By Greg Ray | Outdoor Solutions | July 2025
It's July, and while most people are thinking about summer, I'm thinking about hunting season. Antelope and black bear tags can kick off as early as August in some states, and I've already got several western hunts lined up: a black bear hunt in New Mexico and a mule deer hunt in northwest Colorado where I may be shooting canyon to canyon at ranges up to 600 or 700 yards. That means now is the time to get my rifles dialed in, not two weeks before I leave.
In this article, and in the video above, I'm walking you through the exact process I go through every year to prepare my hunting rifles. I'll also share a mistake I made live on camera that turned into one of the most valuable lessons I could pass along to you: always check your ammo lot numbers. We'll get to that in Step 3.
The rifle I'm working with today is my Benelli Lupo in 300 Win Mag, topped with a Zeiss Conquest V4 4-16x50 and running the Dead Air Nomad Ti XC suppressor. I'm testing three loads: Federal Barnes TSX 180 grain, Berger Hybrid Hunter 185 grain, and Federal Terminal Ascent 200 grain. Let's get into it.
The first thing I do every season is verify my optics are solid. I run Zeiss optics almost exclusively, and I swap between several models depending on the hunt and the application. I go back and forth between first and second focal plane and different magnification ranges quite a bit.
One thing that makes this significantly easier: I leave rings on every optic I use regularly. That way, when I swap glass, I'm just dropping it onto the rail, no remounting and no resetting. It saves time and protects repeatability.
Here's what matters more than anything with optics: Loctite your rail and torque your ring screws to spec.
The nightmare scenario is getting into the field and discovering your scope has shifted. A loose mount can ruin a hunt, so check it before you leave the house.
Here's something that might surprise you: I rarely clean my hunting rifles. If the rifle is shooting well, I leave it alone. If groups start opening up or the point of impact shifts unexpectedly, then I'll run a patch and remove copper fouling. But I don't clean before a hunt just to clean.
I've seen too many hunters come off the range, do a thorough cleaning the night before they fly out, and then wonder why their zero has shifted. When you clean a barrel down to bare metal, that's essentially a cold, new barrel, and the first several rounds through it will shoot differently than a fouled barrel in hunting condition.
If you do clean before a hunt, foul the barrel before you trust your zero. Shoot at least three to five rounds through it to re-season the bore. Your point of impact can shift meaningfully with a freshly cleaned barrel versus a fouled one.
After the optics and cleaning check, I go through and verify all action screws are properly torqued. On a bolt gun, that's really about it for the mechanical check. These rifles are simple by design, and that's one of the things I love about them.
Once the rifle is mechanically sound, it's time to go to the range. My approach is to choose the ammo I believe fits the hunt, verify zero at 100 yards, then stretch out to confirm my ballistic data at whatever distances are relevant to the specific hunt I'm preparing for.
For this season, I have two different needs:
This is a solid copper bullet, devastatingly effective on big game at 300 yards and under, and I have years of confidence with it. I took a brown bear with this exact load out of this exact Lupo. The ballistic coefficient (G7) is .453, which isn't ideal for extreme distances, but for shots under 400 yards it's everything you want: fast, deep-penetrating, and highly accurate out of this rifle.
At 100 yards, the TSX grouped right where I expected. This rifle has historically shot well under 1 MOA with this load, with groups as tight as 0.13 MOA in the past. After zeroing, I went straight to 500 yards since tall grass from unusual Texas rain blocked our usual 300-yard targets.
Here's where I learned a lesson the hard way. My first group of shots at 500 yards sat about three-quarters of a minute high, an easy adjustment to dial out. But the very next group came back three-quarters of a minute low instead of centering up, the opposite direction, with nothing else about the setup having changed.
The only thing that had changed was the ammo box. A box had run dry mid-session, and I loaded in a fresh one without a second thought. On a hunch, I set the two boxes side by side, and the lot numbers stamped on them read differently: one read F283P04, the other read 284Q04. Two different production lots of the exact same load, and that difference shifted my point of impact by roughly a minute and a half at 500 yards.
Fortunately, I had a partial box of the original lot number left. Reloading with the matching lot brought the group right back to center, with two rounds landing on top of each other. The takeaway: always check lot numbers, especially when buying multiple boxes. If you're buying a case of ammo, open a few boxes and verify they all share the same lot number before you count on them at distance. I break this down in more detail in a separate article on why ammo lot numbers matter.
