by Cormac Dodd on
WEARING RED RIDING CHAPS emblazoned with a pair of crosses, 27-year-old Hunter Salter strikes himself richly across the chest as he stands and rotates his hips in place on a platform, extending an arm skyward through the sultry air. It’s a pose to practice for the whirlwind to come. Many miles of juniper desert plains surround the East Mountain Cowboy Church arena in Edgewood, east of Albuquerque. Soon, Salter sits poised in the white chute, hunched over a bull, summoning the requisite amount of focus to ride a complicated, dangerous animal, where the difference between triumph and pain are determined in milliseconds. In the moment before the chute opens, only spurs stir amid an isolated event of trial and error: this lonely bucking bull practice that is shared by a handful of cowboys who ride in the rodeo grounds alongside Historic Route 66.
After the gate bangs ajar, Salter wins a seat—for a spell. Eight seconds feels absurdly long for this wild of a dance. Upon the third pounding twist of a 1,600-pound bull named City Lights, the rider is shot off onto his back.
Justin Neill, a bull rider from Chilili, has known Salter since they were boys. Since today is just practice, a small sermon ensues about what went wrong in the hips. “Hunter, them first two rounds were perfect, and then it kind of got you out here a little bit,” Neill says, gesturing. “Your shoulders, you’re not riding forward.”
Salter had yearned for an eight-second ride that day. Not with country music pouring from speakers, not with Stetson-wearing fans in the stands—just honest-to-goodness practice. Since he and his wife moved to San Juan County, a drive of several hours from the arena, these moments of hustle always feel like home for the local rider, who has longed to establish himself on the professional rodeo circuit since he was a boy. Rodeo cowboys travel thousands of miles for such an opportunity—just eight seconds in duration, and usually much shorter than that.
It’s a common enough dream around these parts, where the Cowboy Church can be the burning center of childhood reverie. “In the summer, you can rodeo for 100 days straight and be up somewhere new every day from the middle of June through August,” says Salter. “That varies drastically if you’re doing good. I’ve had a rough spell for a couple of years now, so it hasn’t been very many lately.” His ambition this year is to turn out a run of fine form on the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association, or PRCA, circuit; aiming for the Turquoise Circuit Finals, for PRCA athletes from Arizona and New Mexico.
He says that’s why he puts in the practice hours. “When you’re hot, you’re hot. When you’re not, you’re not. It can switch like that.”
SCENES LIKE THIS CAN BE found across the rural West, as cowboys train for life on the bull-riding circuit. The rodeo road wends its way through New Mexico, a state with some 1.3 million head of cattle and seemingly endless range property. Here, the sport and the spectacle have endured in popularity for more than a century. These days, there’s no indication of a slowdown in spectators, as rodeo rides the current wave of heightened mainstream interest in all things Western. But it has always been popular in places like Edgewood—where, they say, the mountains meet the plains.
This March afternoon, as the cowboys open gates and mount familiar stock, conversation centers on bulls from the past, animals that are characterized by their temperament. A whiff of obsession permeates this talk, with stories of a left-spinning one that, irrespective of precedent, hooked right; tales of a tricky one that was straddled in Elk City, Oklahoma; and one rascal who was prone to proudly sprint around the arena after bucking off a man. They video-record rides to later pore over technique in a quest for clues couched in the blurred haze of varied rearing, tumbling, and bruising bouts.
Salter saw his top night in 2021, in Dickinson, North Dakota, where he holds the arena record in a faraway land with a score of 92.5 out of 100. Now, with some help from his wife, Elizabeth Florez-Salter, he does an accounting of some of his recent injuries, including a torn groin, broken jaw, broken collarbone, separated joints, and torn ligaments.
“I had to have a surgery to remove a cyst from the inside of my leg, and right when we come back from that, first bull back, I broke my jaw and had to have it fixed,” he recounts. “Then that got infected, so that lasted way longer than it should have, and I had my knee surgery just before that. And that’s just the past few years.”
THERE ARE AMPLE YEAR-ROUND opportunities to watch bull riders in New Mexico. The venues range from an affair put on by the mounted sheriff’s posse organization in Bernalillo—where the earth is dusty beneath the tread of myriad hooves, the chutes tight, and the bronc riders your neighbors—to the lofty spectacle of the Ty Murray Invitational at the Pit in Albuquerque, where the cowboys can earn millions of dollars in prize money. Of the numerous rodeos throughout the U.S. in any given year, New Mexico holds its fair share, including a slate of PRCA rodeos in Clovis, Lovington, Santa Fe, and Socorro counties. The PRCA sanctions more than 600 pro rodeos nationally each year.
Although bull riding is merely one of the staple events of a rodeo, it has always provoked the most acute interest. Its reputation as the most breakneck sport in contemporary life is justified. Some of these young men eagerly apply for their PRCA card, known as a “permit,” no later than the day of their 18th birthday, more than ready to reckon with the stark realities of life on the circuit. During a rider’s high-octane summer run, 10 rodeos in five days might be the norm if you’re convinced a payday beckons only a night’s drive up the lonely road to Amarillo, even if you are limping to the car from another arena. You might draw well in Sisters, Oregon, but then your luck abandons you in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, thousands of miles from home.
Everyone’s chasing the nights of bright-white triumphs. You hear the buzzer and roll from the hips of a raging bull called Court Room or Hazard Pay like it’s nothing—though it is bent, with every ounce of its 2,000-pound-body, on creating your demise. $10,000 for eight seconds? Who else makes that money so quickly? Nights with such a payday can justify a sport—and a business—that much of the American public watches with unmitigated glee but never fathoms attempting.
