Pursuit With Cliff - Cliff Gray

The hunt film is available here: https://youtu.be/20-E3jkSyp4
 
Pat spent 22 years in special operations and teaches firearms, but he’d never been on an elk hunt. I took him on his first one, on a Boy Scout ranch with a rutting herd of 70-plus elk. We break down all of it: the day-one stalk, passing a bull we probably could have killed, the ambush that got winded, and the 200-yard broadside shot that ended it.

We dig into what a guide reads in a new hunter in the first hour, fields of fir...

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 300+ deer a year managed off a single 6,000 acre estate...

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 pad above bore line, negative comb), mechanical vs fixed broadheads, and...

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 guides, and the only mountain goat I...

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 there the conversation runs into double rifles and barrel regulation...

 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 trouble chasing the same scoreboard. 

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Double rifles are the least understood firearms in hunting. They cost more than most trucks, the two barrels are regulated by hand one pair at a time, and most guys buy one for a charge that is never going to happen. I brought in Chris from Heym USA to explain the whole thing from the ground up. Why they cost what they cost. What barrel regulation actually is and why lasers cannot shortcut it. Why 50% of the weight has to sit between your hands. Why a 26 inch barreled double carries shorter than the 22 inch bolt gun in your truck.<...

Most elk hunters don't lose animals because they don't know enough. They lose them because they bugle in the middle of a meadow, creep at 800 yards, sprint at 200, and talk themselves out of the stalk halfway up the mountain. Cliff sits down with outfitter Cade Cole and Eric to break down what actually went wrong, and right, for the guys who came through the in-person Elk Hunting Masterclass in Wyoming this season.

This is the unfiltered debrief: pacing, careless vocalization, wind discipline, onX habits, and the trailhead bubble that leaves miles of glassable elk country untouched every...

Tim Sundles is back on to talk about the Africa trip we did together, the near-charge that convinced him to stop pushing into thick brush, and what he thinks about internet experts who have never killed the animal they're arguing about.

We also get into the part of African hunting nobody advertises: taxidermy commissions, booking kickbacks, and the difference between disclosing what you make and hiding it.

In this episode:

Why first-time Africa hunters come home changed, and why film can't capture it
Three bachelor bulls at 15 feet in brush too thick...

I guided an archery elk hunt last week and it had everything. A shooter bull at 25 yards on the first night that didn't work out. Slow days where bulls ignored every call. A last-night shot under 20 yards on a bull that was found three days later, 1,300 yards away, with a bear on top of him.

This is an uncut coffee with Cliff recap. We get into early rut bull behavior in the first half of September, why you need to practice shooting from the edges of your setup radius, and how one blown opportunity can wreck the...

 Most guys don't quit a backcountry hunt because the area sucked. They quit because they're in a calorie deficit, they haven't slept, and they blew their anaerobic tank on day one. After decades of guiding, outfitting, and packing hunters into wilderness areas, this is the physiology behind the urge to quit and the three prescriptions that fix it.

In this episode:

Why the first two to three days are learning days, and why quitting at 50% means giving up 80–90% of your real opportunity

The 72-hour wall: how appetite decline at altitude drives muscle glycogen and...

Brian Barney has been hunting elk on Montana public land for 25 years. He's called in over 100 bulls. Yet, years ago he left his elk calls in the truck and never looked back.

This conversation is about the spot and stalk system Brian has built that kills a quality six-point bull nearly every season on OTC public land. We cover how he made the transition from calling to full commitment to spot and stalk, what he calls "coyoting the herd" or shadowing, staying 100 to 300 yards back, taking what the elk give you, and looking for the chink in...

Most elk hunters are either struggling with their diaphragm or over-relying on it. Cliff and Jim break down three non-vocal sounds that are easy to make, highly realistic, and will set you apart from every other caller in the woods.

The three sounds: raking (the easiest elk call anyone can learn in five minutes), huffing (what close-range bulls do constantly that almost no one imitates), and glunking (the weird one that most hunters don't even know elk make). Jim and Cliff demonstrate each one and break down exactly how to produce it in the field.

