Spotlight on Our Member!
January 2006

I was raised around horses and cattle.  My wife, Phyllis was bitten by the “horse bug” at an early age and never got over it.  After we were married we decided we wanted to raise horses.  At that stage of the game we just wanted race and roping horses.  Our first stallion ‘Thirsty Rancher’ was mainly race breeding with some performance bloodlines.  In 1973 we started with two race / performance mares that produced our first AQHA foals. 

What really got us addicted to this family of horses was ‘Skip Powder’ a green broke three year old chestnut stallion.  I saw him and fell in love.  He was being sold at a special ‘Skipper W’ sale in Henderson, Colorado in 1977.  Skip was to sell the second day of the sale.  When I went home to tell Phyllis about the young stallion she said, “We didn’t need another stallion with only two mares.”  However, we wanted to go to the sale and see him sell.  Well, I guess you can figure out who got their way.  We purchased our first Skipper W horse.   At the time we didn’t know anything about the Skipper W bloodlines, but really liked this stallion. 

Skip’s was sired by AQHA Champion Skippa Cord and out of Power Powder also an AQHA Champion.  Skippa Cord came from Hank Wiescamp’s place.  Power Powder was a foundation outcross mare by the cutting horse Pokey Power.  Skip had a great disposition, was extremely smart, had enough size at 15.2 hands and was pretty.  Over the next three years Phyllis and I broke, fit and showed Skip Powder without any outside trainers or help in halter, western & english pleasure, heading & healing to achieve his AQHA Champion in 1981.  

In 1978 we started purchasing several mares each year with some Wiescamp bloodlines.  We stood Skip to the public and used this money and invested in a group of mares to use him on.  We showed the foals out of those mares in AQHA shows, breeder’s futurities and earned many class wins.

In 1983 and 1985 we had the honor of being listed with AQHA as a Leading Breeder of  ‘Most Halter Class Winners’.  

We went to Hank’s in the fall of 1985 looking for a stallion prospect to breed to the daughters we kept out of Skip Powder.  There ware pasture after pasture of some of the finest mares we had ever seen.  Hank took us back to the sale barn to show us some young stallions.  The stallions were priced high and not near the quality as the mares we had just seen.  Needless to say, we didn’t purchase a stallion prospect in Alamosa that day. 

In January 1986 we heard of a black two year old Skipper bred colt at Duane and Mary Teten’s in Talmage, Nebraska.  I flew back to look at Skips Associate and purchased him.  Associate had a 7/8 Wiescamp pedigree.  We showed him as a three and four year old.  He earned 18 AQHA halter points with many Grand & Reserve Champions.  He was also High Point Stallion of the RMQHA region.  He was a successful cross on the Skip Powder mares.  The resulting foals won several RMQHA futurities over the next ten years.  One daughter, Associate Contessa earned her AQHA Superior Champion with 50 AQHA open and 44 amateur points.  As breeders do, we kept some of the Skips Associate fillies so we needed another stallion. 

At the AQHA World Show sale in 1992 we purchased ‘Heza Premium’ a weanling colt consigned by Carol & Buddy Brown of Valley View, Texas.  H was sired by AQHA Champion Premium Skip and out of an Intimidator  / Nick W bred mare.  We showed him as a yearling through his four-year-old year.  He earned his AQHA Superior Halter award (50 points), several Grand & Reserves and many High Point awards.  He crossed pretty well on the Skip Powder and Skip Associate mares.  He sired several futurity winners.  However, some of his daughters did not get as big as we like.