The usually sleepy Rio Arriba County Rural Events Center came alive last week as hundreds of visitors attended the 2009 County Fair.
After light rains July 30, visitors enjoyed clear blue skies by Saturday. The event featured dozens of events centered around rural life and drew dozens of youth and adult participants from throughout the County.
Rodeo queen and recent Pojoaque High School graduate Michelle Herrera, 18, took first place for showmanship with her paint horse. She will now compete for state rodeo queen, her sister Nicole Herrera said.
“Michelle’s working full-time at the Lab and is going to school full-time at (the University of New Mexico-Los Alamos), and still comes home to work with the animals,” a clearly proud Nicole Herrera said. “She has three buffalo. When she started 4-H, she started right away with 1,500-pound steers, manhandling them.”
While Herrera and others wrapped up their 4-H and Future Farmers of America careers and prepared for college, younger competitors were just getting started. Trevor Martinez, 8, took a pig home to Canjilon after beating a dozen other children in a mad-dash greased pig scramble. Dustin Martinez, 11, of Diamond, Okla., took first place among four finalists in the elk bugling contest.
Youth competed outside the fairgrounds arena as well, as Army National Guardsmen from Rio Rancho strapped children into rock-climbing gear and sent them scrambling up a portable climbing wall.
“We’ve had 30 kids so far,” Private First Class Deandre Smith said as he double-checked a harness for a grinning Delilah Romero, 8, who was preparing for her second ascent.
The wall is part of the National Guard’s anti-drug education mission for children, Smith said.
Francisco Salazar, 10, hopped down from his climb up the wall, eager to show his Grand Champion award for tin work.
“My grandma showed me how,” Salazar said, holding up his ribbon-festooned, punched-tin work Virgin de Guadalupe. “I did it bit by bit. My grandmother glued the Virgin to the tin because kids can’t smell the glue fumes. They’re not healthy.”
Salazar will take his award-winning tin work to the State Fair, his mother, Dolores, said. Salazar’s Carinos 4-H group also took first place for a Spirit table exhibiting their projects.
When visitors were not viewing animal exhibits, watching horse racing, elk bugling or bull rides, or looking over contestants’ tin work, rocketry projects, painting and 4-H displays on everything from livestock disease to human nutrition, they were buying snacks of dubious nutritional value from vendors.
Three generations of Gina Duran’s family from Chamita, said business was good.
“We’ll go all over the state this year,” Gina Duran said, standing next to her son Paul and granddaughter Ismarelda Marquez, 3. “We’ve been doing it for 20 years, selling fry bread, snow cones, Southwest cuisine. We just finished up at Taos and will go to Santa Clara next for the feasts.”