Rodeo Queen to Dressage Queen

This story has come up here and there over the years. I've never really told it start to finish, but in the mid-1980s, I was crowned Garberville Rodeo Queen.

My "publicity" head shot used for the newspaper and other rodeo advertisements.

I was horse crazy from birth. I couldn't get enough of it, so when I got my first horse, I wanted it all - shows, travel, parades, the works. Unfortunately, we didn't have a trailer, nor was my dad interested in schlepping me around the county doing any of those things.

I had thousands of acres at my disposal though, so I did everything you could do for free. We jumped logs, ditches, and anything else that would hold still. We swam the horses in the river and even skied behind them with one person riding and another grabbing on to the tail. We camped out in the hills with the horses tied to trees. I even rode my horses to school one day to use them as a demo for the junior high agriculture class.

I was always on the hunt for something else though. A friend of a friend of a friend once trailered us out to a popular trail head and let us ride for a few hours. Watching that trailer behind the truck was like winning the lottery. Another time, a friend of my dad's, who was just getting into endurance riding, took me along with him for a camping/trail riding weekend with a big group at a local ranch. I was definitely hooked on travel after that.

Sunny was small but mighty!

I don't remember how it happened, but the summer before high school, I heard about the Garberville Rodeo Queen contest. I had never aspired to pageants, but I did want to ride in a parade. I went to the meeting, signed up, and before he knew it, my dad was schlepping me around more than one county selling raffle tickets.

Newspaper photo of my dad and me as my win is announced.

My dad drove me to the Laytonville rodeo where I sold tickets and he maybe had a beer or two. He drove me to a number of bars where he camped out for the afternoon as I manned the door catching patrons both coming and going. In the small town where I grew up, it wasn't unusual to have someone's kid hanging out at the pool table or jukebox.

My step-mother also helped out by picking me up in town on her way home from work. I'd ride the bus to Garberville after school and sell tickets all afternoon. Other rodeos in our area had "horsemanship" or "poise" portions of the contest, but my town was solely interested in ticket sales. I could sell tickets, and I did.

Trophy, tiara, sash, and a shiny pony. There wasn't much more a girl in the 80s could ask for.

Being rodeo queen was the coolest thing that toothy 14 year-old had ever done. I led the rest of the girls down main street in the parade and then we drove out to the rodeo grounds for two days of as much fun as I could stand. We borrowed a trailer from a friend, and I slept under a tree at the rodeo grounds with Sunny tied to the trailer. We rode in the rodeo's Grand Entrance where I got to do a victory lap in front of the grandstands.

Small town parade.

Eventually, I left home and went to college. I couldn't afford a horse back then; I could barely afford to feed myself. Within a year after graduating though, I had a horse and shortly after that, I was hitting the endurance trail with friends.

For the past 25 years I've taken my horses everywhere and done a lot of cool things - camping at the beach, endurance races, play days, poker rides, dressage shows, and even another school demonstration. Once you've been bitten by the horse bug, there's simply no cure. The only thing you can do is scratch the itch!