“YOU WANT NEW MEXICO?” Justin Neill asks on a spring day in the East Mountains, grinning while he dons a pair of yellow riding chaps proudly decorated with Zia symbols and roadrunners. When we meet in late March, his wife is poised to give birth soon. Neill does not want to miss anything, so he talks about easing up on his rodeo schedule this year. “It’s the only truly blue-collar sport left,” he says.
Asked what type of bull he most prefers, Neill replies, “I’ll get on anything.” Although his father is from Texas and his mother from Wyoming, his loyalty lies with the Land of Enchantment. He quotes the 1994 movie The Cowboy Way, starring Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland as bull riders who go to New York City. “ ‘Oh, you guys must be real cowboys from Texas.’ And he says, ‘No, there ain’t no cowboys in Texas. They’re from New Mexico.’ ”
No two arenas are the same in this state. Towns too small to appear on most maps come alive in unexpected ways on rodeo nights. Rare viewing spaces have been shaped out of some of the region’s most striking landscapes, such as the Pecos rodeo arena, located not far from the river. Here, men from the rural San Miguel County town ride up on their own horses, nursing sweating beer bottles brought from home as they look on from the arena’s outskirts.
Pulling into a gas station off I-25 in Belén to fill up the tank, you might hear the lyrical baritone voice of a rodeo announcer asking God to look down upon the cowboys and cowgirls whose heads are bowed in the arena behind the Speedway. Craning your neck, you see dozens of youths in identical straw cowboy hats mulling around the chutes.
A hazy arena in suburban Bernalillo offers a postcard image of the Sandía Mountains before the sun’s descent, every color accentuated by the dust twisting down through the air. Children, still in spurs, play seriously in the abundant sand. Lifted pickups park around the arena, vaqueros sitting on folding chairs with their families in the truck beds.
Although the state is represented on the pro rodeo circuit by the likes of Shad Mayfield, a world-champion tie-down roper from Clovis, and Korbin Rice, a team roper from Hobbs who earned $65,000 at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo this year, New Mexico representation largely lags behind many of its peers in the West. Longtime rodeo people say it was not always this way. A 35-year-old veteran bull rider who spent time in the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) organization and the PRCA, Scottie Knapp has amassed at least $600,000 on the professional rodeo circuit in his career. He started young, riding sheep at age three, and graduated from the Estancia Valley Learning Center, in Torrance County, as part of a class of 16, five of them bull riders. But Knapp, who lives in Moriarty, says not many kids are coming up in the same lifestyle he did.
“People aren’t raising their kids in it. It’s dangerous, and it’s a sport where you are going to get hurt. It’s not if—it’s when and how bad,” Knapp says. “To know you’re going to have to watch your kid get hurt at some point in time, I think it’s hard to put them in that predicament.”
Still, he would not trade this life for another. Every year, the yellow bucking chutes of the National Finals Rodeo beckon from Las Vegas—in Nevada, not New Mexico. So Knapp goes hard, traveling to around 100 PRCA rodeos a year. The organization scores cowboys based on the amount of money earned at organization-sanctioned rodeos throughout the year, with the top 15 in each rodeo event qualifying for the finals. Even in an off year, one dogged by injuries, Knapp can still make around $55,000. In 2016, he made the finals. This year, he’s found a groove after long hauls across the heartland, winning on a bull named Funky Town at the Fort Bend County Fair & Rodeo, in Texas, and on another called Mo Jo at the Tangipahoa Parish Fair and PRCA Rodeo, in Louisiana.
“You can make a living riding bulls,” he says with determination. “There’s no doubt about it. Whether you’re in the PBR or the PRCA, now’s the best time to be a bull rider than it’s ever been.”
NO ONE HAS YET DONNED riding chaps about an hour before takeoff, yet the men are already dancing in place, their backs rigid. The general heat of expectation settles over the arena for the annual WildThing Championship Bullriding event, billed as a top bull riding tournament in the Southwest and held at Gallup’s Red Rock Park each July. At halftime, the stadium is plunged into darkness. Real fire illuminates the triumphant outline of a bull skull staged on the sandstone bluffs surrounding the show arena.
Odey Tom, 21, sits up on the chute gate. His belt buckle, inlaid with turquoise and inscribed with the words “WILD THING,” sometimes catches the waning sun the way good silver can. Red Rock Park represents the same familiar buttes and reddish clay dirt where he witnessed his father ride bulls as a child. A Navajo rider who resides in Gallup, Tom has excelled at the WildThing Championship Bullriding in recent years. But before the event last July, Tom had mostly been working on a ranch in Arizona.
“I rodeo when my dad doesn’t need help,” he explains. “When he needs some help with the cattle, I’ll give him some.”
Larry Peterson, the longtime promoter of the WildThing Championship Bullriding, tells a story about how Tom called after he won WildThing in 2024 with a 92-point ride, wondering how he was supposed to cash a $10,000 check. His father competed several times at the championship during Tom’s youth, acquainting him with these electric nights, when the sandstone facade of Church Rock catches the day’s last gleams of sunlight as the bulls enter their pens. “I used to go scramble through my dad’s gear bag, putting on his stuff, running around with it on,” he remembers. “It kind of rubbed off on me.”
Nearby, other cowboys are assembled in a nearly straight line, yanking their ropes tied to the pens with fervent simultaneity, applying rosin for enhanced grip. They are men in big hats and boots with two-inch heels from towns whose lush names carry a certain glory, almost none boasting any more than a population of 10,000 souls: Vanderwagen. Ramah. Mariano Lake. Salado, Texas. Rough Rock, Arizona. Red Mesa, Utah.
In the end, Tom finishes third with an 87-point ride for a nice bounty. His friends toss their hats into the ring for him, a mix of straw and felt headgear whirling through the air. From here, he’ll roll off the bull and go home—perhaps to dream about another eight seconds, and a bigger payday, in the red dirt where his dad once rode too.