

30-06 is far from the latest and greatest thing. 280 Ackley Improved, and you’ll be well-armed for elk season. Get a good quality rifle chambered in 7mm Remington Magnum, or a cartridge offering similar performance like the.

Hunters using lightweight 140gr bullets designed for deer hunting may still experience issues with poor penetration today, but the 7mm Remington Magnum is absolutely deadly on elk when using premium quality 160-175gr bullets.Īll in all, the cartridge offers great external ballistics and very good terminal performance with moderate recoil. Fortunately, that problem has since been fixed and hunters now have access to an excellent selection of high-quality 7mm bullets that perform very well on really big game like elk. The result was some horrific flesh wounds that were often not immediately fatal to the elk. In those cases, bullet penetration was terrible, sometimes not even reaching the vitals when striking a bone or a heavily muscled shoulder. Those lightweight, thin jacketed bullets performed very well at the more sedate velocities produced by the 7mm Mauser, but would expand far too rapidly, sometimes explosively, upon impact when fired at 7mm Rem Mag velocities (about 400-500fps faster). This was primarily because 7mm Mag factory ammo initially used bullets poorly suited to the high velocities produced by the cartridge. However, the cartridge got a reputation among elk hunters as a “wounder” after a couple of years. Hunters fell in love with the high velocity, flat-shooting cartridge from the very start. The 7mm Remington Magnum was a big commercial success for Remington when it started hitting shelves in the early 1960s. 7mm Remington Magnumģ00 Winchester Magnum (L) vs 7mm Remington Magnum (R) Those bullets will provide the terminal performance necessary to punch through the heavy bones and thick muscles of a big bull elk to reach the vitals from a variety of shooting angles. Regardless of the cartridge you use, pick a well-constructed, controlled expansion bullet like the Barnes TTSX/LRX, Nosler AccuBond/Partition, or Swift A-Frame/Scirocco (just to name a few). After all, it’s the bullet that kills the elk.

While choosing the right cartridge is extremely important, don’t forget about your bullets either. However, if you’re looking for a good elk rifle, these 5 cartridges are a good place to start. If you fall into that group, don’t take the lack of inclusion of your favorite elk caliber on this list as an insult. Countless hunters go afield each year with other cartridges and have great success on elk. Keep in mind that this is not an all-inclusive list either. With all that in mind, my goal with this article is to provide you with a couple of good recommendations on selecting the right caliber for hunting elk. However, an appropriate cartridge will give you some more options on the shots you can ethically take under realistic hunting conditions. You might only get one opportunity at the bull of a lifetime and he might not present a perfect broadside shot at 200 yards. That could be the difference between a filled tag or a crippled and lost animal in the case of a borderline hit on an elk. It’s a plain and simple fact that a more powerful cartridge does provide a bit more room for error than a smaller, less powerful cartridge. We live in an imperfect world and even the best shooters don’t place their shots exactly where they want every single time. However, that only tells part of the story. The saying “a smaller bullet in the right spot is better than a larger bullet in the wrong spot” does provide sage advice. Yes, shot placement is extremely important when hunting any animal, to include elk. For this reason, hunters going afield after elk with a rifle should be adequately armed.
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Stories also abound of poorly hit elk running into the next zip code with no signs of slowing down. As a point of comparison, it’s not unusual for a big bull to weigh 3-4x as much as a big-bodied whitetail or mule deer. Elk, especially mature bulls, are incredibly large and tough creatures.
