Three Forks Rodeo

The gates of the Three Forks Rodeo grounds, on Montana Highway 2, open at six in the evening, and the performance begins at seven. There are two performances, Friday and Saturday, on the third weekend of July. The rodeo’s own reckoning has a wrinkle: when July 1 falls on a Sunday, that weekend counts as the first. The 2026 rodeo was held July 17 and 18.

The contestants are the cowboys and cowgirls of the Northern Rodeo Association. The program runs through bareback riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, steer wrestling, tie-down roping and team roping. It also includes ladies’ barrel racing and ladies’ breakaway roping, with junior barrel racing and junior breakaway roping for younger riders. Trick riders perform during the program. In 2026 Audrey Snellman returned, and Gracie Stolfus rode for the first time.

Friday night and the food bank

Friday is family night. Any child who drops off a non-perishable food donation at the gate gets in free. Children six and under are free on either night, and tickets for ages seven to twelve are otherwise $10. The food goes to the Headwaters Area Food Bank, which serves Three Forks and the surrounding places of Pony, Harrison and Clarkston. In July 2024, Friday night competed with concerts, another rodeo nearby and the county fair. Even so, the board chairman, Casey Elmose, reported, “we still collected just under 800 pounds of food.” On the Saturday night of that year, just over 2,900 people attended. Gate sales stop when 3,000 tickets have been sold for a performance.

Food comes from the cook shack and, in recent years, from food trucks parked alongside it. Elmose wrote that the trucks “helped streamline the time to get your food from the cook shack” and help the board feed its volunteers. In 2024 every vendor space was taken. The vendors sold craft jewelry, western clothing and cowboy hats, and local sporting groups raised money for their teams.

The weekend opens in town with the Three Forks Chamber of Commerce’s Farmers Market and Kids Stick Horse Derby. Local businesses donate the stick horses. A 2022 question posted on the rodeo’s page placed the derby on the Thursday.

Pancakes, a parade, and a street dance

After each performance the crowd moves downtown for a street dance on Main Street. Live music plays at both the Sacajawea end and the Plaza/Frontier end.

On Saturday morning, from 6 to 10, the Three Forks Volunteer Fire Department serves breakfast “for anyone willing to get up early.” The menu is pancakes, scrambled eggs and, as the rodeo puts it, “typically ham.” The Chamber of Commerce then closes Main Street for Rodeo Dayz. A parade starts at 11, and downtown vendors run specials and sales the rest of the day. There has been a parade with the rodeo every year since the first one.

Gymnasium seats and the No-Go Rodeo

For about forty years, spectators sat on bleachers donated from Montana State University. The university gave the seats away when it upgraded the gymnasium bleachers in its fieldhouse. The rodeo board later wrote that those indoor seats “long outlived their prime.” In January of the year the project began, the Three Forks City Council approved the board’s purchase of 2,289 ADA-accessible grandstand seats. The money came from cash reserves, grants, loan proceeds and private gifts. The private goal was $110,000 by July 1, 2020. By April 28, $40,500 had been raised, much of it from Tom Kanta and the Estate of Richard Townsend. MontanaSports put the cost of the project at $600,000. It reported that the seats were installed just weeks before COVID-19 arrived that March.

In 2020, by the rodeo’s account, the arena sat quiet for the first time in generations. Townspeople instead staged what became known as the “No-Go Rodeo,” a fundraising effort and video event that covered expenses. “We were able to make all of our payments last year without having pretty much any events down here at all,” Elmose told MontanaSports the following summer. (The report spells his name Elmore.)

The rodeo returned as the 75th annual Three Forks Rodeo. On the Friday night, lines stretched outside an hour before the gates opened, every seat sold, and the crowd stood where it could. “I mean, the whole community is pretty much paying for them, so I’m just tickled to death to have it,” Elmose said of the new bleachers. Rick Sisco, a resident, said, “the rodeo grounds are obviously one of the things that glued the community together.” The rodeo’s history page reports a further bleacher expansion now underway.

From the roping club to the board

The first Three Forks rodeo was held in 1946. Harley Fitzhugh and Tex Simpson promoted it, and members of the Three Forks/Willow Creek Roping Club put it on, on the same ground where it is held today. The roping club ran it for four or five years. Don Scoffield, Jack Rea, Monte Parker, LeRoy Miller and Dick Lower were among the members who helped. Ben Peterson was also a big part of the rodeo and was named Grand Marshal in 1961.

Jack Rea and the Three Forks Booster Club ran the rodeo for the next couple of years. Three doctors, Larry Laird, Lin Durham and Ed Bertagnolli, are remembered as a great influence. The rodeo’s history page says the doctors earned so much money from the rodeo that they were able to buy the band new uniforms. Rea and his family then ran the event until the Jaycees and the Three Forks Junior Chamber of Commerce took over for two years. The Three Rivers Saddle Club was formed in 1975 and ran the rodeo until the club dissolved in 2001. Since then the Board of Directors of the Three Forks Rodeo Grounds has put it on. The 1998 rodeo was the first held in the renovated facility.

The NRA and WRA contestants and board of directors voted Three Forks the NRA Golden Rodeo of the Year in 2008. It received the same honor in 2014 and again in 2021. No city or county money supports the rodeo. It runs on business sponsorships and advertising, ticket sales, concessions and participant fees.

The board has seven members, with Casey Elmose as chairman. The city’s page says the Mayor appoints them, while an older page on the rodeo’s site says the City Council does. Whobee Hughes, the arena manager, keeps the grounds. Board members Gene Townsend and Mike Lane, with volunteer Les Ziegler, have worked the concession stand during the spring high school rodeo.

The July rodeo is only the largest of the arena’s events. The grounds host team ropings, barrel races, o-mok-sees, youth rodeos, mounted shooter practices and a roughstock rodeo through the summer and fall. In September 2026 the calendar listed the Wrangler Team Roping Championship and the Bridger Mountain Youth Rodeo.

For the 70th anniversary, Rocky Cushman of Rockies Gunworks in Three Forks built two custom rifles for a fundraiser. One was a .243 Winchester and the other a 7mm Remington Magnum, both with Shilen stainless barrels and glass-bedded synthetic stocks. The highest bidder in an online auction chose one. The other went to a raffle, with tickets at a dollar apiece or six for five dollars, and the drawing was held on the Saturday night, before the bull riding.