As crazy as it sounds, the results speak for themselves. Here is the author's grizzly taken with a single shot from a .223 Wylde AR-15.
August 22, 2024
By Garth Morgan
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If you’d told me four years ago that I’d be sitting in the woods near my home in Alaska, hoping for a big-boar grizzly to come to bait, and planning to take it with an ultra-light AR rifle chambered in .223 Wylde, I wouldn’t have dismissed it out of hand. If you knew me, you’d understand. However, I definitely would have had my doubts. Yet, that’s exactly where I found myself sitting in the fading light in a spruce forest, listening to mosquitoes, red squirrels and gray jays, waiting for the boar we’d caught on the game camera a couple of days prior with that exact rifle sitting next to me. Hours passed and nothing bigger than a magpie stirred. I’d already decided to call it and head home at 9:30, and that time was getting close. It was looking like today wasn’t going to be the day to test this idea. You might be wondering how this crazy idea of hunting a grizzly with a heavy-for-caliber .223 Wylde came about in the first place, but I really can’t take credit for that part. For a couple of years, I’d been following an online discussion of guys using the .223 Rem. with heavy-for-caliber match bullets for big game up to and including elk. On the surface, that sounds crazy at worst and irresponsible at best. The conversation started with far more naysayers than proponents. However, as time went on and more people tried it, and posted pictures of terminal performance, including through elk shoulders, on par with much larger chamberings, the naysayer-to-proponent ratio shifted dramatically. The results speak for themselves.
While few manufacturers will encourage hunting with match bullets, they are often surprisingly effective on big and small game. Although interesting, this .223 information was mostly academic to me. For years, my go-to hunting rifle was my sub-five-pound (bare rifle), sub-MOA Kimber Montana chambered in .308 Winchester. It did everything I asked and more. It appeared a .223 could work on the surface, but I knew from years of experience that my .308 did work, so why change it? Well, steep mountains can be highly convincing. Where I live, hike and hunt, slopes are often closer to vertical than horizontal. I’d been lightening gear for years, including my rifles, but I’m always looking for ways to lighten things further, including my rifles, and the AR platform is easy to make super light. I eventually landed on the Solo 300 website when working on my super-light AR build. The Solo 300 is an AR upper designed specifically as a straight-pull repeater with no gas system. My first Solo build was a 300 HAM’R, built with a Wilson Combat barrel. The bare rifle weighed a mere three pounds, eight ounces and was every bit as accurate as my Kimber Montana. The little HAM’R has performed admirably, cleanly taking black bear, deer, moose and even grizzly, but my quest for lighter gear hadn’t ended. I thought about ways to build an even lighter version of the Solo and still have a 300-plus-yard effective range on game. That online discussion about the .223? It wasn’t just academic anymore.
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A couple of months later, I shouldered a just-completed three pound, one ounce .223 Wylde for the first time, and frankly, it was mind blowing. It was so light it felt like a BB gun. I started to refer to it as the “Red Ryder.” A couple of weeks later, the rifle lay on my pack high on an alpine slope, with a boar black bear at 350 yards in the scope. Immediately following my shot, I heard the hit, and in seconds the boar was tumbling down the mountain, hanging up in some thick willows about 100 yards below. The little .223 worked as advertised. The shot, placed exactly as I would have with my .308, killed just like my .308 would have, but with less recoil and almost two pounds less to carry up that mountain. What’s more, in my 30 years of hunting bears in Alaska, generally harvesting at least two bears per year, that was the second longest shot I’ve taken, and it killed so fast there was no time for a follow up shot.
