story by Ruth Nicolaus
If Landon Munoz can’t be in the saddle, he loves to be in the cockpit. The New Mexico Junior High School Rodeo Association member, who lives in Gallup, N.M., loves to fly as much as he loves rodeo.
In rodeo, the fourteen year old competes as a tie-down roper, ribbon roper, chute dogger, and team roper. In the ribbon roping, he ropes for Weslyn Reno, and in the team roping, he heads for Wade Hatch.
He rides two different horses for the heading. One is an eight year old mare, a dark bay named Shada. The second is his favorite horse, Big Red, who carried him to the National Junior High Finals in sixth grade.
His tie-down horse is a nine year old light sorrel named Razor who is very loving.
Landon is an eighth grader at Rehoboth Christian School in Gallup. He enjoys history class but isn’t crazy about math. “Numbers are just hard,” he says.
In his spare time, he plays baseball, basketball, hunts and fishes, and loves to fly with his dad in their Cessna 182. His dad is teaching him how to fly, and so far, he has logged about twenty hours of flying. He plans on getting his license when he turns 16. There are a lot of similarities between flying and rodeo, he says, the adrenaline rush being one of them. “It’s super fun, and you feel free.”
Landon has big plans after high school and college. He wants to be an oil and gas lawyer and own his own plane. He’s pretty good at debating. His parents may not come around to his way of seeing things, but they “get annoyed and tell me to be quiet.” As for his older brother Zane, a high school rodeo contestant, when they argue, “it turns into a wrestling match, and he wins most of them because he can outrun me,” Landon says.
He competed at state finals in sixth and seventh grade, in the tie-down, ribbon roping, chute dogging, goat tying and team roping. In sixth grade, he finished second in the state in the team roping with Wade. Last year, he finished third in the state in the chute dogging. He has competed at Nationals both years, and in sixth grade, was the Rookie of the Year, the same year his brother won rookie in the high school association. He is the son of Sharmyn and George Munoz.
