AVONDALE
Hot and dry as it is on this dusty stretch of ranchland southeast of Pueblo, Kirsten Vold is thrilled to “just be at home” this summer with a few horses and her dog, Rocky.
“Spending a summer here is new to me,” she said as she relaxed in a shady garden haven her mother created outside the main ranch house. “There are so many summer things that people do that I’ve never done.”
That’s because she was always on the road, hauling bulls and broncs from one rodeo to the next for the Vold Rodeo Company that she ran for 28 years before selling it last year.
She recalled the frustration of being stuck in Colorado Renaissance Festival traffic near Larkspur numerous times over the years — this year she went to the festival for the first time.
Then to the Missouri Day Festival in nearby Fowler, where she and friends reveled in the simplicity of a pie-eating contest.
She paid for the Colorado State Parks pass on her vehicle so she could go — just for fun — to Lake Pueblo. She and a college roommate have booked a trip to Paris and Venice this fall.
“I want to see things I have never seen,” she said.
She did watch the Pikes Peak or Bust Rodeo on television from the comfort of her home. Maybe she’ll spend an afternoon at the Colorado State Fair Rodeo — the hometown rodeo that was put on by the Vold Rodeo Company for decades.
Vold loves rodeo, especially working with the animals, but she doesn’t miss being in the midst of it. She understands now why her dad started talking about selling the business three decades ago: Managing people and a business is tough.
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The business has changed, too. Vold estimated that costs tripled over the last 10 years.
Increasingly, stock contractors and rodeo production companies have a wealthy owner or supplemental businesses to bring in extra money. Stock contractors provide animals for rodeos and production companies put on the show. Often, as in the case of the Vold Rodeo Company, they do both.
The Weld County-based Cervi Championship Rodeo company, for example, has producing oil wells, leases land to farmers and is working with a developer to build a golf resort to an unused portion of the Cervi family ranch, according to news reports.
“Owning a business this year is more expensive than it was last year. Being a stock contractor is no different,” the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association said in a statement.
“It is more expensive to transport animals and equipment, have land for your company and feed your livestock that you have to bring to the arena for rodeos, which includes bucking horses and bulls and steers and calves for the timed events.”
And yet, the PRCA said, it is often the work of the stock contractor and producer that makes or breaks a rodeo. The cowboys might be the stars, but the contractors are the backbone.
There are about 650 rodeos in the United States and Canada every year and the profit margins for the nearly 90 production companies that compete to run them is shrinking.
“When you’re losing money and you’re gone all the time, you begin to question what you’re doing,” Vold said.
A way of life
Rodeo, though, has been a part of Vold from day one. She was born in El Paso, Texas, while her parents, Harry and Nancy Vold, were working a rodeo there.
Harry Vold, known as the Duke of the Chutes, had been connected to rodeo most of his life — first in Alberta, Canada, where he was born and in Colorado after moving to the Pueblo County ranch in 1955.
Nancy Vold was the daughter of Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame clown Andy Womack. She was a trick rider and was inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1978, when Kirsten was 5 years old. Kirsten would earn the honor herself in 2022.
Rodeo was not only her heritage but her lifestyle.
Kirsten Vold grew up on the road, traveling with her family and a tutor who also participated in the pageantry of rodeos. But when it was time for high school, she decided she wanted to attend school and enrolled in Pueblo County High School.
Then it was off to Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, because it had a rodeo team. She left after a couple of years and landed back in Colorado, where she graduated in December 1996 from what was then the University of Southern Colorado (now Colorado State University Pueblo) with a degree in communications.
She took her finals early to take a marketing job in Amarillo, Texas, with the company that held the apparel license for various professional rodeo organizations. It was there she “got a whiff of corporate America” and realized that wasn’t what she wanted.
At the same time, Harry Vold was talking about selling the stock contracting business and she was trying to talk him out of it. After six months in Amarillo, she returned and took over as foreman of the Vold Rodeo Company.
She was 24.
When her dad announced the switch to the crew, “a couple guys stormed out,” she said. They didn’t want to work for the “little girl” who’d grown up on the ranch.
The workers returned but when one stormed out a second time, she didn’t take him back. That was part of her steep learning curve on being a young female boss in a man’s world.
“I grew up in this business so it wasn’t weird for me,” she said.
She persevered and the company flourished, though she noted with a chuckle that she went head-to-head with her dad regularly as her role grew.
“It wasn’t what I planned to do for 28 years,” she said. “But a couple years become 10 years. I had a full life with it.”
