There’s no weekend like a Cowley County Fair weekend.
For all the 4-H/FFA families that brought livestock and have been working around the clock taking care of them, uh, yowza! How do you do it?
Remember back in January when everyone– including myself– was cursing the 15 degree, freezing cold and making statements like, "Lord, give me that summer heat any day!"
Well, maybe not so much now, right?
Still, way to work hard and stay dedicated.
Anyway off to the weekend highlights:
-The Mud Bog lives?
The Demolition Derby organizers went a touch too crazy with the water truck for Saturday night’s event.
In the past the derby, uh, ring– what would one call it? It’s not a track, it’s not a field. Although it isn’t really a circle either. I digress– was way too muddy.
After it was all said and done, even the big 4×4 pick-ups used to pull the cars out of the tractringtle (track + rectangle + ring, I want to be sure to cover all my bases, just in case) were having trouble gaining any traction. I know the speeds need to be kept down in the name of safety, but for next year, let’s not wet it down so much that the cars have problems getting around – they have a hard enough time staying running.
When the mud settled it was Eric Cales left with a churning motor.
Cales’ purple station wagon ended up looking a bit like a Picasso painting, but had the power and reliability to keep roughing up the competition.
Ryan Groene showed that his sedan had a lot of fight under the hood and died multiple times before surging back, but didn’t have the longevity that Cales had.
David Broyles was third in the event.
All three were from Winfield.
– Big crowd, small show.
Saturday afternoon’s Stomper 4×4 drag races witnessed by a considerably large audience, especially with an incredibly blazing 1 p.m. start time with temperatures over 100 degrees.
The premise of the event was that each truck had to drag race a 150 foot distance on a loose, watered down track, throwing up mud with the pedals to the floor.
The question is, was the grandstand impressed?
Yes, and no.
From what I understood during Wednesday’s fair media tour, the organizers of the event typically run side-by-side drag races. But for our fair, the event had to be cut down to one lane due to the smaller dimensions of the area in front of the grandstand.
If the track was wider and allowed for trucks racing side-by-side, that would have been better.
Also detracting from the event was a casting call for trucks didn’t produce many entries.
Just around 11 trucks raced and only a few were honest race trucks.
I’m confident the gear-heads in the crowd were satisfied but for those looking for more action it was a bit of a let-down.
– It’s just boots and blood.
Just as a bonus, for anyone who recognized the sub-head as a part of a lyric in the Garth Brooks song, "Rodeo", for one, I loved the 90’s too, and two, yes, this is my take on Sunday night’s rodeo.
The stands were about as full as usual for the event– often one of the lower draws of the fair– and the fight between man and beast was ever constant.
Cory Hutchinson’s score of 65 was strong enough for the Haysville native to win the bareback riding event and in the saddle bronc riding Josh Handy, from Conway Springs, was first with the highest roughstock score of the night with a 75.
In steer wrestling, Tyler Ricky, making the trip from Alva, Okla., won the event with a time of 5.9 seconds and Cody Bunyard, from Douglass, took first in the calf roping with a time of 9.61 seconds.
Team roping and barrel racing winners were not official until the end of the slack contests, which ran late after the rodeo.
Like the Bull Blowout Thursday night, the bulls won out against the riders. None could hang on for the eight seconds required to qualify a ride.
I’m not sure on the rules or anything, but I got one word for tonight’s bull riders that may be the key to a complete ride; Velcro.
You didn’t hear that from me.
Alrighty then. That’s that for the weekend edition, be on the look-out for the fair wrap-up Tuesday and if you haven’t been by KSOK’s booth, they did a contest asking fair go-ers how long it would take for two-by-two foot chunks of ice to melt.
Sunday afternoon they shrunk by nearly half their initial size. It will be interesting to see how long they’ve made it by tonight.
Check it out and if you see Marty, tell him you know what he did last summer– who knows, you may get some free KSOK swag.
