Burro race brings excitement to Cerrillos, honors mining history

May 6—The often-sleepy town of Cerrillos was jolted into a state of excitement Saturday as hundreds of people from across the United States came to watch or compete in the second annual Turquoise Trail Pack Burro Race.

The event features human competitors who race alongside their donkeys while guiding them with a rope.

As giddy onlookers waited for the race to start at 10 a.m., competitors in racing bibs walked up and down Main Street with donkeys in tow.

Racing director Shane Weigand wore a baseball cap, but his deep knowledge of burro racing and the place donkeys once held in the Old West gave him the air of a cowboy.

"Burros have such a crazy, awesome history in the Western United States, and we forget that," said Weigand, who has been involved in burro racing for about a decade and runs the group New Mexico Pack Burros.

He said horses carried both cowboys and warriors, while burros were the blue-collar work animals, serving trappers, traders and miners.

"And that's what these towns are built on is blue-collar work ethic," he said.

According to legend, Weigand said, pack burro racing began after two miners struck gold up on a hill and raced one another — along with their trusted burros — back to town to stake their claim to the newfound treasure.

One racer, 59-year-old Tim Johnson, recounted a slightly different version of the legend.

"There were two drunk miners in a bar ... just bragging about whose [animal] was faster and raced," Johnson said.

Weigland said the sport actually came about to revive mining towns whose better days seemed to be behind them.

"In reality, after World War II, a lot of the workers didn't come back to these mining towns, and the towns needed something to kind of bring in tourism," Weigand said. So places like Leadville and Fairplay in Colorado and Tombstone, Ariz., started burro racing in 1949, Weigand said.

Second year, twice as many teams

This was only the second year for the Turquoise Trail Pack Burro race. Twenty-three teams participated in last year's inaugural event, which Cerrillos Hills State Park Manager Peter Lipscomb said was kept "low key" for organizers to see what worked and what didn't.

The field this year included 50 teams.

"I am really excited to see how much interest has grown since last year's inaugural event, and the stuff that happens with social media and getting the word out. ... It's just wonderful," Lipscomb said.

Johnson, who traveled to Cerrillos from Colorado to compete, said he started burro racing about 12 years ago after stopping at a festival in Leadville, where one of the bigger burro racing events is held. The rest is history.

He came to Cerrillos to race alongside his nephews Jason Weick, 45, and Sam Johnson, 25. The younger nephew said he thinks he has done every pack burro racing trail in Colorado.

"The adrenaline rush from the start — it's so cool," Sam Johnson said. "The starting gun goes off, it's chaos, and then you're just — you're just roughing it. It's one of those things where you have zero control of the situation. You're just in it as long as the donkey's running."

The teams in Saturday's race competed in either a three-mile or six-mile race across sandy terrain, through an arroyo, up hills and back towards Cerrillos' Main Street.

Weigand compared the track to a cloverleaf. He said all the racers started out on the stem in the same direction before the six-mile racers did a big four-mile loop while the others did a smaller mile-and-a-half loop before finishing together on the same path for the last mile.

And, they're off

After the starting gun went off at 10 a.m., runners barreled past spectators on Main Street. They could have been mistaken for marathon runners, if not for the donkeys alongside them.

About an hour later, Lipscomb was watching a hill, waiting for racers to come down and pass him by. He said things had come a long way from the mid- to late 2010s, when he was trying to develop a signature event for the state park.

"The idea of doing the pack burro race was something we thought would be good because who was doing the heavy lifting during the Spanish colonial and territorial mining periods? It was the burros," Lipscomb said.

While the event lasted longer for some racers than others, 50-year-old Jon Roberts won first place in the six-mile race with a white burro named Louie. The pair completed the winding trail in just over 41 minutes.

After three years of being involved in burro racing, Roberts said Saturday marked his first win. He added Louie will receive a new nose strap, which says "first" on it, as a prize.

Roberts traveled from Colorado Springs, Colo., to compete in the race with friends Joe Polonsky and Roland Brodeur. Roberts said the trio trained together and added their respective donkeys — Louie, Jake and Tin Cup — are all owned by Polonsky.

The 45-year-old Polonsky, who runs a nonprofit called Double Rainbow Ranch in Monument, Colo., with his wife, won the inaugural Turquoise Trail Pack Burro Race in a tight race against Roberts and Louie. He came in second in this year's event.

Roberts dedicated his first-place win to Polonsky's mother, Margaret Pritzlaff, after the event. She died in April at the age of 71 and loved burro racing, according to the trio of friends.

Polonsky, who lost to Roberts by less than a second, said the race showed him and his friends they need to train more on going uphill.

"We're solid downhill and on flats, but the uphills, they just wanted to walk," Polonsky said. "So, that doesn't work well in the Colorado races. If you want to be competitive in Colorado, you have to be able to run up the hills."

While the Turquoise Trail Pack Burro Race is just one of 14 pack burro races in California, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico supported by the Western Pack Burro Association, Lipscomb said he hopes the event can continue to bring tourists from all over the country in years to come.

"I don't know if we can become one of the marquee [burro races], but I would like to see if we can organize it so that it's kind of a thing that brings people in, not just for one or two overnights, but to be here a little bit longer," Lipscomb said.