Harry Vold died in 2017 and her older half-siblings had their own lives and businesses, so she ran the company solo for eight years. In 2018, she moved back to the ranch full time, fixing up a small house that had been quarters for workers.
Although her mother died in January, Vold says she prefers the small house to the rambling century-old ranch house that she has fixed up as a guest house.
“It’s just right for me,” she said, showing off the cozy back porch where she spends early mornings and evenings after the chores are done. “I don’t need to heat and air-condition the big house all the time.”
Not retired
While she’s out of the rodeo production business, Vold, 53, is quick to point out that she’s not retired from working. And she’s staying in the rodeo-adjacent endeavor of breeding broncs.
“It’s the part of the business I enjoyed the most,” she said. “Breeding pays the bills around here — as long as I don’t keep too many of them.”
Some horses naturally buck more than others. If you breed a mare and a stallion that are prone to bucking, you’re more likely to get bucking offspring, she explained.
She starts handling them as soon as they are weaned, and they are trained to “behave in the chutes,” she said. Otherwise, it’s all instinct: They buck to get a rider off their back and they stop when the rider flies off.
She expects most of the horses she breeds will go to her half-brother’s rodeo production company in Alberta, Canada. Wayne Vold, 80, is mostly retired from the Wayne Vold Rodeo Co., which is run by a cousin who expressed interest in buying her horses.
She may keep them around a year or two — that part has not been decided.
Otherwise, she’s dabbled in some interior design at the ranch house and is thinking about house flipping — buying, fixing up and reselling houses.
“I have a contractor friend who calls me his apprentice,” she said with a laugh.
She ran a one-day convention rodeo in June because the pay was good, but she doesn’t see herself jumping back into the business with any regularity.
The ranch is smaller, too. The family trust sold about half of the 30,000 acres last year to a neighboring rancher, and Vold sold the rodeo company to Frontier Rodeo Company.
Vold kept the houses and outbuildings; the corrals that not long ago held nearly 30 bulls sit clean and empty.
Vold runs her John Deere Gator over the bumpy acreage to a 100-year-old cottonwood tree in an arroyo where the horses like to seek shade. She’s carting several half-filled buckets of water — “if you fill them up it just sloshes out on the way out here” — that she dumps at the base of the tree in hopes of helping it survive the drought.
A neighbor told her the roots probably go far enough down to keep it alive, but just down the way there’s another old, fully dead tree.
Then she motors back up the hill to a spot overlooking where the Huerfano River, barely a trickle this summer, cuts through the property. It’s the stock graveyard, neatly fenced and lined with identically sized stone markers.
How many graves?
Vold doesn’t know, nobody’s ever asked. Forty maybe. Probably about 40.
These were the stars. Bulls and broncs that made a name for themselves.
There’s Painted Valley, Vold’s own World Champion bucking stud (he even got an obituary on Cowboy TV). There’s Dusty Dan, 1994-2017 — “Rain or shine — bucked every time.” And there’s Harry’s first arena horse, JR, 1958-1982.
“My dad was pretty sentimental,” she said. “These animals were pretty good to us so it’s hard not to give them a proper burial.”
Vold knew last summer that the Colorado State Fair Rodeo would be her last hometown show. But she had more shows to put on and kept things quiet. She didn’t put the company on the market and rumors swirled for a few months about what was happening.
“I was being selective and I denied that the company was for sale,” she admits. “I sold to a friend and someone who takes care of his animals.”
That company was the Frontier Rodeo Company, which she and her father had traded stock with over the years.
State Fair General Manager Andrea Wiesenmeyer was hearing the rumors and, being relatively new to the job, she was nervous. How do you pick a new stock contractor and producer after decades of working with the same company?
As she sought advice she was encouraged to contact Frontier Rodeo about the time the sale fell in place. She expects the transition to be seamless.
“I think the beauty of it is that Kirsten and the guys at Frontier have worked together for years,” Wiesenmeyer said. “I don’t think fans will see any differences. She just won’t be out in front of those chutes.”
No, she won’t. The bright blue Vold Rodeo shirts are gone, her black hat is collecting dust.
Frontier Rodeo will house broncs and bulls at the Vold ranch during the fair, and Vold said she’ll be happy to see them. And she might just hop on a truck headed to the rodeo one afternoon and watch the show.
“I’ll dress like this,” she said, noting her jeans, tank top and baseball cap. “And I’ll be drinking a beer. I never got to do that.”