The .22 That Almost Made History: Six Hours as a Forward Spotter at the Extreme Long Range Edge of Rimfire Range

A forward spotter’s job is simple to describe and hard to do. You sit downrange, sometimes well downrange, and you use whatever sense is working best in the moment — your ears, your eyes, usually both — to figure out where a bullet landed, and you get that information back to the shooting team as clearly and quickly as you can. That’s it. That’s the whole job. And as my partner Scott Austin and I wrote in our book, The Nomad Rifleman’s Guide to Extreme Long Range Shooting Fun, the single most important skill a spotter can have isn’t sharp eyes or perfect hearing. It’s being a good communicator. Everything else is secondary.

On July 16, 2026, I, Shepard Humphries, spent six hours doing that job while three men I trust with my life shot .22 Long Rifle rounds over my head, trying to hit a steel target beyond 1,500 yards away. We were attempting to set a world record for the longest confirmed hit with a .22LR cartridge. We did not succeed. Chris Baxter continues his reign. This is the story of the day anyway, because in extreme long-range shooting, and probably in most worthwhile pursuits, the breakthrough moment is a small tip sitting on top of an enormous iceberg of unglamorous work, and somebody ought to write down what the iceberg actually looks like.

The Setup

The target was a piece of steel, 24 inches wide and 48 inches tall, angled at about 25 degrees with the top leaning away from the shooters. Seven yards closer to the shooters, and just slightly to the left of the target, sat my bunker: a 4×8 sheet of plywood on two stands, leaning at roughly 30 degrees. I sat inside it in a short camping chair with a two-way radio, for six hours, on a gently sloping hillside of Wyoming high desert at about 7,200 feet, scattered sagebrush all around, in a clearing maybe 20 yards across. I put the bunker to the left of the target rather than directly behind it because the plywood, even leaning, was tall enough to block the shooters’ view of the target entirely. In hindsight, lining it up precisely behind the target would have been better if I could have solved that visibility problem another way. About 25 yards to my left was my ATV , and 7 yards beyond the target was a bright red jacket I used to describe impact points, and the right a bright yellow raincoat.

Our shooting team was Scott Austin, our lead ballistician, Mike Demetris, his assistant, and Frank D Jennings, our shooter. Ammunition was Lapua, subsonic. Muzzle velocities averaged 1,104.4 fps across the day, ranging from a slowest of 1,082 fps to a fastest of 1,139 fps — a spread of 57 fps that, at this distance, matters a great deal.

What We Expected Going In

Scott and I had gamed this out before we ever loaded a round. When our team set the world record for longest confirmed rifle shot with a centerfire cartridge — 4.4 miles, back in 2022 — we made our first impact on the 69th shot. My own estimate going into that attempt had been somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 shots needed. Scott had guessed one in 300. We were both pleasantly surprised.

Going into this .22LR attempt, we assumed it would be considerably harder. Muzzle velocity variation and wind affect a subsonic .22 bullet far more, proportionally, than they affect a centerfire round at 4.4 miles. We genuinely doubted I’d even be able to hear the impacts well enough to be useful. My plan for the day reflected that pessimism: spend thirty minutes to an hour on the .22, let the team get discouraged, then regroup and warm up on a 6.5 Creedmoor at a mile before trying to stretch that out to 2,500 yards instead.

We ended up shooting the .22LR for the entire day.

The First Five Shots Changed Everything

All five of the first shots were audible to me, and all five landed within 30 yards of the target. That was far better than either of us had dared to expect, and I felt our collective mood shift immediately. I remember thinking, clearly: this just might work.

Three shots hit the bunker directly over the course of the day. I want to describe what that felt like, because “startling” undersells it. Imagine wearing a bicycle helmet, looking straight ahead, and having someone come up behind you and smack the top of it with a hammer. There’s no pain. But the psychological jolt is real, and it’s scary. I jumped every single time. After the first hit, every remaining shot carried a little extra tension — a small, nagging is this the one that gets me again running under everything else I was doing.

One bullet hit a rock near me and ricocheted off into the distance with far more force than I expected. Our ballistics had told us the round only carried about 6-7 foot-pounds of energy at that distance, which sounds like nothing. We’d even joked about me wearing a thick coat, which probably would have stopped the bullets outright — though I’d still have felt every hit, and because I’m an excellent husband, I wasn’t willing to risk my wife’s future with me over it. Six foot-pounds turned out to be a very real amount of energy for a 22-caliber projectile to carry, and hearing that ricochet skip away into the desert was a good reminder not to get cavalier about it.

The closest call of the day came when a bullet landed less than a foot to the left of and forward of my left foot. It didn’t change my risk assessment enough to stop the day, but it did make something clear to me: had that bullet struck a stone angled the wrong way, it could have ricocheted backward into the bunker. The odds were low. We kept going. But I’d tell anyone attempting something similar in the future to use a more enclosed bunker design than we had.

