Harve,
That is a mighty purty rack on that bull you felled with a .50 cal. I get such big, warm-fuzzies when I see that kind of thing. In fact, I feel the very opposite way about what are officially referred to as 'atypicals', no matter how massive they. I don't know how many atypical B&C monsters I've seen pics of that to my mind are still just 'rag-horns'. It is illustrative of my feelings about these things that I once smoked a Blackbuck antelope with 19" horns that was standing around with several other bucks, all of which had 22-24" horns. My hunting mates were furious with me. But I just had to have that animal with those virtually perfect 19-inchers, seein' as how all of his older, longer-horned neighbors looked like they'd been in fights with Mexican borrachos wielding dull machetes!
H&H,
My .300 WSM is an 18.5 lb, single-shot rig with no safety, while my .338 Lapua is a 20 lb single-shot with no safety. My 6.5 X 284 Norma, on the other hand, is a repeater that weighs only 12.5 lbs. BTW, in defense of the outfitter I've chosen for this hunt, he explained to me in some detail that the climate (e.g. fog and rain are common during elk season in the Montana Rockies) determines whether one hunts in the timber vs. out in the open, which he says never permits hunting in both on the same day due to the amount of ground that has to be covered.