Vanguard is best known for making tripods and hard cases for the photography and video market. Thirteen years ago, they took that design expertise and jumped into the hunting market with bow and gun cases, followed by shooting sticks. Given their background in tripods, Vanguard is now producing a line of bipods or shooting sticks as they are sometimes known.

The Pro B62 is what you would expect, if you brought together a group of tripod engineers and asked them to design a good shooting stick. In other words the bipod packs in quite a few nice features that are not normally a part of a bipod.

One of the most noticeable features of the B62 is the adjustable yoke. The angle of the yoke is adjustable to compensate for a variety of rifle forearm designs and thickness. The yoke can be opened all the way up to the point that it should easily accommodate wide bench rest style forearms. The yoke head can also swivel a full 360 degrees in a smooth motion. Finally the yoke head can also be removed and has a standardized adapter that can easily accommodate most cameras and spotting scopes.

The yoke adjusts to three different positions allowing a variety of rifle forearm designs to fit on the yoke.

The yoke head swivels 360 degrees.

The yoke is removable to allow attaching cameras or spotting scopes.

Each leg of the Pro B62 has two leg extensions that lock into place. This allows the bipod to nicely accommodate a shot from the seated position or expand all the way up to standing. The height adjustment is more than enough to suit a 6 foot tall shooter with 2.5-3 inches of room left in vertical elevation. The legs are also marked in inches to allow either leg to serve as a measuring stick, perhaps for measuring the depth of a stream or the size of a track. According to the specs, the legs collapse to just over 28 inches and extend to 62 inches. The sticks weigh in at just under a pound and half, which keeps them relatively light considering the expandability.

Each leg is marked in inches to measure depth or length.

The bipod also includes a set of removable snow shoes. Snow shoes are not typically seen on shooting sticks; however they can be helpful for those late winter predator hunts or early snow Rocky Mountain fall hunts. Also the rubber feet are threaded on and can be unscrewed to reveal metal spiked feet for digging into hard packed surfaces.

Snow shoes and the default rubberized feet.

The snow shoes are removable.

The rubberized feet can be removed to reveal a threaded metal spike.

Vanguard spent some time designing a better bipod and the results are worth considering if you're in the market for a new shooting stick or bipod. The only real downside is the threaded spikes, given that the threads will get mud, dirt, and grime caked in them, it will take a while to clean out the threads and screw the rubber feet back on. Currently the Vanguard Pro B62 retails for around $59, which puts it squarely in the middle of the market in terms of price. There are other options that are less expensive with fewer features, but there are many models that are considerably more expensive with the same or fewer features.

For more information visit Vanguard [2].