Pursuit With Cliff - Cliff Gray

Rob Gearing built Spartan Precision Equipment around a question most hunters never answer: what are you actually going to shoot off of when the animal shows up? We get into rest building, why front and rear support (quad sticks) adds real yards to a standing shot, the 500+ yard Namibian kudu Rob killed off one, and why his old Scottish stalking mentor told him “we’re not getting better, the gear’s getting better.” From there it goes wide. How hunting works in the UK with no public land and 3...

Hunters are far worse shooters than they think. I sit down with Form from Rokslide and Shoot2Hunt to talk about why 300 yards on a real animal is a long way, why the viral archery “trick pin” wounds elk, and why aiming off the animal falls apart under stress. From there we dig into the shot process and safety habits almost nobody actually uses. We also cover why a .223 with 77 grain TMKs kills better than most magnums under 400 yards, the physics behind the Rokstock (vertical grip, recoil pa...

We had three bull tags, good snow, almost no competing pressure, and two herds patterned in the Flat Tops during Colorado’s first rifle season. We killed two bulls. This is the honest breakdown of why it wasn’t three, and the guiding decisions I’d make differently. In this episode: How snow changes what you can see in heavily hunted OTC-style units The meadow hunters overlook and why bulls die there The pinball analogy: why bumped elk blow their pattern for days or weeks Groupthink, two gui...

Dr. Ed Ashby has records on 631 big game animals he's taken across 26 years, and only four were never recovered. He explains why most wounded game is hit too far back, why lack of penetration was the number one reason a hit wasn't lethal, and why hunters need to quit being afraid of the shoulder. We get into his Natal Parks Board arrow research at Mkuzi Game Reserve, bowhunting rhino with a 115 lb longbow and 1,286 grain arrows, and why it took 650 grains to reliably break heavy bone. From t...

Access decides more elk hunts than gear, calling, or strategy combined. Private land, resident tags, draw odds, generations of local knowledge. That one variable is why comparing yourself to other hunters is mostly useless, and why the only real measure is for you to calculate Coffee with Cliff, mostly unedited. Assessing your own progress is a harder, but more useful way to judge whether you're actually getting better, plus why the hunting content world keeps getting people in legal t...