story by Ruth Nicolaus
When Tally Harthun isn’t rodeoing, she’s reading. Or baking. Or showing 4-H steers. Or running with her dad. Or playing basketball.
But of all her activities, rodeo is her favorite.
The fourteen year old, a member of the Colorado Junior High School Rodeo Association, com-petes in the barrel racing and the pole bending. Poles is her strong suit, mostly because she and her horse “work together better at poles, and we find it more enjoyable as well,” she said.
Her horse Murphy, a sixteen-year-old palomino, is her mount for both events. Murphy was her sister’s horse; last summer was the first time Tally rode him, and the two are connecting. He’s a very sweet and gentle horse, she said, who loves to rodeo. “Every time I walk past a barrel pat-tern, he tries to go and do it,” she said. “I’m like, ‘not yet.’”
A resident of Kremmling, Colo., Tally is in eighth grade at West Grand Middle School. She loves reading, English/Language Arts, and history classes. She loves to read and has read “The Hatch-et” by Gary Paulsen at least four times, which is a lot, she says, because she rarely re-reads any book. She also loves studying history and found the Boston Tea Party fascinating, although all the dates and names can get confusing.
She plays volleyball and basketball and runs track, and of her four sports, loves basketball as much as she loves rodeo, “more than rodeo, sometimes,” she said. She follows the Denver Nug-gets; her favorite NBA player is Jamal Murray.
A baker, her specialty is chocolate chip cookies, and her dad says they’re the best he’s eaten, although she thinks he may be biased. “I don’t know if he’s just saying that, but he seems to like them, because he eats the whole tray.”
She also makes pies from scratch, and every Thanksgiving, her job is the pies. Last year she made cherry, pumpkin, and apple pie. She uses canned filling for the fruit pies but makes her own pumpkin filling.
To stay in shape for her sports, she likes to run. Sometimes she runs with her dad, but not always. She has trouble keeping up with him, and they don’t usually run at the same time.
Tally loves to show 4-H animals, both steers and pigs, and has two steers she’s working on for this year’s fair. The red steer is named Rocky and the black one is Apollo Creed (she likes the Rocky Balboa movies). So far, Rocky is good at walking, but he avoids being caught and hal-tered. Creed is easy to halter but does not like to walk. Tally has had two grand champion steers and a reserve champion steer throughout her county fair show history.
The best meal her dad makes is burritos; her favorite dessert is double chocolate chip cookies. She’s never made double chocolate chippers, but Subway makes a good one. Her favorite fruit is watermelon and her favorite vegetable is raw broccoli. She’s not big on candy, but does like Starbursts.
The best trip she’s taken was to Tucson this past spring, when she and her friend laid around the pool and ate a fancy breakfast at the hotel, including crème brulee French toast with berries on top, which “was so good.”
If she was given $1 million, she’d use it to construct a barn with an indoor arena.
When she grows up, she’d like to be a surgeon. In science last year, the class learned about the human body, which interested her. And helping people is also something she would enjoy.
This is Tally’s first year of junior high school rodeo, and she’s enjoying the travel, the new friends she’s made, and being part of the association.
Her parents, Dalene and Joe, enjoy their daughter. “She’s very tender hearted,” Dalene said, “and sweet. I keep telling her she’s wise beyond her years in the things she picks up and the things going on in the world.”
Her parents are proud of her willingness to demonstrate her faith. “She is not afraid to show it, and she’s not afraid for people to know,” her mom said.
Tally has an older sister, Taylin, who is 16 and a high school rodeo contestant, and a younger brother, Tilden, who is seven years old.
