Prairie Dogs, Lead-Free, and Starting Over With Experience
The Alturas area in northeastern California is not what most people picture when they think of this state. No traffic. No crowds. Flat ground stretching to distant ridgelines, sagebrush, wind, and colonies of prairie dogs that have been there longer than anyone can remember. You set up before dawn, dial in your dope, and wait for the light.
This is varmint shooting. And for a long time, it was one of the most straightforward things we did out here.
Then California decided to make it complicated.
What Varminting Actually Is
Before I get into the law, it is worth saying clearly what this is and why it matters.
Prairie dog colonies cause real damage to rangeland. Their burrows break legs on livestock, destroy pasture, and undermine fence lines. Farmers deal with this. Population management is not a sport wrapped in hunting language. It is a practical necessity, and hunters who travel to do it are providing a genuine service while getting some of the most technically demanding rifle work available anywhere.
At distances of 300, 400, 500 yards and beyond, a small error in reading wind or calculating drop is immediately visible. There is no hiding a miss at that distance. Varmint shooting builds real skills: reading mirage, understanding bullet drop across cartridges, learning how wind behaves differently at 200 yards than at 400. It sharpens a shooter in ways that punching paper at a static range simply cannot replicate.
People used to drive in from Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Utah. The Alturas area had a community around it. Shooters comparing notes on cartridges, swapping load data, watching each other’s calls on the wind. That kind of informal knowledge transfer is irreplaceable.
A lot of those people stopped coming when California changed the law.
When the Law Changed
California’s lead ammunition ban, fully in effect for hunting by 2019, hit varmint shooting harder than almost any other discipline.
Lead-core bullets at high velocity on small targets at long distances was the formula that made cartridges like the 22-250 and the 204 Ruger so effective. Light, fast, frangible projectiles that performed exactly as designed. Reloaders had years of data. Charges were refined to the tenth of a grain. Brass was prepped, trimmed, sorted by weight. It was not just shooting. It was craft built over seasons.
Copper and copper alloy bullets behave differently. They are harder, longer for the same weight, and they require faster twist rates to stabilize properly. A barrel optimized for lead-core 55 grain bullets in 223 Remington may not stabilize a 55 grain copper bullet of the same nominal weight because the copper version is physically longer and needs more spin.
So the law did not just change the bullet. It changed the rifle for some of us.
My 22-250 was a particular casualty. Long sessions at the reloading bench, longer sessions at the range, and genuine frustration at the results. That cartridge at high velocity with lead-free projectiles never came back to where it had been. I eventually moved it out of the varminting role entirely and repurposed it for coyote in Nevada where lead restrictions do not apply. The load I had built over years still works fine there. The rifle did not fail. The situation changed around it.
The 204 Ruger took serious work. The 22 Hornet came back to performance with Barnes Varmint Grenade copper projectiles after enough development time. The 223 Remington, being the most widely supported cartridge in the country, had the most lead-free options available and adapted the most cleanly.
The 22 LR and 17 HMR at shorter ranges meant different solutions entirely. The 22 LR got a different rifle. The 17 HMR moved to lead-free factory ammunition.
Every single one of those changes cost time, money, and range sessions that produced more questions than answers before they produced results.
Starting Over, But Not From Zero
Here is the thing about doing all of this with twenty years of reloading experience behind you.
It is not the same as starting over.
When a new shooter runs into a copper bullet that groups inconsistently, they are dealing with an unknown. They do not know if the problem is the bullet, the powder, the seating depth, the crimp, the twist rate, or something in the brass. Everything is a variable and there is no framework for narrowing it down.
When I ran into the same problem, I already had that framework. I knew how to isolate variables. I knew what to change first and what to leave alone. I knew when a load was showing early signs of promise and when to abandon a direction entirely. The process was frustrating but it was not blind.
There is a difference between a student solving a problem and a researcher solving a problem. The student works through the curriculum in sequence. The researcher already knows the curriculum and is looking for something the textbook has not covered yet. That shift in role is real. It does not make the work easy, but it makes the work purposeful.
I also noticed that some assumptions I had carried for years needed to be re-examined. Lead-free projectiles forced me to look at twist rate more carefully than I ever had before, because suddenly it was the deciding variable in ways it had not been previously. That knowledge did not exist as clearly in my mind before the law changed. I have it now.
A Phone Call From the Front
One afternoon during a session at Alturas, my phone rang. It was Sergiy, callsign HuntMaster, calling from the front lines of the war in Ukraine.
He was asking about ballistics. We gave him what we had: distance, velocity, ballistic coefficient on the projectiles we were running. He fed the data into his ballistic calculator, gave us back the corrections, and Roman, standing next to me in that California field, made the shot.
We were standing in a California field shooting prairie dogs. He was in a war. The same physics, the same math, the same fundamental problem of putting a projectile where you intend it to go at distance.
The moment landed differently than I expected. Not because of the contrast, though that was striking. Because of what it said about the knowledge itself. HuntMaster did not use technology instead of skill. He used technology to apply skill faster and more precisely. The ballistic calculator is not a replacement for understanding wind, reading conditions, knowing your cartridge. It is a tool that accelerates the application of things you already know.
Same as it always was. Email did not replace thought. It just moved the letter faster.
Where We Are Now
The 223 Remington is still the workhorse. Widest selection of lead-free projectiles, most reloading data available, fastest path back to performance after the transition.
The 22 Hornet with the Barnes Varmint Grenade earned its place back after real development work. It is a pleasant cartridge at closer ranges and the copper frangible bullet performs well on small targets.
The 204 Ruger took the longest and cost the most in components and time, but it is running well now. That cartridge at its best velocity with the right lead-free projectile is genuinely impressive work at distance.
I am watching the 22 ARC. A friend has been on me to take a serious look at it and he is not someone who pushes cartridges without a reason. The architecture is interesting and the lead-free options coming to market are worth evaluating on paper before committing to glass and brass.
The Alturas area is still there. The prairie dogs are still there. Fewer out-of-state trucks in the parking area than there used to be, which is a real loss, for the community and for the farmers who benefit from the work. That frustration is legitimate and it is not going away.
But we adapted. We did the work. We know our cartridges better now than we did before, which is a strange thing to say about a process driven entirely by an outside restriction.
California has a way of teaching you things you did not ask to learn.
Comments are closed.