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James Nash is back, and this one is all elk. We get into why calling is the most overused tool in the elk woods, why your setup is doing 99% of the work, and how to think about wind, scent, and terrain from the bull's side of the equation instead of your own.

00:00 The patience game
00:52 Africa film and honest footage
04:52 99 peanuts on setup
06:49 Calling is just a nudge
11:42 Wind before everything else
15:59 The downwind myth
24:23 What's in it for the bull
28:18 Buttonhook and straggler bulls
34:52 Building the archery setup<...

Three of us sat down after four days in the field. Cade, Cliff and Ryan (a student who just came off the elk class) and got into the small stuff that actually separates hunters who kill from hunters who don't. Not tactics you can read in an article. The judgment calls. When to move fast, when to sit down and wait, how much country you're actually willing to cross, and how much of your own hunting style you should be fighting versus leaning into.

Ryan's primarily an archer with real backcountry experience and that's most of what...

Over the last two months I put 40 hunters through live elk training in the field. Not lectures. Real stalks, real glassing, real archery setups that run two or three hours. The same three failures showed up over and over, and every one of them traces back to the flood of content hunters are drowning in right now.

This isn't an anti-content rant. There are hundreds of skill videos on this channel and you need that baseline. The problem is what happens when guys try to apply every framework at once: analysis paralysis, decision fatigue. I break down...

I sit down with Corey Knowlton, one of the most experienced international hunters alive, to talk elephant hunting, North American hunting and double rifles. From there we dig into the Jim Shockey era of hunting TV, why North American trophy hunting opportunity is never coming back, and why a $30,000 archery elk hunt makes almost no sense when you look at what that money buys in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, or Tanzania.

In this episode:
Why it's easy to win the elephant argument logically — and impossible emotionally
The Jim Shockey years: how those shows actually got made

Evan Koster has guided archery elk hunts in Colorado's Flat Tops for over a decade. This conversation covers everything that actually matters going into an archery elk season — and plenty of what hunters think matters that doesn't.

Colorado is in a historic drought, and Evan breaks down what that means for where elk will be in September — it's not about elevation, it's about feed quality, and aspens are the answer. From there we get into how to search unknown country efficiently, why elevation and trailhead distance are myths that kill more hunts than help them, and Evan's coun...

We explain suppressors for the hunting use cases, from basic concepts to advanced.

Most hunters obsess over decibels and a do-it-all can they move between rifles. This conversation makes the case that they've got it backwards — that length is the real king of a hunting suppressor, that the published sound numbers are mostly unreliable, and that a suppressor belongs to one rifle. We get into the engineering, the failure modes, and where this fast-moving market is actually headed.

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You almost always have a rock-solid rear rest on your body — and most hunters never use it. Cliff sits down with Mike from Tricer to break it down.

This one gets into the weeds on glassing tripods vs. shooting tripods, stabilized binos vs. tripod-mounted glass, reading bullet trace, and the simple rear-rest tricks (a puffy jacket, your pack, even your bino harness) that turn a wobbly hold into a locked-in shot.

In this episode:
Why a tripod forces systematic glassing — and why stabilized binos may cost you animals
Filming every shot: recovering wounded game...

Brian Gilroy runs Wildlife Partners, the largest exotic animal breeding operation in North America and a Cape buffalo herd that didn't exist in private hands a decade ago. He's also hunted Dall sheep in remote Alaska, muskox on Nunivak Island, and elk in New Mexico. This episode is a reality check on how the hunting industry actually works and why the free-range vs. high-fence moral war is mostly mythology from Brian's perspective.

Texas is now on South Africa's radar as a direct competitor. Same animals, same large high-fence model, no 13-hour flight, five-star lodges, and populations of...

A 36-season Colorado wilderness outfitter, Scott Limmer, doesn't sugarcoat it: the new 50%-random draw is about to blow up point inflation and gut the predictability that made Colorado elk hunting plannable. We get into that, the big-bull reality most hunters won't admit, and a stack of Africa stories you won't hear anywhere else.

In this episode:
Why the 2028 draw overhaul tripled the exact point inflation it was meant to fix
The hard truth about how giant public-land bulls actually get killed
Glassing a burn, calling pressure, and why elk go nocturnal
Getting ambushed...

