<\/p>\n
The members of the 16 teams entered in the 2015 Ranch Rodeo sat silently atop their horses on Saturday night.<\/p>\n
Then, as the final note of The Star-Spangled Banner rang from the speakers at the Montezuma County Fairgrounds, the cowboys and cowgirls released shouts of excitement.<\/p>\n
The first-place prize of $3,000 had been announced, and each team had a shot to prove itself superior in events that tested skills like roping, branding, penning and loading.<\/p>\n
After winning the event in 2014, the Cow House Auction team from Kirtland, N.M., had the challenge of repeating as rodeo champions.<\/p>\n
And team members Shane Hatch, Wade Hatch, Phil Wiseman, Shawn Washburn and Rusty Herrera followed up last year\u2019s success with an even more impressive performance.<\/p>\n
Cow House completed the rodeo in 3 minutes, 11 seconds.<\/p>\n
The Avengers finished second at 3:52, and the Groundhog Bunch claimed third with a 4:11 finish.<\/p>\n
Cow House takes home its second consecutive Ranch Rodeo title, and the Josh Karsten Memorial Trophy.<\/p>\n
Although finishing second, the Avengers came together to win the Wild Cow Milking competition.<\/p>\n
Other winners on the evening included Sheldona Zwicker, whose Bay Mare was named Top Horse; Clint Wood, who was named Top Youth; and Jason Blackner, who was named Top Hand and awarded a handmade pair of stirrups, crafted by Steve Williams.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Auction wins Ranch Rodeo as fair kicks off<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":110655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6362],"tags":[188],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-110654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ds-sports","tag-dolores-star"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110654","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110654"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110654\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110654"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=110654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}