Ride for Brand fills out 2 days
Flash Cadillac to perform after July 1 rodeo at Penrose

       A noticeably expanded Ride for the Brand Rodeo will gallop into town June 30-July 1.
       After a variety of rodeo-related activities - including a downtown “cattle drive,” a cowboy photo show, an art auction, and a ranch horse demonstration and sale - the fourth annual “working cowboys” event will climax Saturday, July 1 at 6 p.m. with the rodeo itself at Penrose Stadium, followed by a performance by famous Colorado “oldies” band Flash Cadillac.
       Ride for the Brand is a sanctioned rodeo in the Working Ranch Cowboys Association (WRCA) tour. About 100 cowboys representing 25 ranches from around the country will compete in six events that replicate the work they regularly perform on the job.
       Waddie Mitchell, well-known cowboy poet and one of the creators of the WRCA, will once again be the “host on horseback” for the rodeo.
       Ticket prices range from $5 to $25 and are available through TicketsWest or at the gate.
       The evening events will be the bronc riding, wild-cow milking, trailer loading and double mugging. Bronc riding is widely known, the milking involves several cowboys trying to milk an ornery cow, and the trailer loading requires a yearling to be cut out of a herd and loaded into a trailer with two horses.
       Double mugging, a new event this year, is a variation of the “team doctoring” event (which it replaces) and represents a ranch chore that spawned rodeo's traditional calf-roping event, according to Mark Bukowski, a local rancher and co-rodeo director. One cowboy on horseback needs to rope a calf while the two “muggers” work together to place a doctoring mark on the animal.
       Two rodeo competitions will take place earlier in the day, at 1 p.m., in what is known as “slack.” Viewable for free, these are the team sorting and team branding events.
       As is traditional with Ride for the Brand, the competing ranches' cowboys will “arrive” in Colorado Springs by herding about 100 longhorn cattle from Monument's Searle Ranch down Tejon Street between Cache la Poudre Street and the Pioneers Museum at noon Friday, June 30.
       Another returning feature this year will be the Western Art & Collectibles Auction Saturday, July 1, from noon to 4:30 p.m. It will have more than 250 works by Western and Colorado regional artists. The location will be the new entry facility at the east end of the stadium.
       New this year will be:
      
  • Photo exhibit - titled “Revealing Character and other Cowboy Tintypes,” this consists of cowboy photos (including some of those competing in Ride for the Brand) done in an old-style ferrotype process by Robb Kendrick of Blanco, Texas, at the Smokebrush Gallery, 218 W. Colorado Ave., from 2 to 7 p.m. June 30.
  • Ranch horse competition - Forty trained horses will be put through their paces June 30 at 6:30 p.m. at Penrose Stadium
  • Horse sale - These horses will go up for sale in an auction starting July 1 at 10 a.m., also at the stadium. Note: If you consider horses based on their names, here are samples of some that are being offered: Fool Around Bud, Big Eater, Stray Spook, Cool Little Cal, Smart Lil Peppy Doc, and Booted Bob.
  • Flash Cadillac - The rodeo has featured well-known musical artists before, but perhaps none as widely recognizable as Flash Cadillac. The band, whose original members first got together as students at the University of Colorado, has specialized in '50s-era rock for nearly 40 years and performed in the movies, “American Grafitti” and “Apocalypse Now.”
           The group is scheduled to play after the rodeo ends, at about 9 p.m. The show will be free to ticket-holders. The band will play from the open deck area of the new entry facility at the east end of the stadium, according to Bill Miller, manager of the Norris-Penrose Event Center, which includes the stadium.

    Westside Pioneer article