Learning to Listen

The team’s radio protocol worked well and became a rhythm over six hours. As the shooters got ready, Mike would key his mic, and I’d hear the background noise and voices come through. Then the pop of the shot. Mike would confirm the bullet was in the air and unkey his mic. I wouldn’t respond — I was listening. About four seconds later, I’d hear the report of the gunshot itself arrive at my position. At around ten seconds, I’d hear the impact. Then I’d radio back my best read on where it landed, and the team would confer and decide on their next shot.

Of 405 total shots fired that day, I was able to audibly spot the impact of roughly 380. About 350 of those were clear enough that I could make a solid estimate of where the bullet landed. Between 25 and 35 I was actually able to see — a dust splash I could tie directly back to the sound I’d just heard. Three shots hit the bunker. Roughly five landed within a foot of the target itself.

There’s a real difference between a bullet landing three feet to my left and even with me, versus one landing ten feet left and fifty feet forward — the sound signature changes with both distance and angle, and learning to tell those apart in real time is its own skill. I’d describe it as something like hand-eye coordination, except the two organs doing the coordinating are your ears and your eyes. Every time I could actually see an impact and match it to what I’d just heard, my brain got a little better calibrated for the next one that I could only hear. It occurred to me, sitting out there, that if a person did this day after day — a thousand audible spots, some with visual confirmation, then ten thousand, then a million — they would become remarkably precise at it. I only had one day. I can only imagine what real repetition would build.

I should also be honest about the limits of that skill. On the handful of occasions when radio trouble or human error meant I wasn’t warned a shot was coming, and I wasn’t at full attention, my ability to place the impact dropped noticeably. Being primed and alert mattered as much as raw hearing.

For the technically curious: I’ve been calling this “triangulating” the shots in conversation, but that’s not quite the right word. Triangulation means fixing a location using angles or distances measured from two or more separate points. What I was doing, from one fixed chair, is closer to sound localization — using timing, volume, and direction cues from a single position. If we’d had a second spotter thirty yards behind me, which I now think would have been the ideal setup, that would have given us true triangulation.

Reading Wind at the Edge of What’s Measurable

Scott and Mike were making calls throughout the day that I wasn’t privy to — presumably reading muzzle velocity variation shot to shot, and reading wind. Between my own years in extreme long-range shooting, I’ve come to believe something that runs a little against instinct: wind flags, mirage, and other visual wind indicators are useful for getting a shooter into the neighborhood of a target, but the single best piece of information about what the wind is actually doing is the last bullet that flew through the air.

Here’s why. Every cubic yard of air a bullet passes through has its own wind, its own temperature, its own density altitude and barometric pressure. As of 2026, we don’t have the technology to read every one of those cubic yards — or cubic inches, if you wanted to get more granular — and feed that into a computer for instantaneous, fully mapped ballistic correction. Maybe someday. Until then, the previous bullet is the only thing that has actually experienced the entire path, start to finish, and it is brutally honest about the result.

When the team spots a gust ripping across the desert, that gust is probably only influencing 50 yards of a bullet’s thousand-plus-yard flight. A dust devil passing through might only be ten yards wide — enough to make a wind flag look like it’s blowing hard in one direction, while affecting only a tiny sliver of the bullet’s actual path. It’s tempting to make a dramatic aim point adjustment off a dramatic-looking wind flag. Usually, the better information is what the last shot already told you. Wind does shift meaningfully over minutes and hours, and the gun does need to move with it — but it’s rare that a single visible gust justifies something like a 6 MOA correction.

This matters even more with rimfire than centerfire. Scott and Mike have a combined tens of thousands of bullets watched landing beyond a few hundred yards, mostly with centerfire cartridges, where wind reading is already critical. A .22LR is affected by wind more than something like a .30 caliber bullet. Years ago, competing in rimfire benchrest matches, we’d have four wind flags set up between the line and a 50-yard target, and the best shooters in that discipline built their whole game around reading those flags precisely. Even at 50 yards, a .22 Long Rifle round is at the mercy of the wind in a way a heavier, faster bullet simply isn’t.

Why This Is a Different Sport Than It Looks Like

I want to say something to the reader who has only ever shot, or watched people shoot, at conventional distances — 100 yards, 600 yards, a thousand yards. A skilled long-range shooter can typically put their first shot at 1,000 yards inside a 5 MOA group, which works out to roughly a 50-inch circle. This is the world the NRA’s competition division (their competition division — not their political one, to be clear) officiates, with scoring rings, a bullseye worth 10 points, and an X in dead center as a tiebreaker. A shooter who puts 30 rounds downrange, lands all 30 in the 10-ring, and puts five of them through the X, would post a score of 30, 5X. There’s a certain kind of shooter drawn to that discipline — precise, methodical, comfortable with tight, repeatable standards.

Extreme long-range shooting, at a mile, two miles, three, four miles, attracts a different personality entirely, because that level of precision simply isn’t available at those distances. And the difficulty doesn’t scale in a straight line as distance increases — it’s exponential.

