Yee ha!

To prove that Colorado really is still the wild west, they still have plenty of rodeos here. We went to the Estes Park Rodeo with my family when they were here and then Cheyenne Frontier Days with our friend Avis just this weekend.

The Estes Park Rodeo is a three time winner of the Best Small Rodeo in America and lived up to this award nicely. It wasn't that the rodeo part was small, but the stuff around it was small. Most of the rodeos I've been to in the past have been enormous events like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo that was always held in the Astrodome and the National Western Livestock Show and Rodeo in Denver, the New Mexico State Fair, and even the Greeley Stampede. Those were not just rodeos, they were state or national level agricultural fairs and entertainment as well. But Estes was just having a rodeo. They had a few hat and boot sales out front and a little dance group for Mexico Day, but the real entertainment was the rodeo itself. They started with the display of the sponsor flags ridden around the arena on horseback, then the rodeo princess rode around in their sparkly outfits, then they had a great pre-game show of trick riding. I could see myself doing stuff like riding sideways, or backwards, or maybe even standing up. But the part where they jumped off the galloping horse and then jumped or flipped back is definitely a trick left up to the experts. The main rodeo had all the standard events - steer wrestling, calf roping, saddle bronc and bareback bronc riding, team roping, barrel racing, and of course bull riding. We had signed Wee up to ride a sheep in the Mutton Busting, but there were too many entrants, so he thankfully just got to watch the rodeo and not paricipate. Of course my favorite thing to watch was just the tall, lean cowboys walking around in Wranglers, boots, and hats.

Cheyenne Frontier Days, ten times voted the Best Large Rodeo in America, was more the type of event I was used to. It had a midway and western shops all around. But it also had some areas that made it seem almost like the Cowboy equivalent of a renaissance festival where it seemed like you really were in the old west with people dressed in and selling period clothing, food, and furnishings. The first thing we encountered were the Chuckwagons. They were in competition creating a meal of chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, beans, biscuits, and blueberry cobbler all using old west cooking techniques such as pit fires, hanging cauldrons of soup, and dutch ovens. The wagons and the people were also done up in old west style and must have been judged as well. A few of the participants explained to us about the various specialized woods they used for different cooking techniques - hardwood for the slow burning coals used for biscuits and cobblers vs. pine for the intense heat under the oil frying the chicken fried steak. Next to the Chuckwagon section was the little old town including lots of leather and fur sales, paintings, clothes, hats, iron work art, and some fake establishments like a jail, undertaker, and bank. Then there was the American Indian section with a few teepees, dancing, and shops with beadwork, various other jewelry, more leather and fur, and some musical instruments. We got Wee a tiny beaded cowboy and bought our famous drummer neighbor an Indian drum. < img src = "https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjePEOC4OQnDvGGX5_BkLdbnQOtBY8eyI-mCu1zHcBxNduijYC1MwHRjPWQDsIT4CJ5ABjqN_U3yVzNWben_EJtETLAGkwErPwWga6epx2ehDt1-tNmg-S0dzkfWelhOXhHU_aHTfDrLz-B/s576/IMG_2315.jpg" /> The rodeo event started with Navy paratroopers landing in the middle of the arena and then went on to regular rodeo events.



It was a little unique in that it had a few events run more than once and some funny little events in between. My favorite intermission event was when they had foals on one end of the track and mares on the other and it was a race to see which baby could get to its mommy the fastest - the babies all reminded me of Skye when he was tiny. In all Cheyenne Frontier Days was still not as huge as the big events in the big cities, but it was as real as it gets. We even stopped in downtown Cheyenne to shop a little more at the Wrangler store and for Alex and Wee to have a steak at one of the few restaurants in town.