Yesterday afternoon, Ellen, Max and I went up the Snake River Canyon about a 20-minutes drive to the place where both Jenny and Paul are working, the Snake River Sporting Club. Jenny has worked there for a decade or more, as a combined administrator/hostess/accountant, and Paul just started working making cabinets for new lodges they are building. Yesterday their equestrian staff put on a rodeo for members and their families. This is a club for the wealthy. The membership fee runs about $5-6 thousand annually, I think. So we were rubbing elbows with folks we don't ordinarily associate with. They seemed to be fairly nice people. If you dug down deep enough you would probably find trials and tribulations like all of us have. But there was no opportunity for that. We were all there to watch the horses and their riders.
It was a very intimate, informal rodeo. Some of the riders were staff, some were children of members. It started with some demonstrations, like loose rein riding, where the rider communicates with the horse either by voice or with their feet, with the reins held very loosely. These were very well-trained horses, and they went through their movements beautifully.
Then they demonstrated "breakaway roping." I had heard that term but didn't know what it meant. It is typically a women's/girls's event. The lariat is attached to the saddle horn with a small thread. When the calf is roped by the rider with the lariat, and runs, the rope breaks the thread and breaks away from the saddle. The rider is timed from the moment the calf is released from the pen to the moment the rope "breaks away" -- usually just a few seconds.
After that was "team roping." One rider ropes the horns of the calf, the other the feet.
Then there was barrel-racing. This time to rider runs the horse in a pattern around three barrels, coming as close to the barrel as possible without knocking it over. Among others, there were three sisters competing in this event, ages 7 to 15. They all did well, but the fifteen-year-old was outstanding. She could be a rodeo star someday.
After that, all the children present, including Max, were invited out, and they did a hobby-horse race around a barrel and also chased a goat to see if they could catch it and release a ribbon from its neck. They were variously successful or not, but it provided s lot of fun.
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| Two sisters |
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| Cowgirl all "decked out" |
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| Team roping |
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| Barrel racing |
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| Spectators, including Ellen |
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| Max getting ready to race hobby horses |
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| After the race |
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