Jason7271;
Both Leupold and Vortex make good scopes, but here's a bit of advice about winnowing through some of the options. For hunting purposes, you do not want a scope with adjustable focus. That limits the top end magnification to 10 or maybe 12 power, but that's OK for a hunting rig. What you don't want is to bring the gun up to your shoulder & have it out of focus for the shot you want to take. The game animal may not wait around for you to change things, it's a life & death survival reaction for him. Don't be too anxious to get the biggest objective diameter you can either. More depends on the quality of the glass than the size of the objective. A large to super-large objective makes you mount the scope higher & that puts more weight higher. Big glass weighs more & that can affect the way the gun handles to you. The same holds true for any factor that affects scope size & weight, like tube diameter. In a rapid hunting situation, a busy reticle can be confusing more than helpful. Personally, I prefer a mil-dot & nothing fancier than that. That being said, the standard duplex works fine too.
If you do the range work to find out what your combination of gun, ammo, and glass does at various ranges you should be just fine come hunting season. You may want to get a decent spotting scope too if you spend the time you should at the range. If possible, go to the range in the early morning & late evening. Find out there what the glass's resolution is in low light situations. Find out how much it affects your accuracy, if any. Here's the point: If low light increases your group size at 300 yards from 5 inches to six inches, does it really make any difference when you hunt? The bullet is still gonna go into the animal's boiler room & really ruin that mulie buck's day. I don't know what the hunting regs are in your state, but here shooting time begins a half hour before sunrise & lasts to a half hour after sunset. If there's a lot of cloud cover, first light can be pretty dim, but most of the time you don't need to spend a whole big gob of money to get a very decent scope that'll do the job just fine.
900F