Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo Photography - It's Like Coming Home

“I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing.
Out here it’s like I’m someone else,
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave.
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me.”

I’d forgotten how much I loved this place.  The musty smell of livestock, the morning breeze tickling the back of my neck.  I followed the white rail around the track counter-clockwise, my eyes trailing the freshly plowed curves in the soft earth.  Behind me I heard a cowboy quietly loping his horse in small, lazy circles, the big bay’s rhythmic chuck-chuck-chuck as it found it’s breath in harmony with it’s muted footfalls.

Oh how I’ve missed mornings like this.

I was headed to take photos of slack at Cheyenne Frontier Days.  The official rodeo starts tomorrow, but there are so many contestants, they have to complete timed-event runs in the days leading up to the event.  These pre-rodeo events are known as slack.

The grandstand loomed large to my left.  It blocked the rising sun so most of the arena floor was in shadow, with just a few patches of light poking through between concrete support beams.

I grew up in this arena.  For years, my dad was the announcer at slack.  Each Frontier Days, he would rise before the sun, collect his clipboards and announcing bag and head out to the arena.  Many mornings, I rode with him.  We’d sit together in the small announcer’s booth, cold hands wrapped around cups of warm coffee.  As he’d call out the names and hometowns of cowboys, I’d drink in the sights and sounds of rodeo.

When I’d grow weary of sitting still for so long, he’d allow me to wander the grounds.  I’d explore under the chutes where the cowboys readied themselves to climb on the back of a bull or bronc or the production rooms with their maze of electronic cords and hypnotic blinking lights.  I’d wander the pens where the livestock was held, watching the bulls doze placidly or the horses swish flies of one another’s faces.

Sometimes, I’d get invited to play with the other rodeo kids.  We’d take turns roping a plastic steer head shoved in a hay bale or try to catch each other’s feet with a heel loop.  Dad had made many friends in his years announcing, and some of the cowboys recognized me as his horse-crazy daughter.  They’d throw me on the back of their horse and lead me around the track or let me help take off their equipment or brush out sweat marks.

Those mornings with my dad were pure magic.

I’d go on to serve as a Cheyenne Frontier Days Dandy, a group of teenage girls that rode horseback and promoted the rodeo.  I loved to get up early and take my chestnut mare to the arena while slack was running.  I’d put Peppermint to a long trot, my body rising and falling with her strides down the track as my dad’s voice hummed in the background.  Despite the craziness of the schedule I knew lay ahead with parades and performances and crowds, those mornings brought me peace.

Magic.

The Cheyenne Frontier Days slack arena hadn’t lost any magic for me.  I felt it again as I headed to the camera pit.  I wasn’t quite prepared for the lump in my throat that formed when I looked into the black windows and red canopy of the announcer’s booth.  A different voice radiated from the speakers, but in my mind, I heard my dad’s voice as clearly as if he was still sitting behind the microphone.

“Steer gets away from him.  That will be a no time for this Colorado cowboy.  No time.”

There was no Dad and no bad jokes.  Just the whirring of my auto-focus and the snapping of my shutter.  But I still felt connected to him through time and space over our mutual love of this rodeo.

This was a bit out of my wheelhouse as a Torrington, Wyoming based portrait photographer.  But I loved every single moment.

The morning went by in a blur of horses and steers and announcement of times.  I recognized few cowboys as I don’t follow rodeo much anymore.  Though the names have changed, the rest remained the same.  Steer wrestlers and their hazers lined up on the east side of the arena to wait their turn.  Steer ropers lined the west side of the track, a labyrinth of rope cases, baby powder and extra bell boots at their feet.

Later, I would try to describe to my husband just how much I had enjoyed my morning.  But words failed me.  How can I explain the joy and peace those early mornings bring me…have always brought me.

Finally I settled on the best description I could think of.

It was like coming home.