At 4350′ elevation, Silver Lake, Oregon is a great place to shoot long range. We’d been shooting 1000 yard and 1250 yard targets earlier in the week with a new Bergara 6.5mm Creedmoor LRP Premier rifle (with a .30 Gemtech can), and on the last day of a recent trip, Patrick said he wanted to try the mile. So we backed up another 500 yards or so until the GPS said “1.00 miles” and plopped down a shooting bench. At a mile, our man-sized silhouette steel was about one minute of angle wide and two minutes tall. With the naked eye, it was just a speck. In the Leupold VX3i LRP 4.5-14X50mm it was just a bigger speck. We warmed up with a magazine at a 1500 yard target to gauge the wind call. The wind was tricky, seeming to shift from a headwind to left-to-right in a span of 15 minutes, blowing 5 to 10 mph. Even though the wind wasn’t cooperating, we set our sights at the mile. With 147 grain Hornady ELD Match factory ammunition going 2710 fps, the ballistic calculator called for 80 minutes of drop. The elevation turret topped out at 75 minutes, so we had to hold the last five minutes of drop in the Leupold Front Focal Impact 60 MOA reticle.
It had rained the night before, so spotting misses was more difficult than usual. Normally, the loose soil provided nice clouds of dust, but now our misses were small sprays of dirt. Nonetheless, we quickly figured out the wind and verified the drop with a string of near misses. Patrick then turned the rifle over to my son Eric, described the reticle hold, and Eric rang the mile steel with a headshot on his second shot holding five minutes for drop and six minutes for wind.
Some takeaways about the equipment:
- The Bergara LRP Premier rifle trigger has almost no takeup and a wonderfully clean break. We loved it. The action glides smooth as butter and has almost no rattle or play. And we believers that their sub-MOA guarantee is legitimate. Great platform.
- The 147 grain Hornady ELD Match 6.5mm Creedmoor ammunition was arriving at target subsonic, yet seemed to punch through the transonic barrier in a predictable and consistent manner. It’s possible that some of the misses we didn’t spot had tumbled, but we don’t have any evidence of it.
- The Leupold VX3i LRP 4.5-14X50mm scope was just enough to shoot a mile, but the 8.5-25X50mm would be better suited for such extended ranges. We really liked how easy it was to know exactly where we were on elevation turret as we dialed revolutions away from zero (add the revealed number on the turret barrel to the number on the turret knob to get total adjustment dialed). The Christmas tree reticle made it easy to hold the remaining drop and also hold the windage. And as usual, the Leupold glass was eerily crisp and clear.
