Puyallup Fair and Rodeo with Brittany

This is Jon. On my next rodeo tour stop of the Northwest (I call it my "Northwest Run" when I write about my travels in the newspaper, separate from my weekly column) Brittany and I traveled to Puyallup. Puyallup's a huge rodeo for a couple of reasons: 1. It pays out more than $500,000, and 2. It's a championship event of the ProRodeo Tour, which means basically refer back to reason #1.

This is Will Lowe. He's a three-time world champion bareback rider. He rodeo Mad Money to an 86-point ride in Sunday's semifinal round.

Gabe LeDoux in bulldogging, another term for steer wrestling. The guy on the horse is called the hazer. Both cowboys exit the chutes and flank the steer on each side to keep its direction consistent. While the steer wrestler gets all the credit, a percentage of his earnings goes toward the hazer because without the hazer your steer's going to go wherever the heck it wants to.

The above and below photos are of Stran Smith. This guy's the man. He's the defending world champion tie-down (calf roping) roper and just got back from a pretty bad leg/hamstring injury from early August. I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with him the other day for some stories I'm writing and he said the best part of this year was being able to spend a lot of quality time with his wife and two kids. Interestlingly enough, his wife is a television interviewer/commentator for ProRodeo and ESPN, so she's on the road just as much as he is.

This is Jordon Peterson. When I talked to her last week, she had just won about $6,000 at Ellensburg and up until recently hadn't even planned on coming up for Ellensburg. She won about the same amount in Puyallup, too. She's ranked in the top eight in the world in barrel racing.

Corey Navarre in bull riding. I chose this photo because it somewhat shows the height a bull can reach when bucking. He's actually on his way down, too, so add a foot or two to that height. Navarre got bucked off about a second later, but he did win a wad of cash by winning Ellensburg last weekend.

Fans in the stands at Puyallup. Good crowd. They were entertained. It's interesting to see crowds in different regions. At Ellensburg, it's a very educated crowd, plenty of experience with rodeo and the lifestyle so some rides/times/scores that are good, might not get a boisterous reaction. However, over in Puyallup, the fans seemed to enjoy every minute of it. That's not to say E-burg fans are quiet, it's the contrary, just different. Not much rivals the sound of close to 10,000 Ellensburg fans cheering at the top of their lungs...maybe the 50,000 fans at RodeoHouston, but I've never been there...yet.