AG makes the most expensive and strongest flip-flops on earth. Sounds insane, but I like his business. This is a conversation about authentic materials, the economics of making something real, why almost everything in your life is fake, and what happens when an environmental group comes after you with a campaign.

AG is the founder of Toehold, a Las Vegas-based company that sources elephant, hippo, crocodile, shark, and zebra hides — old-world vegetable-tanned leather, made in America, by hand. We get into the murder hides specifically: a bull elephant called the Red Ghost, a man-eating croc, and hippos th...

 A decade-plus of guiding off horses and mules, distilled into a Q&A with Vince who is going on his first horseback elk hunt. Cliff doesn't sugarcoat it: horses are always a cost, sometimes a massive advantage, and never the shortcut people think they are. 

In this episode: 

Brian Poor, a former Marine scout sniper and SWAT instructor who now teaches Western hunters through Gunwerks sat down with me to break down what actually matters when an animal gives you an opportunity at distance.

In this episode:

Joel Turner spent 11 years as a SWAT sniper instructor before becoming one of the most well known instructors in the hunting world. His take on why hunters miss is unlike anything you've heard — and it applies equally to archery and rifle.

We start with how bullets actually kill. From there we get into the pre-ignition flinch... why there's no such thing as a subconscious override of the central nervous system, what open loop vs. closed loop trigger press actually means, and why the fix isn't mechanics. The fix is speech. Joel's core argument: the skill is not in...

Colorado's Parks and Wildlife Commission now has zero experienced big game hunters on it. The chair is a former Humane Society attorney who spent his career suing game agencies. Six of ten commissioners voted to impose a commercial fur ban that their own agency and director recommended against — in writing — with five expert witnesses and a hundred years of combined expertise. Dan Gates was in every one of those meetings.

Dan Gates runs Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management and has been on the front lines of every major Colorado hunting fight for eight years — Proposition 127, Ordinance 308, wolf reintr...

Evan Koster just got back from seven days of public land hunting in New Zealand — no helicopter, no lodge, no estate stags. He hunted tahr in a glacial valley and red stag in the Canterbury High Country with guide Jurgen, carrying everything on his back and doing 5,000 vertical feet of gain literally the day he got off the plane. This conversation is the honest version of New Zealand hunting.

We cover what the terrain actually looks like, why the tussock country and scrub edge are the game zone, how red stag compare to elk (less gregarious, more vo...

Craig Doria spent 30 years in Africa as a professional hunter in addition to running two anti-poaching operations in Zambia and Tanzania. He's also just written Bateleur, a suspense thriller built on all of it.
 
We cover what poaching actually looks like from the inside: the subsistence guy with a muzzleloader trying to feed his kids, the 150-snare line bisecting the wildebeest migration corridor, the zebra hide operation running skins through a cattle tannery and across borders, and the ivory networks.

From there we get into buffalo hunting (Craig's pick for the best hunting still available — hun...

Cliff sits down for a live Q&A and answers two hours of questions from the audience and membership group — recoil and cartridge selection for elk, the case for a "two-rifle" system (a low-recoil trainer and a hunting rifle), why most North American hunters under-rate predator hunting, how to scout migration corridors in May and June for fall success, the realities of bow hunting in Africa, moon phase myths, and a long, honest answer on why he hunts at all.

In this episode:

Most hunters think wolves can be managed like any other predator. The data says otherwise. In this episode, I sit down with Justin Webb, founder of the Foundation for Wildlife Management (F4WM), to dig into the unfiltered reality of wolf control in the West... what works, what doesn't, and why the "predator-prey balance" we all learned as kids isn't how this actually plays out on the landscape.

In this episode:

In this episode, Jurgen Schwanecke and Cliff break down how hunting in New Zealand actually works, from public land access to species like tahr and chamois, and what makes it so different from hunting in the U.S. We also get into the realities—terrain, weather, physical demands, and why success isn’t guaranteed just because opportunity exists.

Jurgen also talks about culling work and the skills that come from shooting a high volume of animals in real-world conditions.

00:00 — Why New Zealand Might Be the Best Hunting Country
01:24 — How New Zealand Got Its Game Animals...

