Valley View Rodeo

Thursday on North Black Avenue

On rodeo nights the Cowboy Market opens in Denecke Park at four in the afternoon, with local vendors trading until eight. The arena gates at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds open at 5:30, the pre-rodeo starts at 6:30, and the performance runs from seven to nine. Food trucks park on the grounds and change from week to week. A full-service bar works beside them, and in 2026 the evening also carried live entertainment. Outside alcohol is not allowed, and the only animals admitted from outside are service animals.

The fairgrounds lie ten blocks north of Main Street, where Bozeman’s historic street grid ends: 26 buildings on 78 acres, now surrounded by the city. The rodeo is not a fairgrounds event. It is put on by an independent organizer that rents the arena.

Nearest the dirt is the VIP Pen, a section of whiskey-barrel tables with its own bar. The four-tops seat up to five on barstools, and eight-tops are offered for larger parties. Each table is set before the action with charcuterie, champagne, and water. Holders of VIP tables are asked to check in before 6:30, because, in the rodeo’s words, “We don’t want you to miss the first ride!” Brittney Jones, the producer and managing director, said in June 2026 that her phone fills with people who have family coming to town and with bachelor and bachelorette parties wanting a table: “it’s just something really cool for everybody to do here in Bozeman.”

Eight seconds and three barrels

The program divides into roughstock and timed events. In bareback, saddle bronc, and bull riding, a rider must stay on one-handed for eight seconds to qualify. Animal and rider are each scored from 1 to 50. A bull is judged on front-end drop, backspin, kick, and changes of direction, and its rider on body position, leg motion, the free hand, and keeping that hand off the bull. Bronc and bareback riders must “mark out,” keeping their boots above the horse’s shoulders until the front legs hit the ground on the first jump.

The timed events are team roping, breakaway, and barrel racing. In team roping the header ropes the steer around both horns, half a head, or the neck, then turns it so the heeler can rope both hind feet. In breakaway the clock stops when a flag tied to the rope breaks from the roper’s saddle. Barrel racers run a three-barrel triangle and take a five-second penalty for each barrel knocked over. The rodeo’s own website lays all of this out under the heading “Is this your first rodeo?”

The arena is open to all comers. “We’re an open rodeo, we’re not sanctioned, anybody can come,” Jones said. “That was Brandon’s dream, is that it gave a platform for the young ones that are still learning, to the pros just stopping by from qualifiers.” Two nights each June are the exception. In 2026, June 25 and 26 appeared on the Northern Rodeo Association schedule between Wilsall and the Polson and Big Timber rodeos, with slack at eight on the first morning and performances both nights at seven.

The Fourth, the Finals, and the Bobcats

The 2026 season ran from June 4 to August 27, mostly on Thursdays, with a couple of Fridays and a Saturday for the Fourth of July. That Saturday was billed as a Ranch Rodeo and Fireworks Celebration. “We’re doing our very first ranch rodeo on July 4,” Jones said that June.

Points carried across the summer to the Valley View Finals on August 27, 2026. The 2026 Finals also staged Tackle for Turquoise. Thirty women signed up at the box office on a first-come basis, signed waivers, and went into the arena after rodeo clown Koby Ruff, who carried a football. The first to tackle him and take the ball won a turquoise necklace from Miles Away Silver, valued at $250, and a tumbler. The rodeo’s announcement ended: “Come for the Finals. Stay for 30 women chasing a rodeo clown around the arena for turquoise.”

The night after the Finals belongs to the Montana State University rodeo team. The 4th Annual MSU Meet the Bobcats Rodeo Team event, on August 28, 2026, served as the team’s season opener, and all ticket proceeds went to the Bobcats for their 2026–2027 season. The third edition had been held on August 23, 2025.

Brandon Blackstock’s open rodeo

The series was announced on May 25, 2023, in a press release promising roughstock, barrel racing, and team roping at the fairgrounds through June, July, and August. The first night was set for May 31. Gates were to open at 3:30, slack would run from four to six, and the rodeo from seven to nine. The contact named was Brittney Jones.

The founder was Brandon Blackstock. According to a Bozeman radio station, he settled in Bozeman after his divorce from Kelly Clarkson, with whom he had spent time on a Montana ranch, and started the rodeo in 2023. He had built his career representing Blake Shelton and was the stepson of Reba McEntire. NBC Montana described his goal as a simple one: create opportunities for competitors of all skill levels and put on a show every week during the summer.

The first season drew 10,000 attendees, by the count of the Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber’s 2025 fiscal-year tourism plan listed the rodeo among the town’s opportunities and noted that it would host ten rodeos from June through August. The rodeo’s ticketing page puts the figure at more than 25,000 fans each season. “Last year we sold out every single rodeo, that was mind blowing to me,” Jones said in June 2026.

Blackstock died on August 7, 2025, at 48. His family’s statement said he had “bravely battled cancer for more than three years” and “passed away peacefully and was surrounded by family.” That week Clarkson had told fans she was cancelling her Las Vegas residency because her children’s father had been ill. The rodeo went on to a fourth season in 2026. When the season closed, it posted: “Four seasons in, and this community just keeps getting better.”

The ground Louis Menage lost

The arena stands on land with a longer story, and its tellers do not agree on every turn. The fairgrounds’ own history says the grounds have served the community since 1902, that the first fair was held there in 1903, and that a group of Bozeman pioneers bought the property from the University of Syracuse in 1898 for the express purpose of a regional fairgrounds.

Courtney Kramer, then Bozeman’s Historic Preservation Officer, gave a fuller account in Bozeman Magazine in 2015. The land had belonged to Louis Menage, whose Northwestern Guaranty Loan speculated in real estate between Minneapolis and Seattle. Through his Bozeman attorney, William Imes, Menage subdivided three additions to the town in 1890, betting that voters would make Bozeman the state capital. Bozeman finished fourth, and Kramer notes that Menage’s Capitol Hill Addition is now home to Montana State University, which the town received as a third-runner-up prize. The panic of 1893 broke his company. Menage fled to Canada and then South America, was reported murdered in Honduras in 1895, and returned to Minneapolis in June 1899 to face charges of stealing nearly $700,000. Meanwhile a court ordered his Bozeman holdings sold at a sheriff’s auction. In September 1895, “for reasons that remain unclear,” Syracuse University placed the high bid of $16,682.

In Kramer’s account, Syracuse kept the land and partnered with the Inter-State Fair Association, led by Nelson Story, F. L. Benepe, Julius Lehrkind, and Walter Sales, which sold shares to pay for improvements. In 1903 the Butte Inter-Mountain reported the contract let for fencing 80 acres and a new grandstand for 1,000 people. The paper said the track would be “one of the fastest in the Northwest,” that there would be an effort to draw the state fair away from Helena, and that “the expenses are being borne by the local sportsmen.” The 1904 Sanborn map shows a mile-long racetrack and a two-story grandstand facing northeast, which kept spectators in the shade, all inside an eight-foot fence. The entrance, at the end of North Black Avenue on Tamarack Street, had a gate and a ticket box.

Kramer records that Gallatin County bought the grounds from Syracuse in 1914 for $9,000. World War II curtailed the fair, and livestock shows brought ranchers back by the late 1940s. A ball field went in after 1949, and a landing strip was in use by 1950. By the 1957 map the racetrack was gone. City Commission minutes from the 1950s through the 1970s record permit requests for Jaycees teenage dances and Fourth of July fireworks. In 2016 the fair took a new name, the Big Sky Country State Fair. In the 1980s, parades for the College National Finals Rodeo began or ended on the grounds.