Next stop, Kodiak Island The author's fine Sitka Blacktail deer taken at nearly 300 yards with a .223. He noted that the trauma is roughly equal to that of a .308 Win. he'd used in the past. My .223 Red Ryder continued to perform admirably on a Sitka Blacktail hunt on Kodiak. Of three bucks harvested, two were the longest shots I’ve taken on Sitka Blacktail at 293 and a bit over 300 yards. All three bucks, two shot broadside through the lungs and one hard quartering, dropped at the shot, and other than tumbling down mountain slopes, they never took a step. I go to Kodiak every year, and of the many bucks I’ve taken with my .308 and .30-‘06, only a few have dropped the same way, but never three in a row. On field dressing the deer, the internal damage was essentially indistinguishable from what I typically see from my .30-caliber rifles. This little .223 was really doing the job and continued to on three more deer in the lower 48. So, what’s the magic? The bullet that gets most of the attention for allowing the .223 to “hit above its weight” is the Sierra 77-grain Tipped Match King , and that’s what I used on the black bear and deer mentioned above. A lot of readers might be thinking, “But match bullets aren’t for hunting.” I won’t belabor the point here, but trust me, some match bullets are fantastic hunting bullets, penetrating adequately, expanding violently and causing a tremendous amount of internal damage to everything in their path, and even not in their path. For example, one of the bucks I shot broadside on Kodiak had an additional hole upwards through his spine, well above the bullet’s path, shot at over 300 yards, with a 223. Although I’ve yet to try them, other bullets are reported to perform similarly, including the 73-,75-,80- and 88-grain Hornady ELD-Match bullets and the 75-grain Speer Gold Dot. The 77-gr. TMK, 73-gr. ELD-M and 75-gr. Gold Dot are designed to work within AR magazine length constraints. All of those mentioned will work in bolt rifles provided there’s enough magazine length. You’ll want at least a 1:8-inch twist, and better still, a 1:7-inch for the longest of the bunch.
More examples of trauma from a .223 on a Blacktail deer. Note the additional wound channel exiting through the upper back. What’s the Catch? If you’re looking for bullets that reliably provide a large exit on broadside shots, these may not provide that for you, especially on larger animals. Is that a problem? Well, maybe, or maybe not. Bullets do their work inside the animal, and these do that job exceedingly well. A bullet design that leans toward deeper penetration and exits will provide a better chance of a blood trail, but it also may do less damage inside the animal. I guess there’s no free lunch in this respect. Okay, but, a Grizzly with a .223? One of my reasons for trying this was the question a lot of people seem to have. “What about hunting around Grizzlies/Brown Bears with a 223?” That sounds like a bad idea. What if you must shoot a bear in self-defense? Admittedly, that’s a reasonable question. (I know guys that think my .308 is too light to hunt Kodiak, for the same reason). After my experience with the 77-gr. TMK and its terminal performance, I had exactly zero doubt it will kill a grizzly with a correctly placed broadside shot. I’ve killed a lot of bears, and as I say, hit ‘em right, and they’re not tough. Hit ‘em wrong, and they are. The bullet and its placement are the key. But what would happen if you had to take a frontal shot on a bear with that .223? Well, I was hoping to answer that question, with a sample of one anyway.
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Last Call There are many heavy-for-caliber bullets that would work well for hunting, but the author prefers the Sierra 77-grain Tipped Match King. I looked at the time and the witching hour had come. It was 9:30 and no bear. It was time to call it a night, but for some reason I decided to give it two more minutes. As fate would have it, one minute and 50 seconds later, a brown figure appeared in the thick spruce trees, big shoulders rolling as he moved, swaying confidently toward the bait, moving like only grizzlies move. I gave a low grunt to get him to look my way and face me. He didn’t turn fully to me, but he gave me hard quartering to shot...good enough. I placed the crosshairs on the point of his shoulder and sent a 77-grain Tipped Match King 50 yards downrange. The boar roared, spun and disappeared into the thick spruce and alders. I listened, and in a short time heard the familiar “death moans” of a bear. Upon finding the dead bear, I noted he ran to and died in exactly the same spot another grizzly had the previous year. That one I helped a friend recover. That bear was shot broadside through the lungs with a .338 Winchester Magnum. A better shot angle from a much larger rifle, but identical results in killing and similar terminal performance. Hmm. With this limited experience, I’m certainly not trying to argue that the .223 is the be-all-end-all cartridge for big game, especially dangerous game. What I can say is that up to this point, it has been far more effective than I would have ever imagined. What’s more, one can train with a .223-chambered rifle practically indefinitely without breaking the bank. I currently have a sub-three-pound .223 Wylde Solo 300 rifle in the works, and moose season opens in three weeks. I’ll keep you posted.
