Red Desert Rifles: More Than Just a Custom Hunting Tool
Eve Flanigan 01.31.24
Attending the January 2024 West Texas Hunting Extravaganza, hosted by the West Texas chapter of Safari Club International, was a new rifle vendor ready to cater to the needs of big game hunters. Even across the expansive expo floor, the beautiful wood stocks of these guns caught my eye. Of course I had to get a closer look and when I did, I found something worth writing about. Straight from Rock Springs, Wyoming, meet Red Desert Rifles.
Red Desert Rifles are “custom” in a way that’s rare yet true to the meaning of the word. Owner/operator Chad Chapman, a lifelong hunter and rifleman, builds each rifle only after personal consultation and measurement of each customer to learn his/her intended and probable use of the rifle as well as dimensions to make a truly custom product to serve their hunting needs.
At face value, Red Desert rifles are unique thanks to hand-crafted wood stocks with matte or high-gloss urethane fiish. Chapman frequently works in Tiger or Shelled Maple, but also uses Turkish Walnut, Bastogne Walnut, and Myrtle. Each stock’s length of pull, comb height, padding, and overall design is made for each customer, and outfitted with an in-house customized action, barrel, and barrel features, and trigger. Chapman showed me a carbon fiber barrel with an attractive fluting pattern of his own design. Threading and custom thread protectors are part of each rifle package.
Building a rifle for a particular hunter’s taste and measurements is not the end of the process. Chapman often includes an optic with the package, and in every consultation, works with the customer to be sure they’re fully competent behind their new gun. Wyoming, with its frequent gale-force winds and wide open ranges, is the ideal place to develop as a rifle shooter. The purchase of a Red Desert rifle includes, at minimum, Chapman shooting it to confirm it meets his ½ MOA or less accuracy guarantee. If the purchaser needs assistance in understanding rifle-craft as viewed through the lens of big game hunting, he also takes them afield to learn how to range targets and call wind, to achieve a stable platform when shooting from various positions, and to make the humane call to get closer or wait for another day when the odds of a good hit aren’t great.
These rifles are pretty as well as durable. Chapman had on display the rifle that accompanied him on a 10-day Dall Sheep hunt. That rifle has logged many miles afield on that hunt alone, and then some. One would expect the glossy stock to look bedraggled, but it takes fairly close inspection to find the couple dings and scratches.
It would be impossible to find a rifle made with more caring attention to detail than a Red Desert rifle, and none that I know of come with the peace of mind of having custom training included so that bagging that trophy animal is as close to guaranteed as possible. These rifles are ready for delivery 10 months post-order and priced around $15,000; a bit more if sold with a mounted optic. The shop also offers custom work on existing rifles and handguns.
