Let's Rope!

I just l o v e to rope. Once I became involved with sheepdogs, it kind of went by-the-by for me, but I still have a nice head horse in my pasture and I have these pictures of the when I worked so hard at it. This picture was taken at a USTRC roping in Las Vegas and I'm riding one of my favorite rope horses, Dial Sunny Jack, aka Sunny. I made the trip to Phoenix and traded Mo', the horse in the picture below, for Sunny. He came from a man named Harold Baumgartner, a real character, who taught me how to make a "rodeo start" while I was trying the horse. We had gone to the home of a friend of Harold's and the young steers there had never been roped. They ran like scalded cats and I was struggling to catch them. Harold encouraged me to get out quicker on them and his demonstration of a "rodeo start" is what lingers and still makes me laugh.

I had ridden with friends to this roping, and transferred Sunny from my trailer to theirs when I got to their house. What didn't make the transfer was my luggage and every stitch of clothing I have on in the picture was borrowed, and from 2 different sources of different sexes. Right down to the belt and buckle, none of the clothes are my own, and the boots were too big by the way.

This is little Mo', with an apostrophe because his whole name was Mo' Money. Mo' was the first rope horse I owned. Before that, I just borrowed, and he forgot more about roping than I will ever know. He was backing out of a trailer the first time I saw him, and the more of him that came out, the uglier he got. He was little, well under 15 hands, with a plain head and he traveled like a Volkswagen with bad shocks. Notice in the picture that his tail is on the way up. He always flipped his tail, when you turned off with a steer and it was kind of embarrasing until I started cashing the checks. I tried to use him on the ranch to gather cattle, but he hated it and we always joked that his best event was "arena."

This is the rope horse I have now. I forget his registered name, and I call him Alley Cat, or Alley for short. He's quick on his feet and very catty. He came from Brian Fulton, a man in Nebraska who has sold lots of nice horses over the years. I bought him sight unseen off a video, which is something I had never done before. I met Brian in person when I attended a horse auction in South Dakota that he was involved in, and I called him when a mutual friend told me about this horse. I had lots of questions for him explaining that while I had bought horses without riding them, I had never bought one without actually seeing it. He laughed and patiently answered my questions. As it turned out, Alley was a better horse than Brian made him out to be.

I'm stuck at home too much of the time these days and not able to travel and dog trial like I once did. There's a few little punkin' rollin' ropin's that take place around here a couple times a week, and I think it may be time to dust off old Alley and go ropin'.