Longtime Methow Valley Rodeo photographer Dana Sphar has been in the arena her whole life
Dana Sphar has been taking pictures of the skills and thrills of rodeos for more than 30 years, starting with photographing her own kids when they competed in junior rodeos. “What always made it easy for me is I’ve been around horses and cattle all my life, so I kind of anticipate what to shoot,” she said.
But Sphar’s connection to rodeos goes back even further. She comes from three generations of rodeo and horse people. When she was growing up, making the rounds of the Northwest rodeo circuit, where her father and grandfather supplied bucking horses, was an annual summer ritual.
Sphar’s mother’s family focused on saddle and ranch horses. Although Sphar entered a few barrel-weaving and pole-bending contests in her teens, her specialty has always been training and exercising horses.
Sphar’s father and grandfather were the biggest competitors in the family. They specialized in calf-roping and bareback bronc-riding, and in a particularly demanding event known as steer-wrestling. Steer-wrestling requires extraordinary timing, technique — and pluck — because the wrestler must chase a steer on horseback; grab it by the horns; and pin it, flat on its back, on the ground.
Sphar loves the whole rodeo scene, but her favorite events are the bucking broncs and bulls. “Those are the most exciting to watch and photograph,” she said.
Sphar, who recently retired as a designer at the Methow Valley News, was the official photographer for the Methow Valley Rodeo for the past decade. Her chronicle of the event includes riders in complete concentration, horses and bulls in mid-air, and spectators taking it all in — often in an atmospheric cloud of dust.
In one throat-stopping shot, Sphar captured a rider, his feet in the air, clinging to the side of a feisty bull. In another, the rider is already on the ground, one foot still in the stirrups, while the horse towers above him on its hind legs.
But Sphar also captures the quieter side of the rodeo. There are photos of animated kids weaving through barrels or clinging to the back of a sheep in the mutton-bustin’ competition. There are also sweet shots of little kids in the stick-horse races and details like a yellow jacket perched on barbed wire.
“One of my favorite shots was taken after the rodeo was all over and they’d turned out the animals on pasture, all running,” said Sphar.
Sphar enjoys capturing horses in all their moods. For her fine-arts degree in photography, she did a series of horse portraits as her final project.
“I’ve always really enjoyed the Methow Valley Rodeo — it’s small and low-key and you see people you know,” said Sphar. She is missing the rodeo for the first time in years, since she’s away visiting friends at their Montana ranch. But she’s finding lots of new material there for her camera.
