ebrate our Independence Day 4th of July weekend in a small ranching town called White Sulphur Springs (WSS) – population: a little under 1,000. We started the day with their parade. The lineup took longer than the actual parade, but they made up for it by going up Main Street, turning around, and coming back down again. The 10-minute parade became 25 minutes. It may have been short and sweet, but it was twice as nice!Cows – 9, Cowboys – 0
After the parade, we had choices of going to a dog show and art festival, or to a R
anch Rodeo. We have never seen a Ranch Rodeo (though we have seen traditional rodeos) and we found it very interesting. There were 9 teams of 4 ranch hands or ranchers. The competition included different skills in a cowboy’s workday: the ranch horse, branding, penning, doctoring, cow milking, and counting. Why the score above? Well, the teams were doing very well competing against each other until they got to the wild cow milking competition. The cows were smarter than the average cow. Not a single cow got lassoed during that competition. Watching the horse and rider working as one was amazing. We added some action shots of the rider and horse to our Webshot album. Please see above link.That evening, the town put on a fantastic fireworks show. While waiting for the official show to start, the locals were entertaining themselves with very large fireworks. They were being shot from all over town. After dark, the town’s firework show went on for an hour. Well Done!
Like many small towns, White Sulphur Springs is showing signs of hard times due to our economy. The town may need some fixing up and paint, but it is clean and shows plenty of pride. The locals were very friendly and proved to be down-to-earth, heartwarming, and very patriotic.
