, to take in the monthly long range match. This would be the event that changed the course of my endeavor and made Joe one of my very best buddies and a true lifelong friend. When I arrived at the Boulder range, I got the rundown of how the match worked and thought, This shouldn’t be that hard; I’ve hit a milk jug at a mile, after all. Boy, was that ever an example of wrong thinking. These crazy buggers were shooting at these tiny, little targets. The targets were 1 MOA, which, if you don’t know, that means you get 1” of steel per 100 yards. In short, an 880yard target was 8.8” square. I think I hit something like 3/25 that day and started questioning everything I had learned plus, don’t bet lunch with these guys. Bad idea. These guys were banging the heck out of those “fun-size” targets, in the wind, no less, and with someone talking smack right behind them. For the most part, they were unshakeable rocks when behind the rifle. Now, that’s not to say that if you got ‘em laughing, that it wouldn’t mess up their shot. This behavior was strongly encouraged. This environment makes it so you can block almost anything out. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had fallen into the fold of some of the absolute best marksmen in the entire Southwest. I arranged my schedule so if possible, I would make this shoot at all costs. Over time, I became one of them. This portion of my journey was probably the most significant due in large part to Joe. He taught me that my hand loads were crude, at best, and only slightly better than factory ammo. I have to admit it kinda hurt. After all, I had enjoyed a certain amount of success in the last couple of years. I can’t be that messed up, right? Joe is a generation older than me and has been shooting competitively most of his life. I learned the basics of reloading from my dad and had refined what he taught me into what I thought was a pretty solid process. I was doing things right, but Joe started explaining how I could do better. Consistency is the name of the game, folks. Each round you chamber needs to be precisely the same as the one you just sent and the same as the next one in the box—if you want the same result, anyway. Variations will kill you in this game. I learned that my reloading press was crap, my scales were altogether sub-par, and my case prep was flawed. It became a running joke with Joe that continues to pop up. “Just listen to Old Joe,” he will say. He was usually right, and I started winning. I like this feeling. The Boulder match and a similar match in Arizona become my concentration over the next year. But the Covid-19 thing reared its ugly head and ruined everything. Those two matches were closed down, as well as almost every match for a period of time. I started to climb the walls. Time to circle back to the shoulder-fired artillery. Covid forced me back into research mode. Upon further analysis, I determined that the 375 EnABELR cartridge from Applied Ballistics (AB) was the correct cartridge for me. In a nutshell, AB took the 375 Cheytec cartridge and made it shorter and slightly fatter. This alteration made it feed well out of a magazine, something that those hot-dog-sized cartridges struggled with and something I couldn’t ignore. That, along with a snazzy four-ounce hair trigger, a recoil-eliminating muzzle brake, a sweet adjustable scope base, and NighForce optics (of course), all added up to my dream configuration. And although it blew past my intended budget, Temple agreed it was time to go big or go home.

As I write this, my gunsmith Klayt Kinyon (I call him “cuz” even though we can’t figure out how we are related, but I know we are), is waiting to receive my 36” barrel from Kreiger and my chassis from Cadex to help “birth” my new “child.” I should have my long-awaited “baby” by this fall. Then that whole load development thing will start again.

In the spring of 2021, Covid restrictions were lifted enough to allow the High Desert ELR match in Lexington, Oregon, to take place. Stanley Cutsforth and Kasey Jones, along with several awesome and generous sponsors, hosted. These guys did an excellent job and put on a good shoot. But as luck would have it, my artillery piece wasn’t done yet, so the 7 SAUM got the call again. My dad came along for fun, and we camped out at the shooting site and got to spend some father-son time together that was well overdue. I should note that the range sits smack dab in the middle of hundreds of windmills. That tells you a lot about what weather conditions to expect. And did you know those windmill lights all blink at the same time? Blink. Blink. Blink. All. Night. Long. But I digress…

Everyone shoots in the same class for this match, so I didn’t enjoy any protection from competing with those really big rifles shooting enormous bullets. The targets started at 1574 yards and went all the way to 3556 yards. I knew going in that my rifle would be struggling at around 2600 yards, even with a new and longer barrel.

