Comeback Trail
Rachel worked diligently to rehab her string and cope with finishing out her very successful high school rodeo career.
“Blaze had to have stem cell treatments and we never had to ask her to do what was needed,” says Hendrix of her daughter’s work ethic. “She would be out there in the wind, the snow, the rain doing his rehab, whether it was walking him for 20 minutes or walking and then trotting.”
Without Blaze for most of the year, Rachel still qualified for nationals in barrels and breakaway roping. She would finish third in the latter. Over the course of her four years, Rachel had qualified to the NHSFR in every event at least once.
In 2013, Rachel graduated with honors from Churchill High School in her hometown of Fallon, Nev., and moved on to compete with the rodeo team at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. In fact, she and Blaze were leading the Rocky Mountain region standings at the semester break. She had also met Wayce Pulham, a boy she told her mom was the one she wanted to marry.
But while home on Christmas break, Rachel confided to her mother that she wasn’t enjoying college rodeo and that she hoped to transfer to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and start trying out the pro rodeo circuit.
“I was telling her dad that if she really wanted to know how she stacked up [against the pro girls] that she should go to Buckeye for the Greg Olsen in January,” remembers Hendrix. At her husband’s insistence, she called Rachel and pitched the idea. “I was thinking, ‘She won’t want to come, she’s in college now and she’s in love.’ She’d never say no, but she’ll say she has homework or a project she’s working on, which is code for, ‘I don’t want to be with you, I want to be with my boyfriend!’ But I called her and she said, ‘OK great, I’m game.’”
So mother and daughter headed to Arizona, meeting up in Las Vegas. The weekend began with a hit barrel on Friday night, but they had a good conversation about the misstep.
“I was so glad that our relationship had evolved to where she wanted to hear what I had to say,” Hendrix says. “I couldn’t ride them, but I spent 20 years on the fence watching and I’m analytical so I can tell you what went wrong. But sometimes the teenager in her came out and she wouldn’t listen to me since I don’t ride myself.”
Such was not the case that weekend in Buckeye.
“We had a fabulous weekend. It was so fun being there. It was a gift from God, spending three days just her and I at a barrel race,” Hendrix recalls.
They also had the opportunity to spend time with Campbell, a long time friend of Rachel’s.
“We rode quite a bit together when she was little,” Campbell remembers, adding that soon after she was hauling the young girl with her to barrel races. “After they moved to Fallon [from Las Vegas], I didn’t see her as much since I wasn’t going to the barrel races. We ended up parked next to her at Buckeye and it was her and Annette and me and my mom. We spent hours talking and she was the same, vibrant kid she had always been. I’m so grateful I got to see her there.”
On Saturday night, Rachel and her mother were waiting for Rachel’s competition and sat in the grandstands watching at about 11 p.m., when Vickie Carter came to run.
“She came up to us in the holding area and we were just chatting,” says Hendrix. “Then, I’m sitting up there in the bleachers all alone at 1:45 a.m. and I hear someone coming up the stairs at quarter to 2 in the morning, and it’s Vickie.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And she said, ‘I’ve got to watch my girl run.’”
It would be the last time that any of Rachel’s “moms” got to be with her.
Two weeks later, Rachel, the fierce competitor, the kind girl with the warm heart, was gone. While sleeping in her living quarters trailer, fumes from a generator left too close spit fatal levels of carbon monoxide into the rig. Rachel died Jan. 26, 2014 at the age of 18.
Her boyfriend Wayce was also in the trailer and was hospitalized for a long time. He would eventually recover from carbon monoxide levels that should have taken his life as well.
A new planVickie Carter rides for Rachel aboard Blaze Ta Fame at the PRCA rodeo in Buckeye, Ariz.
Vickie Carter rides for Rachel aboard Blaze Ta Fame at the PRCA rodeo in Buckeye, Ariz.
Faced with a devastation that no parents should endure, the Hendrix family tried to pick up the pieces, and many within their local community of barrel racers wondered what would become of Blaze.
“When she passed away, there were a lot of people who subtly tried to get Blaze,” says Hendrix. “We knew we wouldn’t sell him…we won’t sell any of her horses.”
“I’m religious and I just started to pray. Who would Rachel really let swing their leg over her horse? And I realized that God had taken care of everything before she passed away. Vickie Carter was there at 2 a.m., so when I asked that question, Vickie was the only name I could come up with.”
Carter remembers getting a text from Annette, asking if she’d be willing to help put together a benefit in Rachel’s name.
“Then they sent me a text, ‘do you want to ride Blaze in the benefit?’” Carter remembers, saying she agreed despite the fact she had never ridden the gelding. “Then Annette sent me another text, ‘do you want to try to make the NFR on him? I know that’s always been one of your goals and you’ve always had to sell all your good horses.’”
In fact, Carter has spent a lifetime training horses, competing in futurities and the Central Texas Barrel Racing Association when she lived in Texas, but had never bought her card with the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association.
