Most calendars in Sheridan County treat Labor Day as the exit ramp out of summer. In Big Horn, it is the opposite. The last week of August and the first week of September are the densest social stretch of the year here, and almost all of it happens on the same 35 to 80 acres of grass at the end of Bird Farm Road. If you live within a short drive of the Big Horn Equestrian Center, this is the window when your calendar starts filling itself in.
The thesis of this guide is small and specific: the closing arc of the polo season and the two days of Don King Days are not separate events sharing a venue. They are one continuous nine-day tournament with a public party bolted onto the back end, and reading them together is the difference between showing up and actually knowing what you are watching.
The Nine-Day Arc, in Order
The Big Horn Polo Club's own schedule spells it out plainly. The Don King Days Tournament opens with its first game on Sunday, August 30, and runs through the finals on Labor Day, September 7. Between those bookends sit the Margarita League on Friday night and Sunday morning, playoff games branded as the Big Horn Equestrian Center Cup and the Big Horn Polo Club Cup, the Doc & Bunny Connell Memorial, and the Friday Night Lights match under sponsorship from Grinnell Street Dental. The 38th Annual Don King Days celebration itself is scheduled for September 6 and 7, with events kicking off at 11 a.m. each day.
Read as a block, the shape is clear: polo builds through the week, the public showcase lands on Sunday and Monday, and by the time the last horse walks off the grass on Labor Day evening, the season is done. There is no encore.
Sunday Polo, Decoded
If you have driven past the fields on a Sunday afternoon in July and wondered whether to stop, the answer for August is easier: yes, and there is no gate.
- Admission is free, and it stays free through Labor Day.
- July and August Sundays are doubleheaders, with matches at 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.
- Friday Night Lights games are played at 5:00 p.m., which is the polite way of saying tailgate light lasts longer than the polo does.
- There are bleachers and a live announcer for Sunday games, plus concessions.
- After the last match, the clubhouse opens to everyone for drinks and conversation.
Two details in that list matter more than the rest. First, the announcer. Polo without commentary is unreadable if you have not played, and the announcer at Big Horn is the reason a first-time spectator can follow the chukkers. Second, the clubhouse-after-last-match rule. It is the closest thing this neighborhood has to a standing weekly party, and it is open to whoever is there. If you have out-of-town guests staying through the holiday weekend, this is the plan.
What Don King Days Actually Contains
The name gets used loosely around town. On the ground, it is three distinct competitions plus an evening at the clubhouse, run twice, on September 6 and September 7. All three take place out on the open grass with no arena fence between the action and the lawn chairs.
Polo. Don King Days serves as the backdrop for the Big Horn Polo Club's largest tournament of the season. The Sunday and Monday games are the finals of the tournament that has been building since August 30, which is why the play is a step above what you see on an ordinary July Sunday.
Steer roping. The Wyoming State Ropers Association uses Don King Days as its season finals, and roughly 30 cowboys race the clock to rope, turn, and tie a steer for the CAP Silver belt buckle and the WSRA Champion Steer Roper title. The 80 acres of unfenced grass at the equestrian center is what makes this event unusual. Most roping in Wyoming happens inside an arena. Here it looks the way it did on the open range in the late 1800s, which is the specific reason the WSRA keeps bringing its finals back.
Match bronc riding. Six cowboys drawn from a seven-state region ride two horses each. Three ride on Sunday, a different three ride on Monday. No fences, so the crowd is close enough that the animal science stops being abstract.
Vicki Kane, who has served on the Don King Days committee almost since the beginning, calls it "the last big picnic of the year." The turnout backs her up. She and co-organizer Cecile Pattison estimate roughly 2,000 spectators each day, split between locals and visitors. That is a meaningful number for a neighborhood the size of Big Horn, and it is why the traffic pattern on Bird Farm Road changes those two afternoons.
Why This Field, and Why This Name
The equestrian center did not exist until the mid-1980s, and the story of how it came to be sitting where it sits is a Big Horn story worth carrying in your head.
The Big Horn Polo Club is the oldest polo club west of the Mississippi. When the old Polo Ranch was sold, Shirley Taylor and her three polo-playing children pushed to find a new field, and a 1984 tour of the Burns Ranch with Bruce Burns settled on the current site. The original lease was signed on May 2, 1985. The fields were built out with heavy work from Bob, Mike, and Orin Connell, and Kurt Luplow moved the old Big Horn School schoolhouse onto the property and adapted it as the clubhouse. If you have wondered why the clubhouse looks the way it does, that is why.
The event's name honors Don King, the world-renowned Wyoming saddle maker and founder of King's Saddlery in Sheridan, not the boxing promoter. King's Saddlery still operates at 184 N. Main Street in Sheridan and houses the Don King Museum of ropes, saddles, and western working gear inside the same building where saddles are still made by hand. The 1989 group of ranchers and ropers who organized the first Don King Days took inspiration from the Pendleton Roundup, which is why the events are contested on grass rather than dirt. That single choice, grass over arena, is what has given the weekend its character for 38 years.
A Resident's Tailgate Checklist
If you are hosting people through Labor Day weekend, treat these two days as the anchor and build the rest of the visit around them.
- Arrive well before 11 a.m. on either Sunday or Monday. Parking on the grass fills in from the road edge inward, and the shady positions go early.
- Bring lawn chairs. The spectator perimeter is a lawn-chair perimeter, not a bleacher one, for roping and bronc riding.
- Pack a real tailgate. There is food on site, but the culture here is coolers, folding tables, and neighbors trading plates.
- Plan for both days. Sunday and Monday have different bronc riders. If you only come once, you are seeing half of it.
- Save the clubhouse for after the last event of the day. The transition from field to clubhouse is the part visitors miss and residents build the evening around.
- Cross-reference the polo schedule. If the Friday Night Lights match under Grinnell Street Dental's sponsorship is playing at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, September 4, that is your low-key warm-up night.
The reason to think about this weekend in resident terms rather than spectator terms is that it sets the social tone for the fall. The people you run into at the clubhouse on Labor Day evening are the same people you will see at the Brinton Museum later in September and at holiday gatherings in December. Nine days on Bird Farm Road is how the year's second half introduces itself.
If you own a home in Big Horn or The Powder Horn and you are still figuring out where late summer fits into life here, this is the answer. And if you are thinking about a move into the area and want to see the community at full volume before you decide, the first weekend of September is the weekend to visit. When you are ready to talk about what it looks like to live within a short drive of that grass field year-round, the team at Powder Horn Realty knows the neighborhood, the calendar, and the houses that back up to both.