Shooting at 2,000 yards isn’t twice as hard as shooting at 1,000. A typical 1,000-yard shooter is running a .308 Winchester with a 155-grain bullet. A 2,000-yard shooter is more likely using something like a .300 Norma with a 220-grain bullet — faster, flatter-shooting, genuinely better-suited equipment for the distance. Even accounting for that equipment upgrade, a shooter with comparable skill, sitting down with a $15,000 rifle and optic system at 2,000 yards, will not shoot as tight a group, even measured proportionally in MOA, as the same shooter with a $2,500 .308 system at 1,000 yards. The person capable of a 30, 5X group at 1,000 yards, handed a different rifle and moved out to 2,000 — even with a target scaled up two or three times larger — will not repeat that performance. And it keeps getting harder past that: 1.25 miles is harder still, 1.5 miles more than that, and on up the chain.

So when a friend tells you they went out and shot at 2.5 miles, and they’re thrilled because they saw their dust signature land within five feet of the target, understand: that is not a bad shooter with bad equipment. That is an entirely different game than the one played at conventional distances, and by that game’s standards, five feet at 2.5 miles is a remarkable result. Extreme long-range shooters get skunked plenty of days. That’s the sport.

Probability, Not Precision

Setting a world record at these distances is fundamentally a probability problem, not a precision problem. Out of ten shots, what’s the chance one lands somewhere useful? Do patterns emerge as the shots accumulate? That’s the question field scientists in this sport are actually answering, and it’s a different question than the one being answered on a 100-yard paper target.

We didn’t know the real numbers going in, because nobody had done this before with a .22LR. We guessed it would take thousands of shots, if it was possible at all. It took 405, with the first bunker-area impact inside the first five, and we still don’t have a number we trust for how many it would take next time — muzzle velocity variation makes this round considerably less predictable than a centerfire round. The probability of a hit is clearly lower than one in 405, since that’s the number we fired without a confirmed hit on steel, but we don’t yet know what it actually is.

Keeping Spirits Up

Six hours in a cramped bunker is not comfortable, particularly for a big man like me. It was only about 80 degrees, but with the sun beating straight down on me the whole day, it was plenty toasty, and I’ll admit a smaller, younger person with a good sense of distance would probably have made a better spotter than I did. A lower-profile bunker — say 4 feet tall instead of 6 or 7, set back another three yards to about 10 yards from the target — would have been an improvement too, though a fully enclosed design with a front and sides, while safer, would have turned that plywood box into an oven. Someone who complains less than I do would have handled that trade-off better.

We kept our spirits up on the radio all day. After roughly 150 shots, Mike announced, with a straight face, that the team was now going to try aiming for the actual target — as if the bunker hits had been the plan all along and the white steel had been an afterthought. We got a good laugh out of that every time the bunker took a hit. Humor kept the whole day cheerful even as the shots piled up without a confirmed hit. I continue to suspect that Frank’s preference was really to hit my red jacket (three hits) or my bunker (also three hits).

Calling It

We’d scheduled the day to wrap at 3:00 p.m. We kept going until 4:30, and at some point we simply had to call it — not because we’d run out of hope, but because the day had to end somewhere. We took three breaks of about two minutes each across the full six hours. Otherwise it was shot after shot, radio call after radio call, for that entire stretch.

Where Things Stand

We don’t have a firm plan for a next attempt yet. What we learned is that muzzle velocity consistency is likely the limiting factor, more than wind reading or spotting skill. A 57 fps spread between our slowest and fastest shots, on a subsonic round at this distance, is enough to matter. Our current thinking is that we need to find a more consistent ammunition source before further testing is worth the time. Scott and Frank are also discussing an alternative approach with the ammunition we already have: discarding the top and bottom 20 percent of shots by muzzle velocity and only firing within a narrower band close to the average, to see if that tightens things up without needing new ammunition at all.

On Records, Trust, and Reputation

Extreme long-range shooting has almost no official sanctioning body, and the handful of organizations that have tried to claim that role aren’t taken seriously by the people actually doing this. ShootingExperience.com has leaned into the position that there probably shouldn’t be one — that the Guinness Book of World Records is a good cautionary example of an institution that’s become bloated, administrative, and bureaucratic to the point of being less useful than it once was.

What we have instead is reputation. If a respected shooter like Chase Stroud says he achieved something, the rest of us — even those of us who compete with him in business — take him at his word. When we set the centerfire world record at 4.4 miles, we documented everything as carefully as we could, but at the end of the day, there’s an irreducible element of trust in this community. I’ve seen it go the other way, too: a claimed world record with an air rifle that, once several of us regarded as experts looked closely at it, turned out to be quite suspicious. That record, as far as the community is concerned, still sits in the Czech Republic.

Why the Day Still Mattered

We didn’t hit the target. But we walked away from that hillside having learned that a .22LR impact is audible and locatable at well beyond 1,475 yards, that the spotting skill sharpens in real time over the course of a single day, that the probability of a hit is lower than one in 405 but almost certainly not the thousands we originally feared, and that muzzle velocity consistency — not wind, not spotting — is likely the real bottleneck standing between us and a confirmed hit.

This is a record of the iceberg, not the tip. If it helps Scott, Mike, Frank, and me look back on our own work later, or helps anyone else pushing the limits of extreme long-range shooting build on what we found, it’s done its job — even if, ten years from now, someone reads it from an armchair and figures they could’ve done it in half the shots.