You dont need the stainless. Get the regular version, blued is tough, I've had mine for 10 years not a drop of rust and i've taken it with me through snow,rain, and cold weather similar to coastal alaska... i live in southeastern new york and come deer season there are a lot of ice storms/snow storms/ rain storms, known as NORTHEASTERS. Correction i've had it for 8 years sinc eI was 16, and i've take it thru the thickest nastiest conditions imaginable... swamps, spruce thickets that rips your arms and face when you walk thru them, rain, snow, ice. You name it and if I handed you my gun now you could not tell the difference between it and a brand new one. Granted I do BASIC maintenance on the gun... you have to treat it like your car...change your oil, do you tune up. I got a boresnake and i run one thru my bore soaked with solvent after every hunting trip... i always keep everything lightly oiled on the rifle, even the bore. You could always get a stainless model down the road, but if you anticipate that your going to be hunting very soon and need the gun i wouldn't hold off just to buy a stainless version. If you need to put meet in the freezer or if you just wanna have fun to get out, don't let the fact that you don't have a stainless steel gun hold you back from enjoy your life. These gun magazine writers oughta be ashamed of themselves for painting a picture of paranoia into peoples minds about their blued/wood guns. They exaggerate the facts so it keeps their advertising advertising in their magazines and keeps their pockets lined.
Alot of manufacturers and gun magazines who are paid by the manufacturers and have a working relationships with each other are obviously going to blow out the proportion of the necessity of stainless steel. They wanna line their pockets so they exaggerate the truth a bit to get people to panic and buy stainless teel guns and think that its an indestructable gun. And they paint the picture that blued/wood guns will rust and fall apart like a cheap bb gun from a dollar store. Just like the SUV craze and now all suburbanites and soccer moms have one and you know 90% of trucks in a ditch are SUV's!! because people think they are fool proof and can do 75 in 1 foot of snow.. its crazy.
Don't buy into the BS.
Also the marlin stainless steel rifles are not fully stainless steel, mainly the barrel I believe, the action parts are coated or nickel plated.
