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Way Out There: Shooting (And Hunting With) The .50 Caliber Browning Machine Gun Cartridge
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Photos by Timothy Devine
The days when 300 yards was considered extremely long range are over. Now, thanks to better rifles, scopes, rangefinders, and bullets, 500 yards is more like it. But there is a small subculture of shooters to whom 500 yards is a piddling distance scarcely worth a round of ammunition. These are the people who have harnessed the power of the immense .50 Browning Machine Gun cartridge and transformed it into an instrument capable of shooting with eerie precision at distances that are usually associated with track meets rather than riflery.
John Yenason and Wendy Henry belong to the fraternity of .50 BMG shooters, where everything is oversize, hyper-powered, and far, far away. Yenason is a wiry, dark-haired heavy-equipment contractor who took up the .50 in 1992. He shoots one in benchrest matches at 1,000 yards and hunts with it, too. Wendy Henry, his fianc¿¿e, is a tall, willowy woman who walks with the toes-out waddle of the ballerina she has been all her life. With no prior shooting experience, she took up the .50 in 1998. She competes and hunts alongside John. I had a chance to visit and shoot with th6em at their home in rural Pennsylvania, and they took me on a tour of their arcane world, where glory lies way out yonder.
The days when 300 yards was considered extremely long range are over. Now, thanks to better rifles, scopes, rangefinders, and bullets, 500 yards is more like it. But there is a small subculture of shooters to whom 500 yards is a piddling distance scarcely worth a round of ammunition. These are the people who have harnessed the power of the immense .50 Browning Machine Gun cartridge and transformed it into an instrument capable of shooting with eerie precision at distances that are usually associated with track meets rather than riflery.
John Yenason and Wendy Henry belong to the fraternity of .50 BMG shooters, where everything is oversize, hyper-powered, and far, far away. Yenason is a wiry, dark-haired heavy-equipment contractor who took up the .50 in 1992. He shoots one in benchrest matches at 1,000 yards and hunts with it, too. Wendy Henry, his fianc¿¿e, is a tall, willowy woman who walks with the toes-out waddle of the ballerina she has been all her life. With no prior shooting experience, she took up the .50 in 1998. She competes and hunts alongside John. I had a chance to visit and shoot with th6em at their home in rural Pennsylvania, and they took me on a tour of their arcane world, where glory lies way out yonder.
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Four Rules of Long-Range Accuracy 1. Errors in shooting technique or wind estimation are catastrophic. If you cannot hold well and shoot correctly, you have no chance, because there is absolutely no margin for error. A measly little twitch when you?re shooting at 100 yards will take you off the paper at 1,000. 2. He who holds off the target is lost. I'm referring, of course, to Kentucky windage, the time-honored practice of holding high or low or right or left, depending on range and wind. Here, it?s too imprecise. There are two methods that are far better: Employ the mil dots in your reticle, or actually crank ¿¿adjustments for range and wind into your scope and hold for the center. 3. The wind will kill you. I've seen several formulas for calculating wind drift, but try computing when you don?t know how fast the wind is moving. 4. You must be able to do math in your head as you aim the rifle. An example: You are shooting at an elk that your range¿¿finder tells you is 760 yards away. You estimate that the wind is 10 mph where you are and 20 mph out where he is. Your rifle is zeroed dead on at either 100 or 200 yards. And your scope has mil dots instead of dial-in scope knobs. Get the picture? |
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