When Kirsten Vold, 31, took over as manager of her father’s legendary rodeo stock company, the Harry Vold Rodeo Co., in 1998, heads turned, rumors flew and even some tempers flared.
By David Frey
Above a tangle of corral gates, cowboys in black hats, bright Western shirts and frilly leather chaps stretch their legs and steel their courage. Below them are a half-dozen livestock chutes loaded with rambunctious bulls and spirited broncos ready to bolt into the small rodeo arena in eastern Colorado. It’s easy to pick out Kirsten Vold inside this maze.
She’s the one who isn’t a he.
The rodeo world remains very much a man’s world. Young men test their strength and skills in a battle against nature as their fathers and grandfathers did.
So, when Vold, 31, took over as manager of her father’s legendary rodeo stock company, the Harry Vold Rodeo Co., in 1998, heads turned, rumors flew and even some tempers flared. Vold handled it all the same way she handles an uncooperative bucking horse: with patience, determination and Western moxie. Over the last six years, she’s managed to convince even some stubborn cowboys that there’s a place for a cowgirl in the rodeo world.
“She’s a pioneer; not an easy thing,” says her mother Karen Vold, 65. “And when she first decided to do it, it was very tough. You have to prove yourself to a crew that’s been there longer than you or is older than you, and to the cowboys. But she did prove herself. She never asked anybody to do anything that she won’t do right alongside them. So she’s earned their respect.”
Before the cowboys drop into the saddle and long after they’ve hit the dirt, Vold is at work in the chutes. Stock companies such as hers provide the bulls, steers, calves, and bucking horses to rodeos and get them ready to give the cowboys the ride—or roping—of their lives. As fresh horses gallop snorting from a stock truck into the rodeo gates, Vold rushes in as other cowpokes run for cover.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” she shouts, staring down a wild, whirling bay and chasing it into a pen as it wheels.
“Kirsten, you’re scaring the horses,” one cowboy jokes. “At least she’s not scaring the cowboys,” says another.
Or maybe she is. After taking over her father’s company, she faced scorn from some cowboys who thought women didn’t belong in the arena. She’s had ranch hands—men and women—hang up their hats rather than work for her.
There’s nothing easy about the rodeo business, says Harold Dean, who raises bucking bulls in Beulah, Colo. That’s especially true for women. “They have to prove themselves more than some hairy-legged, pot-bellied fool who’s been doing it for 40 years,” he says. “But that’s true in anything.”
Bucking tradition
Kirsten Vold is an unlikely personality in the chutes. Never mind that she’s a woman. She’s effervescent and quick with a laugh in a stoic Western world. Sometimes her wardrobe’s more Calvin Klein than cowboy, her musical tastes more Aerosmith than Alan Jackson.
“I’ve never been a very good traditional little cowgirl,” Vold says, laughing. Young and a tad more hip than the traditional sport of rodeo, Vold may saunter around the arena wearing a skinny visor instead of a cowboy hat, flip-flops instead of boots. Facing down a stamping bronco, though, she’s tough and unyielding, qualities that help her in her business, too.
Vold’s company is the stuff of rodeo lore and the life’s work of her father, Harry Vold, who started in the rodeo business in 1941 as a teenager in his native Canada. At the urging of cowboy actor Gene Autry, who was also in the rodeo stock business, he moved his operation to Colorado, the center of the rodeo world. Since then, it’s become one of the biggest and most respected in the industry, raising some of rodeo’s greatest bucking horses.
The company has supplied livestock for shows across the country, including the giant Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming, known in the rodeo world as “the Daddy of ’em All,” and to every National Finals Rodeo since it began in 1959. In a business where deals are often sealed with nothing more than a handshake, Harry Vold has earned the respect of rodeo organizers across the West, and the nickname “the Duke of the Chutes.”
When he decided it was time to pass on management of his namesake company, he turned to his daughter, Kirsten, then just 25, but with a lifetime in the chutes. A director of a Pueblo, Colo.-based bank, Harry Vold says he’d seen plenty of women take on management roles in the business world, so why not the rodeo world?
“It hasn’t always been easy for her,” says Harry Vold, who at 79 still takes an active role in his company and inspects his horses in white cowboy hat, black boots and fancy green kerchief. “Not everyone has been ready to accept her and take orders from a woman. I’m very confident with the decision now.”
Today his daughter oversees the legendary operation, raising some 650 bucking horses on 30,000 acres of short grass prairie outside of Avondale, Colo. (pop. 754). There, the Great Plains fold into rolling hills to meet the Rocky Mountains that shimmer in the distance. Horses share the pastures with prairie dogs, coyotes and deer. Harry and Karen live there, too, in a 129-year-old adobe home. It’s filled with more than a half-century’s worth of belt buckles, saddles, lassos and awards that make the house a museum to the legacy of the company that the youngest Vold now manages.
The cowgirl life
When she’s not working rodeos, Vold is busy showing other women the ropes. Two years ago, she started 9 Lives Ranch, a guest ranch geared exclusively to women. Women from across the nation spend weekends getting a taste of Western living— riding, cutting and branding rodeo horses on the plains.
There were lots of dude ranches for people who wanted to experience cowboy life, Vold says, but not many that offered the cowgirl life. That’s where Vold came in. After spending most of her life in the male-dominated rodeo world, she spends a few weekends each summer in an all-woman world at the ranch she calls home outside of Boone, Colo. (pop. 323), 30 miles from her parents’ ranch.
“It’s a chance to live out your dreams,” Vold says. When people think about the West, it’s usually a man’s world they picture, she says. “It’s ‘the cowboys ride the range,’ and stuff like that. But there are so many women who have that desire and there’s just not a place to express it.”
In many ways, Vold was a natural to take over the family business. She grew up in the saddle and traveling the rodeo circuit with her parents.
“I don’t remember learning to ride,” she says. “It was like learning to walk or talk.”
Vold didn’t attended public school until her freshman year of high school. Instead, she was tutored so that she could travel from rodeo to rodeo. Her two brothers and three sisters also are in the rodeo business.
After college, Vold thought about leaving behind the rodeo. She worked for a California sports marketing firm, and later for a New York-based record label, but rodeo was never out of sight or mind; both companies promoted products with rodeo themes. She soon found herself returning to the rodeo world she grew up in, just as her father was ready to hand over the reins.
“My first love will always be the rodeo,” she says. “It’s what drives me.”
At her guest ranch, Vold shares that love with others, and gives them the chance to see the West the way she has: a cowgirl riding the range, taking the bull by the horns.
