I've done some elk hunting, but not enough to call myself an expert at it. Also, when I was going elk hunting every year, I owned a dandy of an AQHA registered mare and thus did most of my elk hunting on horseback. My experience with hunting off of horses was that it was a no-brainer to get close to game when riding. For example, when riding my horse on trout fishing trips in California's Marble Mountains, I had several occasions where I quite literally rode right up to bedded Roosevelt elk. It was much the same thing when I hunted elk in Utah and Colorado, too.
Because of this, I didn't really need a lot of gun or optics to do the job. As an example, I killed elk with patched round balls from my wimpy .50 Lyman Great Plains Rifle, and killed them very dead very quickly with it, too. But part of the reason why it worked was because the shots were close and the animals shot didn't have adrenaline running through their viens when I shot them. I basically snuck up on them and capped them while they were asleep.
For the regular gun seasons, I used an old peep-sighted Springfield in .30-'06 firing 180 grain Barnes X Bullets, for the most part. I did use a .280 Remington M-700 Mountain Rifle and shot elk with it during the 1984, 1985, and 1986 seasons. Ancient history, by now, to be sure, and nothing that I could use to claim expertise in killing elk with the .280 Remington cartridge. But I did actually kill a few using it.
The load that I used was the 175 grain Barnes X over 55 grains of IMR 7828 in nickle plated Remington cases capped with Federal 210 primers. This is a max load from Barnes Bullets Reloading Manual Number 1 and is also ancient history now. The velocity I got was on the modest side at around 2,675 from the skinny little 22" barrel of the Mountian Rifle. It was plenty of cartrige, however, and resulted in "bang-flop" on each elk I shot with it, but that is only for three seasons of elk hunting, which doesn't add up to a whole lot of elk.
That rifle was scoped with a 2 X 7 Leupold Vari-X II. That was plenty of magnification to me, but this is coming from a guy who shot most of my big game with an old peep-sighted Springfield, so big magnification was something that wasn't very important to me in a historical sense. I would also emphasise again that most of the elk that I shot were killed at distances under 100 yards, regardless of whether they were shot in timber or out on the more open "parks."
-JP
