Gunnison Cattlemen's Days PRCA Rodeo

At seven in the evening on three July nights, the covered grandstand at the Fred R. Field Western Heritage Center and Fairgrounds in Gunnison fills for the Cattlemen’s Days PRCA Rodeo. The grounds sit at 7,800 feet, one block south of U.S. Highway 50 behind the Safeway, and the gate opens at 5:30.

The program runs through the standard Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association events:

• bareback and saddle bronc riding
• tie-down and team roping
• steer wrestling
• barrel racing
• bull riding

In bull riding a cowboy tries to stay eight seconds on a spinning, bucking bull of about 2,000 pounds, holding only a flat braided rope. When a rider goes down, the rodeo clowns draw the bull away until he reaches safety. Barrel racers enter the arena at over 40 miles per hour, the committee’s program says, and run a cloverleaf around three steel barrels. Tipping a barrel costs a penalty.

The committee calls the event the “Granddaddy of Colorado Rodeos.” It describes it as the longest-running rodeo in Colorado and the fourth longest in the country. The Colorado Directory calls it the oldest continuous ProRodeo in the state.

Three nights, three colors

Each rodeo night has a theme and a color for the crowd.

• Thursday is Golden Circle of Champions night, in black and gold. Proceeds go to the Golden Circle of Champions, a nonprofit that supports children with pediatric cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.
• Friday is Patriot Night, in red, white and blue. The visitor bureau calls it the main event.
• Saturday is Gunnison Ranchland Conservation Legacy Night. It benefits a nonprofit that helps valley landowners place conservation easements on their ranches.

The 2027 rodeo nights are July 15, 16 and 17.

In 2026, Patriot Night ended with a free drone light show for Colorado’s 150th and the nation’s 250th anniversaries. It was a signature initiative of the America 250 – Colorado 150 Commission. When barrel racing began around 9 p.m., the gates opened to people without rodeo tickets. They watched the barrels and the bull riding before the drones went up, and an arena dance ran during the show. The food and beer tents stayed open until 11:30.

The rodeo also spills into town. On Thursday there is a concert next door at 5B’s BBQ. On Saturday, after the last performance, there is a block party at the Sage Grouse Lounge. On Thursday morning, before the first evening show, comes the slack: preliminary rounds for the extra entries that will not fit into the evening performances.

Fair week on the grounds

The rodeo closes a longer program. In 2026 the season opened with a benefit golf tournament for the Golden Circle of Champions on June 12. A carnival followed on the grounds over the Independence Day weekend, July 2 to 5. The visitor bureau gives the 2026 dates of Cattlemen’s Days as July 3 to 11.

The 4-H and FFA shows run through the week in the Rubber Room and the Concrete Room. Children show horses, dogs, rabbits, poultry, swine, market sheep, goats and cattle, compete in showmanship, and enter general projects from cake decorating to rocketry. The livestock program ends on Saturday with a buyers’ barbecue at 12:30 and the Junior Livestock Auction at 1:30.

The working-ranch events fill the early days:

• The Open Horse Show, in its 84th year by the committee’s count, took the first Sunday in 2026. Classes ran from stud colts to open reining and open western pleasure.
• The ranch rodeo, on July 4, set teams from working ranches against one another in stray gathering, calf branding, trailer loading and bronc riding.
• The watershed events are local contests that visitors can enter or watch: ranch sort, barrel races and team roping. The visitor bureau says the ranch rodeo and the watershed roping and barrels are free.

Monday brought three events: Trudy Vader’s Working Ranch Competition, a cattle drive event with a trail challenge and open sort, and an evening of cowboy poetry. The committee’s schedule puts the poetry at the Pioneer Museum. The visitor bureau places it in the Cattlemen’s Hospitality Tent and describes an open mic for poems and songs.

Tuesday evening belongs to the smallest and newest riders. Mini Broncs and Mini Bulls start at six. Children ages 5 to 7 try mutton busting, holding on to sheep for as long as they can. Women’s bronc riding follows; the 2026 ticket page marked it “NEW!”

At ten on Saturday morning the parade comes down Main Street. Local organizations ride floats and throw candy, and rodeo contestants and the Cattlemen’s Days queen and her court ride horseback. Rick Barton was the 2026 parade marshal. The week ends on Sunday morning with Cowboy Church at the Paragon Schoolhouse at the Pioneer Museum, which in 2026 showed “The American Cowboy.”

The committee says the whole event is staged by “our committee, volunteers, and the community.” Tyler Hanson signs the president’s letter inviting visitors to the 127th celebration in 2027.

