Little Britches 09/14/14

Sunday morning found us with ATV loaded up and heading for Grand Mesa.  On the way, we made a side trip over to the Surface Creek Saddle Club Arena.  We had read in the paper that the Little Britches (youth rodeo association) were doing a competition this weekend and were wrapping it up with the last events starting at 9:00 AM.  The Little Britches Rodeo weekend with parade, dances, barbeques, etc. is in July but, we didn't make it over to watch any competition events.  It was too hot to sit out on bleachers in the sun at that time of the year anyway!

We loved watching the kids.  No event had more than 6 entries, so it was real down home and personal.  We might have been the only non-parents attending.  The parking is on terraced hill above arena, so we just parked and watched. There were a few lawn chairs out next to some pickups with horse trailers, but mostly spectators were moms and dads who were walking around encouraging kids and guiding horses.

Last month we set a LetterBox hybrid cache at the arena entry gate under some landscape boulders.  The rubber stamp for finders' log books says "WaHoo" and the purpose of the cache is to learn about Little Britches Rodeo.  Since Cedaredge has the distinction of having the longest continuous Little Britches rodeo in the nation (since 1950's), this was a fun research and write up.  Karl didn't know anything about Little Britches before we started pulling information together for the cache.  He was eager to see the kids compete, so didn't complain about getting out of bed early enough to be at the arena when competition started.

One thing we found interesting at this public event was after the mounted color guard did a turn around the arena, someone said a prayer over the PA.  Interesting.