---
title: Cold Bore Personal Best 2,958 yards!
description: Witness Rusty Newton's remarkable 2,958-yard cold bore shot, exploring the precision of his rifle, ammunition, and the importance of practice.
---

<https://blog.xringprecision.com/newt_tips>

# [Cold Bore Personal Best 2,958 yards!](https://blog.xringprecision.com/newt_tips/record-cold-bore-impact-2958)

 Written by [NEWT](https://blog.xringprecision.com/newt_tips/author/newt) | Aug 26, 2026, 9:47:31 PM

# 2,958 Yards, First Round, From a Cold Bore: Rusty Newton on the Shot Nobody Can Warm Up For

*We caught up with Rusty Newton after his first-round cold bore impact at 2,958 yards — 1.68 miles — recorded live at an ELR Alliance sanctioned match. We talked rifle, cartridge, ammunition, and the elevation problem that made the shot more dificult than it needed to be.*

Let's be precise about what happened, because precision is the whole point out here.

Cold bore means the rifle sat cold and the shooter sat cold. No warm-up. No sighter rounds to walk in the shot. The first round of the day goes downrange at a 36-inch square plate, in this case, **2,958 yards** away — call it 1.68 miles, or about the distance you'd drive to the good coffee place.

Rusty Newton hit it. First round. The whole thing went out on the ELR Alliance live feed as it happened, in front of a firing line full of people who understand exactly how hard that is.

For the record — and Rusty would say this before I could — the sanctioned three-shot cold bore world record still belongs to **Chris Schmidt at 2,874 yards**. Rusty's second round went just off the edge of the plate. What's sitting here is a first-round cold bore impact 84 yards past the standing record distance, which is its own kind of remarkable!

I asked him how it came together.

## Q: Start with the rifle.

**Rusty:** Chambered in **33XC** — .338 caliber. It's a purpose-built extreme long range cartridge and it earns its keep past two miles the way nothing in the old .338 family really does. Good ballistic coefficient downrange, and it stays honest through the transonic window, which is where most cartridges start telling you lies.

**Newt:** That transonic point is worth pausing on. Somewhere out past a mile, depending on muzzle velocity, the bullet slows through the sound barrier, and if it isn't stable going in, it isn't accurate coming out. Half of cartridge selection at this distance is really about buying yourself a stable arrival, not a fast departure.

## Q: And the ammunition?

**Rusty:** Hand loaded **Berger 245-grain OTM in Lapua brass with Vihtavuori powder.**

**Newt:** Hand loaded is the only answer at this range, and I'll leave the formula where it belongs — in Rusty's book. Every barrel is its own animal, and a load worked up for each rifle should have a safe starting load.

## Q: Conditions?

**Rusty:** Sunny, 85F degrees, wind was 8-10mph.

**Newt:** Good call. Not dead calm, but not extreme.

## Q: Let's talk optics, because this is where it got interesting.

**Rusty:** Nightforce riflescope. The problem at 2,958 is that you run out of elevation before the target runs out of distance. I had to dial almost all the elevation the scope had and hold **5 mils** over the plate to get the bullet there.

**Newt:** Read that again, because it's the most important sentence in this interview.

He was not aiming at the target. He was aiming at a patch of empty sky five mils above the target. The center of the reticle is off the plate. You are holding on hash marks in the scope and trusting the math.

That works — obviously it works, the steel rang — but it costs you. Every mil you hold instead of dial is a mil of precision you're having to decrease magnifiation in the scope to see the correct hash mark, and at 1.68 miles you need all the magnification you can get without inducing mirage.

## Q: Would you run it the same way again?

**Rusty:** No. I'd run a **Reach-R**. If I'd had the prism on it, I'd have had the elevation to put the crosshair *on center* , take the hold out of the equation entirely and keep the much needed magnification.

**Newt:** And that's the honest version of the pitch, so I'm not going to dress it up. An elevation prism doesn't make you a better shooter. It gives you back the ability to put the center of the reticle on the target — which sounds like a small thing right up until you're holding 5, 10 or 15+ mils into blank sky with the whole line watching.

## Q: You've been on this plate before. 2,298 yards, cold bore, three for three.

**Rusty:** Yes in 2020. The rules were more strict back then. You and your spotter had to be cold.

**Newt:** It was harder then. Rusty said it plainly and he's right — the old format nobody on the two man team had previous knowledge of the 1st shot. I'll admit I'm sentimental about it.

An ELR Alliance sanctioned match now records the entire event, which means every claim comes with footage, and every record comes with a firing line full of people who'd have said something if it hadn't gone the way it went.

## Newt's Bench Tip

Here's what I want you to take from a 2,958-yard first-round impact.

The shot was actually made before the shot was taken. It was made in every cold session where Rusty put one round downrange first thing, wrote down what it did, and kept the number whether he liked it or not. A well-kept logbook is critical in making shots like these.

You don't need a mile and a half to practice this. Next range trip: before you touch anything else, take one shot. Record the velocity. Then go shoot your session. Do that for a season and you'll know something about your rifle that most shooters never learn — what it does cold, which is the only condition that ever actually matters when it counts.

**Cold bore is a habit, not an event.**

*— Newt*

**Congratulations to Rusty Newton, and to the ELR Alliance crew, along with LongShot Cameras, who put it on the live feed.**

[How to Install a R](https://blog.xringprecision.com/newt_tips/installing-your-reach_r-properly)EACHR Prism

[View full post](https://blog.xringprecision.com/newt_tips/record-cold-bore-impact-2958)

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