Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Sale

The real action in the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale is, of course, the sale. There were over seventy broncs bucked that day, ranging from experienced buckers who had seen the NFR, to outlaw saddle horses looking for a new career more fitting of their talents. The majority were somewhere in the middle, youngish and/or inexperienced broncs.

For me the broncs that are the most fun to shoot are the big time pros, like Grated Coconut and the like, and the rank young untested broncs. Experienced broncs will come out and buck rhythmically, gracefully, beautifully really!

Inexperienced broncs, on the other hand, pull things like this:

And occasionally they do things like this:

I looked at this photo probably two dozen or more times while picking it out for the blog and editing it, but it wasn't until I was totally done editing it that I realized that the horse wasn't wearing a bucking strap. Show 'em how its done Pali!

The young and the rank: There was also a handful of futurity broncs bucked like this handsome "born to buck" colt.

The one thing that has really struck me about broncs, both the young rank horses and the tried and true pros is actually how they're the same:

They're athletes. Plain and simple.

Coming up: The BHS match bronc riding! Friesian colts! And (it's that time again)... HELIX!

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Sale

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Bulls

Friday was a day of heart pounding excitement!

People who know what happened can stop rolling their eyes now. For those who don't I'll fill you in and then you can go back and roll your eyes. For those of you who don't care just scroll down for the rodeo action shots ;-)

Friday morning, just after breakfast and for no particular reason, my heart started beating out of my chest. So I took a visit to the lovely Forsyth MT hospital where after a few (probably expensive) tests they informed me that, for no particular reason, my heart was beating out of my chest. Luckily it righted itself shortly and I got to leave with a "take it easy/stay hydrated/avoid caffeine/alcohol/doing anything fun at all". Al asked the nurse if it was a good time to mention that I was going to be in the arena with the bulls later. She laughed because she thought he was joking.

He wasn't, of course.

(this may be me taking the situation too lightly but I found that hilarious)

On to the photos!!

OK so I wasn't quite in the arena with the bulls. Anyone with a scrap of sanity was outside of the small arena that they had sectioned off for the bulls.

If you've been wanting to give bull riding a try I can tell you that this is NOT how you want to dismount a bull (hangups are scary, thankfully he was fine).

My favorite shot from the bull riding and one of my faves from the weekend.

If it looks like these bulls are staring at me its because THEY FLIPPING WERE!! A bunch of bulls who were hunting the fence, just looking for someone to hook, decided that to stop and stare and snort at me. Its amazing how a steel fence seems to disappear when you've locked eyes with a thousand pound animal who would like very much to crush you. Of course they might of just thought I was cute :-)

...and small and easy to trample.

Hey my heart is still working, what do you know.

I may have to devote an entire post (or two) to bullfighting photos I took! Those guys were having way too much fun and it made for some awesome shots! But that can come later, because the next day was the Bucking Horse Sale...

PS: There is a lot of missinformation, misunderstandings, and even outright lies out there regarding rodeo. If you have any questions just shoot me an email :-)

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Bulls

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Long Road to Miles City

To tell any story properly you have to start from the beginning and the story of my weekend at the Miles City Bucking Horse Sale started with approximately 15 hours of driving. Thankfully for my sanity, much of it included scenes like this:

In Montana, if you don't like the mountain range you're looking at, theres another around the corner.

See those white peaks in the back there? According to my tour guide Al, they're part of Yellowstone National Park, a place I have never been and am convinced was created by God specifically as a playground for photographers...but I may be biased. It pained me to just drive by the stomping ground of photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Muybridge and William Henry Jackson, the man who's photographs of Yellowstone helped convince congress that it should be our first national park (I could geek out on photo history all day), but we had a bucking horse sale to get to.

There were tons of wildlife that I saw along the way! I spotted deer, pronghorn, gophers, prairie dogs, elk, eagles, hawks, coyote, & bison. And also slow elk. Lots of them. I was super excited to see all the Pronghorn Antelope, like the buck above, since I'd never seen an antelope before. Later I found out that Pronghorn are not, in fact, antelope and therefore my entire life was lie.

Ok not really.

Not long after I took the shot of the antelope pronghorn Montana got rather flat and sparse and the hours of driving started to wear on me. By the time we got to our hotel in Forsyth, I was very excited to not be on the road. The next day the real shooting would start :-)

By the end of the weekend I had taken over 1,700 images. I have no idea how I am going to narrow it down to a handful from each day to show you. Wish me luck.

Miles City Bucking Horse Sale: The Long Road to Miles City