West Side is Usually Our Strong Side

We left home for four weeks this past monday. It is informally known as The West Coast Run. It is one of my favorite times of year for professional team roping because we get the best of both worlds four our sport, a lot of good jackpots and the right amount of good, big rodeos. We usually do well out here on this run, but this year, it hasn’t started out to well for us…
We started off at a jackpot in Las Vegas at Horseman’s Park. You might have heard of that place. Anyway, I roped with Buddy Hawkins, Chase Tryan, and Tommy Zuniga. The steers were dead fresh, they have never been roped before that day. The barrier was long and dead. Definitely a tough set up. Tommy and I were 3rd callback. We had a chance to win it but had a little bad luck with our short round run. I got a GREAT start at the barrier and went to deliver, and right in the middle of my delivery the steer checked off and stepped off to the right… I missed the right horn… such a bummer! The next day was the infamous Hork Dog. The steers here were OLD and SLOW…. this usually makes for an extremely tough and fast roping, which is exactly what happened. I made the short round with Chase Tryan, but we had a leg on our first round steer so we were 19th callback. We made a good run, 5.7, but that wasn’t near fast enough for us to even come close to winning anything. That roping was ridiculously tough this year. FAST ROPING! Now we are in Oakdale, California about to get ready to run our second round steer. Yesterday, in the first round, Buddy and I drew a slow steer. I got one of the best starts I think I have ever gotten and caught up to the steer immediately. The steer had big horns and I did not cover them enough to get them caught… I split the horns. Today is a good day though. We are looking to be fast and place in the second round hopefully. After we run this steer today, we fly back to Vegas to drive up to Logandale, Nevada for the Tour Rodeo there, where we hope to change things around.
I hope ya’ll have been doing well. Sorry I have not written in awhile… and that there are no pics on this blog… I’ll do better now that I am back on the road for a few weeks. Talk to you all soon! DH

Oh ya, the Picture you see on the title of this blog is Ted. I got him from Olive, my girlfriend’s daughter, last summer, and he has been in our rig ever since.