At 100 yards, this bullet produced an acceptable group out of the Lupo. The first two rounds landed close together, the third opened it up slightly, roughly sub-MOA but not its finest hour. Given the heat and a hunting-weight barrel, I wasn't going to burn extra rounds chasing a perfect group at 100 yards when the real test was at distance.
At 100 yards, the Terminal Ascent grouped slightly better than the Berger. More importantly, it stacked beautifully at 200 yards. At 500 yards, it hit dead center on elevation, exactly where my ballistic app said it should. And at 700 yards, the elevation was spot-on. My wind hold was slightly off, a reminder that reading wind is never something you're fully done practicing, but the ballistic data itself was validated.
Winner for the Colorado mule deer hunt: Federal Terminal Ascent 200 grain. The high BC, the confirmed performance at 700 yards, and the tight groupings make it the clear choice for a long-range western hunt.
One tool I use constantly is the GeoBallistics app. After confirming my elevation data at 500 yards with the Terminal Ascent, I can go into the app and true my velocity based on observed drops. I input my actual distance and actual elevation dial, and the app recalculates my muzzle velocity to match observed performance. From there, all my other distance data becomes more accurate.
I also ran a Garmin chronograph to verify muzzle velocity. My app was programmed for 2,945 fps, and the Garmin measured 2,941 fps on a cold bore shot, incredibly close. As the barrel heated, velocity crept up slightly to 2,952 fps, giving me an extreme spread of about 12 fps across several rounds. That's excellent consistency and gives me high confidence in my data.
The point of all of this isn't to have the fanciest gear or the flattest-shooting cartridge. It's confidence. When the shot matters, when you're glassing a bear at 275 yards or a mule deer buck at 600 yards across a Colorado canyon, you need to know, without doubt, where that bullet is going to go. That confidence comes from systematic preparation, verified data, and repetition at the range.
Get out there before the season opens. Check your glass, check your lot numbers, and stretch it out. The time you put in now is what makes the difference when it counts.
Watch the full video above to see all of this done in real time, including the live lot number lesson and side-by-side bullet comparisons at distance.
Greg Ray is the founder of Outdoor Solutions, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He offers precision shooting instruction, guided hunts, and firearms training courses. Follow along on YouTube for weekly hunting and shooting content.
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Why keep the Barnes TSX for the bear hunt if the Terminal Ascent grouped better at long range? Confidence and a track record matter as much as ballistic coefficient. The Barnes TSX is a solid copper bullet that has already taken a brown bear out of this exact rifle, and knowing precisely how a bullet performs on an animal at a given distance is worth more than a slightly tighter group on paper when the shot is well within its comfortable range.
What is the actual difference between the Barnes TSX, Berger Hybrid Hunter, and Federal Terminal Ascent? The Barnes TSX is an all-copper monolithic bullet built for deep, reliable penetration with a lower ballistic coefficient. The Berger Hybrid Hunter uses a match-style hybrid ogive for higher-BC accuracy at extended range. The Federal Terminal Ascent combines a bonded core, a Slipstream polymer tip, and AccuChannel grooves to hold together and expand reliably across a wide range of impact velocities, which is why it performed so consistently from 100 out to 700 yards.
Why use red Loctite instead of the blue that most manufacturers recommend? Blue Loctite allows a mount to be removed later with normal tools, which is useful if you swap optics often. Red is a permanent bond. Since these rings stay matched to one specific optic and never get swapped to a different rifle, red Loctite guarantees the mount won't shift or loosen in the field, which matters more than the convenience of being able to remove it later.
Should you clean a hunting rifle before a hunt? Not unless it needs it. A barrel that is still grouping well should be left alone, since a freshly cleaned bore shoots differently than a fouled one and can throw off a zero that was otherwise dead on. If a cleaning is necessary, plan on firing several rounds afterward to re-foul the barrel and confirm point of impact before heading into the field.
Why does the ammo lot number matter if the bullet and cartridge are identical? Small manufacturing variations in powder charge, seating depth, and components can differ slightly from one production lot to the next, even within the same product line. Those small differences can be enough to shift point of impact at distance, as shown here when swapping to a new lot mid-session moved the group by a full one and a half minutes of angle at 500 yards. For the full breakdown, see our article on why ammo lot numbers matter.
For more on the gear used in this test, see Zeiss Conquest V4 riflescopes, the Dead Air Nomad Ti XC suppressor, the Benelli Lupo bolt-action rifle, Federal Premium Terminal Ascent, Barnes TSX bullets, and Berger Hybrid Hunter bullets.
