Rod Carpenter

Way back around the turn of the century, I used a Hawken muzzleloader to take a spike elk in Washington. It was mostly fun, except for the constant rain.

Then I used it to miss a deer three times at less than 60 yards and it wasn’t as much fun, so I gave up muzzleloader hunting for quite a while.

With tags getting harder to draw, I decided to try hunting deer and elk again with a muzzleloader, but not the Hawken. A lot has changed since then, and this year I will be using a .50-caliber CVA Optima in-line muzzleloader.

That old Hawken was a hefty 10 pounds. The CVA comes in at just under 7 pounds, making it much more pleasant to pack around.

I was a little nervous that such a light rifle would jar loose my fillings when I touched it off for the first time, but to my surprise, it wasn’t too bad. Instead of the metal buttplate of the Hawken, the modern recoil pad on the CVA tamed it down to a level on par with a stiff .30-06 load.

When I hunted Washington, most Northwest states required that the ignition cap be exposed to the elements. On that hunt it rained constantly. Despite my best efforts to keep my rifle dry, the first three caps I tried failed to fire. I was as surprised as that elk when it actually went off on the forth cap.

Just this year Oregon changed the law to allow closed ignition, so it will be quite a bit easier to keep the cap and powder dry even in wet conditions. While Oregon still doesn’t allow the use of the hot 209 shotgun primers, most folks have started using musket caps, which are much more reliable than the No. 11 muzzleloader caps of olden days.

I used a patched round ball and honest-to-goodness black powder to kill that elk. We still can’t use a projectile with any plastic attached to it, but this year I’m using a Thor all-copper hollow point bullet.

Pelletized powder is not allowed in Oregon, only loose powder. Still, the substitutes we have for black powder now are much cleaner and don’t suck up water the way real black powder does. That makes cleaning almost bearable.

And last, but not least, gone are the clunky buckhorn open sights. Around here magnified and electronic sights are a no-no, on muzzleloaders. Instead, my CVA is adorned with Williams peep sights. The front sight is interchangeable so that you can choose a crosshair, dot, post or any of several other designs. It may not be the latest from Vortex, but it ain’t bad.

While modern muzzleloaders are still a ways behind centerfire rifles for ease of use, they are getting a lot better. And they are kinda fun, to boot.

Do you have a good muzzleloader story? Let us know at shootingthebreezebme@gmail.com.