 Most reticles are built for perfect conditions… but hunting rarely gives you that.

In this episode, I sit down with Thomas to break down what actually matters when it’s time to shoot. We get into reticle design, wind brackets, and why simplicity often beats complexity when things happen fast.

We talk about real-world scenarios—multiple animals, movement, communication breakdowns, and the kind of pressure that forces you to make decisions in seconds. That’s where most systems fall apart.

We also get into shooting moving animals, and even cold weather hunting—where your gear...

Most hunters think they understand shot placement and bullet performance—but the reality is very different.

In this episode, we break down what actually kills animals, from bullet construction to impact velocity to shot placement. This isn’t theory—it’s based on thousands of animals, real-world testing, and hard lessons learned in the field with Dr. Ashby.

Chapter 1 – Bullet Myths vs Reality (00:00)
Chapter 2 – Why Faster Bullets Don’t Penetrate (12:00)
Chapter 3 – Real-World Bullet Testing Results (25:00)
Chapter 4 – What Actually Kills Animals (30:00)
Chapter 5 – Bullet Construction vs Caliber (49:00)
Chapter 6 – The Shot Placement Problem (1:39:30)
Chapter 7 – Why Hu...

Cape Buffalo hunting is nothing like elk or deer hunting—In this episode, we break down a real hunt where we tracked multiple Cape Buffalo through thick bush, lost them, picked them back up, and ended up surrounded. 

We also cover gear setups, shot placement, what happens when a buffalo decides to charge, and the reality of planning an African hunt—from rifles to cost to what to expect.

If you’ve ever thought about hunting Africa, this is the unfiltered version of what it’s actually like.

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Colorado’s draw system is changing, point creep is accelerating, and hunters need to rethink their strategy for elk, sheep, goat, and moose in the coming years.

In this episode, Cliff sits down with Jimmy Oswald to break down the current outlook for Colorado hunting ahead of the upcoming draw. They start by discussing Colorado’s unusually dry winter and what historically low snowpack could mean for wildlife, habitat conditions, and the upcoming hunting season. While winter conditions matter, they explain why summer moisture and fire season will ultimately have a bigger impact on elk behavior and hunt...

Colorado’s draw system is changing, point creep is accelerating, and hunters need to rethink their strategy for elk, sheep, goat, and moose in the coming years.

In this episode, Cliff sits down with Jimmy Oswald to break down the current outlook for Colorado hunting ahead of the upcoming draw. They start by discussing Colorado’s unusually dry winter and what historically low snowpack could mean for wildlife, habitat conditions, and the upcoming hunting season. While winter conditions matter, they explain why summer moisture and fire season will ultimately have a bigger impact on elk behavior and hunt...

Why do Tikka rifles keep working when others choke in snow, dirt, and real hunting conditions?

In this episode, I sit down with Jared Smethurst from Beretta to break down the mechanical and manufacturing reasons behind Tikka and Sako reliability. We cover action design, bolt tolerances, primary extraction, magazine systems, safety design, cold hammer forged barrels, and why some modern cartridges—especially PRCs—can introduce feeding issues.

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This conversation with Briggs Pittman breaks down what actually kills elk on hard, public land hunts. Not theory, not gear hype, but decision-making, preparation, and execution.

Briggs and Cliff cover why smelling elk is a non-negotiable stop, how elite hunters manage time in the woods, why mindset mathematically affects success, and how rifle hunters should think more like bow hunters. They dive deep into rifle setup, bipod selection, shooting positions, dry fire training, backpack weight discipline, food strategy, and why most hunters quietly sabotage themselves long before they miss a shot.

Briggs on Instagram https...

This episode breaks down how elk actually respond to hunting pressure and why most hunters misunderstand where mature bulls survive once seasons open.

Cliff talks with a self-taught elk hunter, Dan Vinson, who learned the hard way, without mentors or shortcuts. The conversation centers on pressure, access, and human behavior, not elevation gain or how far someone is willing to hike. Elk do not disappear when pressure increases. They compress into small, unattractive pockets where hunters walk through but never slow down enough to hunt.

The episode also covers bivy hunting, decision-making under uncertainty, and...