A hometown bronc rider, 2026

At the opening performance on July 9, 2026, Coleman Shallbetter rode at home. He was 21 and the top-ranked rookie bronc rider in the PRCA. He had left the Calgary Stampede on Wednesday afternoon and driven about 20 hours back to the Gunnison Valley. On United Pro Rodeo’s Sky Fall he scored 84 points to share the saddle bronc lead with Skinny Parsons, the Gunnison Country Times reported. The next day he was due in Casper, Wyoming, and then back to Calgary. “Last year I got folded up pretty hard, but things progressed a little better this year,” he told the paper.

The same night, Danielle Lowman of Gilbert, Arizona, set an arena record in breakaway roping at 1.6 seconds. She rode Mijo, a horse her cousin owns. Nobody made a qualified ride in the bull riding.

Between calving and haying

Cattle came to the valley before the town did. The Gunnison County Historic Preservation Commission dates the start to a cow camp set up in the early 1870s to supply beef to the Ute Indian Agency.

Alonzo Hartman crossed the Continental Divide with one of the first herds brought into western Colorado and reached Gunnison on Christmas Day 1872. In his biography he recalled: “The first winter was the worst; five feet of snow… We had 2000 head of sheep and 3000 head of cattle to take care of in that deep snow, but we never lost a single one.” He and his wife, Annie, built the Dos Rios Ranch and a stone house now known as the Hartman Castle. A preservation group is raising money to buy it.

The railroad arrived in 1880. Ranching outlasted the decline of silver mining in the late 1890s, and the county’s producers established the Hereford as a high-altitude breed.

The contests grew out of that ranch work, though accounts differ on when:

• The Colorado Virtual Library places the first informal riding and roping among Gunnison horsemen in the early 1880s.
• The committee says only “the 1800s.”
• The visitor bureau says the late 1880s.

All three set the contests on Main Street, in the break between spring calving and summer haying. Horse races and livestock shows were added early.

The founding date varies by source as well:

• Cattle ranchers formed the Gunnison County Stockgrowers Association in 1894, according to the library.
• The visitor bureau says the event was formalized in 1900, and the committee’s banner reads “Rodeo Since 1900.”
• The library says the association held the first Cattlemen’s Days on Main Street in 1901.
• The committee says that by 1901 the Gunnison Valley Stockgrowers Association sponsored the celebration and the name became official.
• The local author Judy Buffington Sammons counts “almost every year since 1902.”

Before the name Cattlemen’s Days, the event tried out Pioneer Days and the Helldorado Stampede, which the visitor bureau spells Hellorado. The library also says the rodeo is “said to be” the longest continuous rodeo in the United States, while the committee claims fourth.

From 1913 through 1928 the rodeo and races used the track and stands at Colorado Normal School, now Western State Colorado University. From 1929 to 1936 they returned downtown. The newly formed Cattlemen’s Days Association then built facilities on the present site with community help and held its first celebration there in 1937.

The Gunnison County Library keeps the event’s records, including programs, brochures and a photograph of the 1982 queen, Keri George. It began digitizing them in 2016, starting with the newest items.

Main and Virginia, 1916

Writing in the Gunnison Country Times in 2020, Sammons quoted the Gunnison News Champion’s report from a century earlier: “What a celebration ... cattlemen, merry-go-rounds, cowpunchers, popcorn, horses, ice cream, more cowpunchers, red silk handkerchiefs, people, cars, races, brass bands, an eight legged calf, snakes ….”

The 1916 celebration opened with a parade of horses and riders, teams and wagons, and early motor cars. It was held at the junction of Main and Virginia, with booths along both sides of the street and a carnival alongside them. Ranchers, ranch hands and a great many cowgirls had ridden in on their working ponies, some from more than twenty miles away.

The newspaper did not say whether every contest ran downtown. In the library’s account, those were the Normal School years. The program included:

• horse races and team driving contests
• bucking horse contests and horse shows
• whip relay races
• a “ladies with glass of water race,” in which each rider carried a glass of water at full speed for 200 yards, and the one with the most water left won
• a chuck wagon race, described as “a splendid exhibition of skill and accuracy with a round-up outfit”
• a wild horse race, in which some horses, it was said, “threw riders, some jumped fences, and some took sections of the fence with them”

Afterward an immense crowd went to a big party at the LaVeta Hotel. Then the cowboys, cowgirls and ponies rode home to the ranches. “The not so nearly exciting haying season was about to begin,” Sammons wrote.