The first time I ever laid eyes on a Boyds hardwood stock, I somehow knew it wouldn’t be the last time. I was at our Idaho deer camp in Atlanta, Idaho the “Gateway to the Sawtooth Wilderness” when the newest member of the camp, Jared Crapo of Rigby, Idaho opened his truck and brought his rifle out, getting ready to make his first hunt. My jaw literally dropped when I saw the beautiful laminated hardwood pattern of his rifle’s thumbhole design stock, which also had a high and wide cheek piece with a top edge that ran as straight as a ramp to his scope’s eyepiece. Let’s face it, in this day and age real wood stocks on rifles and shotguns are almost as rare as 220 Class mule deer bucks. Black synthetic stocks dominate the firearms industry, whereas I actually grew up in an era when synthetic stocks didn’t even exist, and real hunting rifles and shotguns were made from “wood and steel.”
I really didn’t know Jared at all. He was a friend of a friend of one of our camp’s regulars, and I had only met him about an hour before that morning when he had first arrived in camp. But that Boyds stock of his, mounted solid as a rock on his Ruger M77 300 Winchester Short Magnum, was an instant ice breaker, and when he told me that he had stocked the rifle with it in order to try and cut down on the gun’s uncomfortable recoil, and that it had worked, an instant kinship was born between us. You see, my hunting rifle, a Ruger M77 in .270 Winchester with a synthetic stock, also had a terrible recoil problem which I was trying to solve. I say “had” because it doesn’t any longer. It now wears a beautiful new Boyds hardwood replacement stock, as does another rifle of mine, a Savage in .300 Winchester Magnum. And I couldn’t be any happier with both of them! They are a dream to carry, a dream to shoot, and absolutely beautiful to look at!