“I was in the business to train horses and sell them, so all the good ones I ever had, soon as I’d get close to filling a permit or soon as I’d fill a permit, they were gone,” Carter says.
Perhaps, as Hendrix thought, God had intervened. Working for another family at the time, Carter had asked for a break to go to Arizona for two weekends. That’s when she met up with Annette and Rachel in Buckeye.
“Rachel was the last person to run for the whole barrel race and it was 2 or 3 in the morning,” remembers Carter, noting that Annette was surprised to see her. “And I said, well, she’s half my daughter, too, and I came to watch her. I can sleep any time.
“That night she said, ‘only you would do that for my kid,’” says Carter, recalling Annette’s remark.
Carter remembers the first time she met Rachel, who was about the same age as her own son, Colton. They were at a Wrangler Junior Rodeo Association rodeo in Pahrump, Nev., where Carter was serving as the barrel racing director while hauling her son to compete. Rachel was only about 10 or 11 years old.
“Rachel was on a horse that wouldn’t go in down the long alley. I really didn’t know them; I just went up to them and I said, ‘I’m sorry and it might not be my place, but that horse is going to really hurt your daughter,’” Carter recalls. It was the beginning of a long friendship and the horse, Johnny, was soon at Carter’s for training.
Meanwhile, while Carter had Johnny, Campbell arranged for Rachel to run JDC Best Efforts, or “JD,” the horse that carried Sue Smith to a Wilderness circuit championship and Molly Powell to the Olympic gold medal in Salt Lake City in 2002. Rachel needed a mount for the NBHA Super Show in Las Vegas and, proving her mettle as a jockey, she won a go-round at the super competitive event, outrunning over 600 riders, including Campbell.
“She was fun and she was always happy,” Campbell remembers. “At the NBHA that year when she won the first go, we were riding together and giving each other a hard time; it was an ongoing joke between us, who was going to win that day. And she told me, ‘You better sharpen your spurs because I’m coming after you today.’ Then she goes out and wins the round! It wasn’t arrogant or obnoxious, it was just the cutest thing, and she backed it up.”
“She was a great kid, always an absolute pleasure to be around,” Campbell says. “She was something really rare to run into. She was genuinely sweet and had a great desire to learn, to win.”
Carter, too, has high praise for the kid that grew to be like her own, not only for her outstanding horsemanship but also for the person she was.
“She was a heck of a rider – she was aggressive. I don’t care if she was 20th out and it was snowing, that girl rode to win, every single time, and that’s what’s made that horse. Rachel was always such a positive person…she had a smile on her face, no matter what.”
A New Partnership
Carter picked up “Blaze Man,” as she calls him, and headed to a jackpot in St. George, Utah, right down the road from her home in Richfield, Utah. The Hendrixes had persisted in talking Carter into running there, setting aside the concerns that that was where Blaze had been injured so badly a few years prior. She relented because Rachel had won a race there after her runs in Buckeye, her final run before she passed away.
“The first run scared me absolutely to death, I’m going to be honest,” says Carter.
“Annette had told me, ‘He’ll be a real dodo and you won’t like him sometimes,’” Carter remembers, noting that Blaze can be a handful at times. Prepping for her run in the holding area, Blaze ran off down through the barns, going sideways as fast as possible. “I’m like, oh my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding.”
It was an inauspicious beginning for the new partnership.
“They’d call me about things when they were having trouble and we’d discuss it and Rachel would work on it, but it was probably six months in between when I’d see her runs,” Carter says. “The instructions they gave me when I took him were to just drop your hand at the barrel and sit down and trust him.”
In St. George, once Carter got the spunky sorrel back to the arena, she made her run, breaking the arena record.
“So, the second day [at St. George], I’m like, ‘OK I can’t do this, I’m doing it my way.’ Well, I picked him up, we went to the fence on the first barrel,” Carter laughs.
Later, at the first benefit barrel race for the scholarship program the Hendrixes established in Rachel’s name, they laid the groundwork for the new plan.
“I just said, the only thing I’m going to tell you before I take him…he has to become my horse now. He can’t be Rachel’s anymore. The only way he and I can get together is we have to be on the same page. They said, ‘Here you go.’”
The plan was for the duo to acclimate at Wilderness circuit rodeos while Carter worked to fill her permit again.
“Rachel had taken him to Little Britches finals, high school finals; he’s been to the dance. He knows what to do,” Carter says. “She did an awesome job on him. She really did. I give her all the credit. I think maybe I rounded the edges off.”
After the somewhat shaky start, Carter and Blaze began to get together and she filled her permit very quickly. She would have easily qualified for the Wilderness circuit finals in October 2014, but did not purchase her card in time. Instead, she settled for the Wilderness circuit permit championship and a chance to run for WPRA Rookie of the Year in 2015.
There were plenty of lessons learned through the summer. Carter remembers one weekend she had run at three rodeos and was headed to Salina, Utah, for their big barrel race.