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If I do my job at the closer targets, I’ll be ok. I needed to shoot clean starting at 1574, but due to target location, I couldn’t tell that I was shooting over the target. I ended up with only a couple of hits. I’ll still be ok, on to the next target.

I engaged six targets with a hit here and there, ending at 2503 yards with a total of 23,499 points. That last target proved to be tough. My scope was maxed out, and I couldn’t see any indication where I was hitting—a tough pill to swallow since we would return on day two to shoot even further. I finished day one in 10th place out of 17 shooters. I had survived but held little hope of making a move on the leaders.

So there I was on day two, in over my head again, trying to figure a way to make a move. I just didn’t see any way I could continue, so I sent a message to Kasey to withdraw from the firing order. I do NOT like this feeling. It feels like a bad case of heartburn, bitter and acidic.

When Dad and I arrived at the firing line, I explained to Kasey and Stan that I was maxed out and had absolutely no idea where I was hitting. Stan looked at me and said, “You mean you drove all the way from Vegas to Lexington, and you aren’t going to shoot?” Peer pressure doesn’t usually work on me, but this time it certainly did. Within minutes, I was putting my rifle back together and doing the math to figure out how in the hell I was going to engage a target at the next distance, 2810 yards. I needed about 50 mills of elevation, but I only had 29 in my scope adjustment. So I hatched a plan to back the power off in my scope and use the reticle to measure the other 21 mills. After all, a scope reticle is just an extremely expensive tape measure. I just needed to find the right aim point once I had the elevation and 12.5 mills of right wind. The math says it’s possible. I first lined up the scope so the target was positioned correctly in the reticle. Then I started looking for an aim point somewhere near the top of my reticle so I could turn the magnification back up. And there it was, like a beacon. Right on the ridgeline was a damn bush, all alone and sitting right under my left 6 mil mark. All I had to do was put the left 6 on that bush, and I should be close if my math was correct. My turn to fire. I let out my breath and squeezed off the first round. After a six-second flight time (1.6 miles), Stan relays to me, “You’re a plate and a half high, and your wind was dead on.”

Wait, what? You mean I was close? Maybe I can do this. I made slight adjustments and kept feeding the rifle in rhythm with the wind. On shot #5, Stan yelled, “Impact! You hit it!” “Let me go check the video feed!” he chimed and ran off to the trailer to check. He roared back a few seconds later and confirmed that I had indeed hit the 2810 target. In fact, I was the only person to hit that distance for score at that point, with only four shooters to go. “Do you want to move onto the next target at 3372 yards? “he asked.

Well hell! I hadn’t any kind of a plan for that and didn’t have time to come up with one. I mean, I would have to aim somewhere up in the sky, and that certainly wasn’t going to work because clouds move. No aim point. So I elected to take my new personal best of 2810-yards, sack the bats, so to speak, and call it a day. The last shooter of the day hit the 2810 target with his personal artillery piece, and that was it. No one hit anything further.

Maybe I don’t suck. Man, I wish my new rifle would have been ready. Think of what I could’ve done with THAT. But my good old 7 SAUM came through again (I love that rifle), and yes, I moved up one spot with that lone hit worth 2810 points. I finished a respectable 9th place. Even if it was a small one, I had managed to make a move in a situation that seemed impossible. Next time, hopefully, I’ll be better prepared to put some pressure on the leaders.

So what’s next, you ask? Well, there is this competition which is the crown jewel of long range marksmanship, King of 2 Miles in Raton, New Mexico. Hold on, here we go in 2022. I will qualify, I will go, and I will compete with the top ELR shooters in the world. And I will beat some of them. Maybe all of them. At least that’s the plan for Joe and me. Hopefully, if you are interested, you’ll follow along on my adventure.