A doe stepped from a cedar thicket at the bottom of a deep ravine and my heart skipped a beat. In seconds a heavy bodied brute of a beast followed and my binoculars quickly captures a heavy rack with multiple points. The doe continued up the other side of the coulee with the buck shagging 30 yards behind. Using my Bushnell range-finding binoculars, I calibrated the buck to be 331 yards, a makeable shot with the Savage Model 16 chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor, yet the deer soon crested the ridge and dropped out of sight, providing the chance to halve the distance with a hasty stalk.
I’m hunting in the Dakota’s where a rain-less fall had the bare earth as crunchy as egg shells, so I had to move quickly, yet soft-shoe to prevent spooking the rutting deer. I had my eye on a small bushy knoll and believed if I could get to that point, I could wait out the buck and get a shot. Just as I reached the shooting cover I saw the buck through the tall grass and immediately went prone, careful to part the weeds in front of the muzzle. The buck was walking up hill, slightly quartering away so I settled the cross-hairs on the left flank, squeezed, and dropped the buck dead in its tracks. I quickly chambered another round, yet at 125 yards, the buck seemed to be stone dead… and indeed it was.
Meet the 6.5 Creedmoor-
The never-ending debate between fans of the 30-06 Winchester and the .270 Winchester may have a new contender for mid-size game- the 6.5 Creedmoor which was developed and engineered for long range accuracy. Not a necked down version of another cartridge, it was built from scratch to perform. Luckily, I had the privilege of hunting with Jacob Burns, a Product Development Engineer for Federal Premium Ammunition and the brains behind the new 6.5 Fusion cartridge. Like riding with Henry Ford in the First Model T, I was eager to hear about the engineering behind the new product. “It’s a round that’s been gaining lots of popularity and Federal Premium worked to manufacture the brass internally and that first offering is the 6.5 in Fusion which provides more of a long range solution for medium size game like deer. The Fusion line was the perfect fit because the bullet is plated and there is no jacket-core separation. The bullets are really good at penetrating and initiating expansion which develops wound cavities capable of dropping the animal where it’s stands.”
Although most whitetail deer are shot at ranges under 200 yards, many under 100, I asked about the effective range of this cartridge. Like having 500 horsepower under the hood, you rarely need that kind of energy, yet it’s comforting to know it’s available in an emergency. “We have ballistic gelatin upsets at 500 yards and get a similar bullet upset as you’d get at 100 yards so that you can be confident at shooting even past 500 yards,” Burns said. “At 500 yards, you are looking at 58 inches of drop, about the height of a buck whitetail deer.
Crunching the Numbers
The rifle I used on this hunt was the Savage Model 16, a gun I’ve used in other calibers and perfect favorite. To be honest, I was surprised, but delighted, to see my buck drop in its tracks, yet as Burns states above, it’s part of the engineering between the caliber and the Fusion cartridge performance. Here’s what you can expect from a 140-grain load in 6.5 Creedmoor:
Distance Muzzle 100 200 300 400
Velocity (fps) 2750 2546 2350 2164 1985
Energy (ft-lbs) 2351 2014 1717 1455 1225
As a long range cartridge, the 6.5 Creedmoor in the Fusion cartridge flies at nearly 2,000 fps at 400 yards and delivers well over 1,000 foot pounds of energy, the kind of performance that will exceed the vast majority of deer hunting circumstances. For more information, go to
