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Craig Boddington's Adventure Blog

The .30-06 in my 2006

The hundred-year-old caliber got a round-the-world workout on my hunts this year.

We gunwriters aren’t particularly creative types. If we were, we’d be writing novels and using the proceeds to buy Purdeys and hunt argalis. So we welcome ideas. When there’s a new cartridge, we rush to be among the first to use it, not necessarily because we believe this brave new soldier will rise to glory, but because it’s a no-brainer story.

And then there are the celebrations. In this year of 2006 we celebrated the centennial of the .30-06, a cartridge that has been America’s favorite for most of the century just passed. Most gunwriters have spilled ritual ink in this celebration, and well we should. Not only because it has been an easy topic to address, but because the .30-06 and its millions of fans deserve it.

Many are the twists and turns that have spun ’round the .30-06 in this past year. Most creative, in my view, goes to one colleague who maintains he received special dispensation to use the .30-06 to take a Cape buffalo, in clear contravention of published game laws. Why not? Roosevelt did, Hemingway did, Ruark did . . . and it makes no more sense today than it did in their day. However, the honors for most courageous goes to Richard Venola of RifleShooter. Richard must have really aggravated his editor, because he drew the assignment of unmasking the .30-06 as a fraud, which is sort of like hinting that John Wayne was a sissy or people who like apple pie are Communists. He did a great job, but, as I’ve told him, I’m glad I don’t have to live with that story for the rest of my career!

I am equally guilty of riding the .30-06 bandwagon. In early 2005 I decided to use the .30-06 as much as I could in the months ahead, so as to lay in some fresh material and photos for the approaching wave of deadlines. No, I did not use the .30-06 to take a Cape buffalo; I believe minimums established over the last three generations of African hunters are there for good reasons. But, early in 2005, I used the .30-06 to take a wonderful leopard and a wide variety of African plains game. Later in the year I used it to flatten a fine elk, and I finished the 2005 season using the ’06 to hunt whitetails.

The Good Old Days

Okay, mission accomplished. The deadlines were met, the centennial celebration was underway, and now good old Magnum Boddington can get back to the cartridges he really likes, right? Except, you see, one of the cartridges I really like happens to be the .30-06, and if you examine my work over the last thirty years you will find this to be true.

Once upon a time I was a wannabe writer, and since I was under the command of no editor and was sent no firearms to test by any manufacturer in these blissful and innocent days, I could actually shoot whatever I wished to shoot. As I’ve written before, I was a child of the first magnum craze. I quickly graduated from a .243 to the “hot” gun of the era, the .264 Winchester Magnum. Before I was twenty I also had a .300 Winchester Magnum and a .375 H&H, and it surprises even me that I also had a .270 and that I found that this anemic and unbelted marvel was actually capable of taking game. I also had a .30-06, a surplus Springfield that I partially sporterized. I shot that old Springfield a lot, but I never actually hunted with it until thirty-five years later.

I cannot recall exactly why, but as I prepared for my first safari I trotted down to the Post Exchange (in a time when PXs actually sold firearms) and bought a Ruger M77 in .30-06. It’s possible that I thought the ghosts of Roosevelt, Hemingway, and Ruark were speaking to me . . . but, although it was much in vogue in those days, I really wasn’t smoking (or snorting) anything strange. After all, I was an officer and a gentleman. I cooked up some fairly warm loads with 180-grain Nosler Partitions, and that .30-06 seemed to perform miracles. But they weren’t miracles at all—just the wonderful bullet performance that is, and always will be, the hallmark of the .30-06. Over the next few years, as I morphed from a wannabe writer to a real writer, that same .30-06 accounted for numerous milestones in my hunting career: first Coues deer, first blacktail, best mule deer, longest shot, and more.

That rifle was stolen in 1981, but by then I was hearing voices again, this time those of editors and manufacturers instead of ghosts, and on an ever-escalating basis my choices were no longer my own. So, for the last thirty years I have used a wide variety of rifles and cartridges. Almost all have proven capable of doing exactly what they were supposed to do, and as such have deserved the ritual ink I have spilled over them. In my heart of hearts, however, some I have really liked and some I have simply written about. No, I will not tell you which is which. I write honestly, or at least I think I do, but I’ve never thought it necessary to foist my peculiar peeves and prejudices upon readers. But if you look closely at my work over time, you will probably note there are just a few cartridges that keep reappearing. The .30-06 isn’t alone; other favorites include the .270 Winchester, .300 Weatherby Magnum, and .375 H&H. But it is probably telling that, at this moment, I own six different rifles chambered in .30-06, which is a considerable percentage of my personal rifles, and the only cartridge chambered in more than two of my rifles. Next page