We took off Wednesday evening (Jan. 21st) and headed to Colorado.  We spent the night in North Platte, got up early, stopped for some donuts and drove the rest of the way to Denver.  We were lucky to get a parking spot not far from the front door of the Coliseum.  We walked around checking a few things out.

There is so much to do and see at the Stock Show so I just thought I would post pictures.

There was a buffalo auction

There were Yak and Jillian and I got to try Yak jerky. It was very good.

This is one of the Highland bulls.

This was the first year that we got to watch the draft horse halter class. It was very entertaining.

Across the ring from the draft horse haltering show was the mule halter show.

I was impressed that many of the horses were handled by women.  At the end of this post I added a video showing one of the horses.

We watched a little presentation about birds of prey.

Ken up close and personal with a Highland Bull.

Mule hunter jumper class.

Minature hereford show.

Each week day at the National Western Stock Show schools send their students as a field trip for a day.  The kids all start out here in this arena and then meet up here again in the afternoon before loading on to the buses.  This gal probably weighs about 130 and she’s handling a stallion that weighs over 2,000 pounds.  She was doing very well with him until all of the kids came in.  They were very noisy and this bothered most of the stallions.  I focused on her just because of the size discrepancy.  The guy that came over to help her was actually one of the handlers of another stallion (in many cases there were two people with each horse but not for this gal). She then took off her exhibitor number and tried to pin it on him but the horse only stood still long enough for her to get his number off..  So another gal who was helping with a third horse took the exhibitor number for the guy and held it up by his horse when the judge would come by.  I know these people all know each other very well and have competed against each other probably for years, but like I told Ken, it just puts competition in a new light (or actually the way it should be).  Competition for this judge’s opinion on which horse he likes the best, not the desire to win no matter what.  A totally different mindset from letting the air out of footballs.