As the bull fed toward the timber I was running out of time, racing the rising sun that would send the elk into his daybed like Dracula returning to his coffin. The only shot he offered me was an extreme quartering away angle that would require my bullet to penetrate a couple feet of mature wapiti, including a stomach full of masticated and digesting food. No simple task but impossible for the bullet I was shooting and I resigned myself to a long day’s wait to see if the bull would feed out into the open during the waning hours of the day and offer me a less severe angle.
That scenario was several years back and it changed my mind about bullet performance on large, heavily built animals like mature, trophy, bull elk. I’ve since begun loading and shooting monolithic copper bullets when I’m headed into a high stakes hunt where I need to be able to capitalize on any chance I’m given.
The Hornady CX replaces and upstages the company’s tried and true GMX monolithic copper bullet and does so by taking advantage of the latest advancements in bullet design like Hornady’s heat shield tip and optimum groove geometry making the CX the best performing, most accurate monolithic bullet the company has created. Not to mention it’s “California compliant” meaning you can use it wherever you need a lead free projectile for hunting.
Now to the meat and antlers of the CX… Hornady offers the new CX bullets in 6mm, 25, 6.5mm, 270, 7mm, 30, 338 and 375 calibers. Every offering is either light or medium for caliber in weight. For example, 139 and 150 grains in 7mm. The reason for this is that the CX retains 95%+ of its weight for deep, straight-line penetration. Solid copper bullets are also long for their weight so a 150 grain 7mm CX will roughly be the same length as a 175 grain Hornady ELD-X. Therefore, choosing a light for caliber CX and pushing it as fast as accurately possible will provide the best results, unless you’re shooting them into a very large and/or dense animal where the bullet will meet with sufficient resistance to operate within its performance spectrum.
In short, Hornady’s CX bullets are highly accurate, deep penetrating bullets designed to take a wide variety of animals from antelope and deer to elk and big moose or big bears. When you need a bullet that is going to penetrate deep and destroy tissue across a wide array of hunting scenarios and ranges the Hornady CX will get the job done. I wish I’d had them loaded up on that cold October morning, if I had that bull would have gone home with me instead of slipping away unscathed.
