If I Ever Get Dementia, Show Me My YouTube Channel

February 28, 2026Leave a comment

Today I Hit 800 Subscribers

(After Launching My Channel in 2006) Twenty freakin’ years!

Not 8000, Not 80,000,
Eight hundred. Yeah, you read that right! 800 and teetering…

Fun Fact: Only 10 % of YouTube Channels reach 1000 subscribers. I’m in good company with the other 90%.

My very first video 20 years ago was a grainy, low-resolution clip of my sister shadow dancing at Burning Man. (since removed) I edited it in Windows Movie Maker. Digital cameras were still evolving, and the videos were Blurry. Tiny. Imperfect.

But that didn’t stop me. I continued to film and upload.

Back then, nobody really knew what YouTube was supposed to be. It was the Wild West. People posted funny skits, awkward home movies, random moments of life. No strategy. No branding. No algorithms to decode. Just curiosity and creativity.

Then came the how-to videos. Those were gold!

I remodeled parts of my house using YouTube tutorials. Total strangers taught me things I might never have learned otherwise. That was the magic — people sharing what they knew.

When I started uploading my trick riding videos, I picked up a couple hundred subscribers fairly quickly. For a minute, it felt like momentum.

Then YouTube introduced ad revenue.

I made pennies….literal pennies.

And then they changed the rules — you needed 1,000 subscribers and thousands of watch hours to qualify for monetization. That’s when my growth slowed to a crawl.

I didn’t have a niche.
I didn’t have a strategy.
I just wanted to share my crazy life in an artful way.

I’m a musician.
A hiker.
A traveler.
A ranch owner.
An artist.
A complete jackie-of-all-trades.

Over time, my equipment improved. My editing improved. I spent hours polishing videos into little documentaries of my adventures.

And sometimes they were full-blown documentaries.

I once flew to Kansas to stay with a family living in the middle of wheat fields as far as the eye could see. I filmed their simple life as farmers and the one-room schoolhouses they were restoring. I submitted that film to festivals.

Some of my videos have over 100,000 views.
Others have 25.

My subscriber count? It creeps.

I gain a few.
I lose a few.
I gain a couple more.
It inches forward.

It’s always teetering!

One day I’ll hit 1,000 subscribers. Or maybe I won’t.

But here’s what I’ve realized: That number isn’t the point.

The point is that I’ve documented my life.

When I go back and watch videos from ten or fifteen years ago, I smile. I remember who I was. What I cared about. What my voice sounded like. The light in my eyes. The people who were still here.

YouTube became my time capsule.

If I ever get dementia, I hope someone sits me down and presses play.

“Look,” they’ll say.
“This was you.”

And I’ll get to meet myself all over again.

800 subscribers – still filming.

Go take a look and don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE! I want to get to 801!

Interview with a LEGENDARY COWBOY

October 25, 2023

In 2007, I attended a Trick Riding Competition in Claremore Oklahoma and had the opportunity to interview the legendary Cowboy Hall of Fame Inductee, J.W.Stoker. He is a legendary trick rider and trick roper who has been a stuntman in many movies and television shows and has performed in thousands of rodeos over the course of 70+ years. J.W. passed away at the age of 94 in 2022. In this interview, he gives tips on how to train a trick-riding horse. This clip is part of a 1.5 hour Trick Riding Documentary that I produced and sold as a DVD in 2007. “Trick and Fancy Riding-Past Present and Future”

Upside Down on a Running Horse

March 9, 2017March 9, 2017Leave a comment

suicide drag

(yep this is me!)

At 40, I decided I wanted to ride a galloping horse at full speed while hanging by one foot upside down. This is called trick riding!

Mid life crisis? Hells yes! It all started when I saw a photo of a woman riding a galloping horse standing up on top of the saddle! I NEED TO LEARN TO DO THIS. This sport was huge back in the 30s through 60s, with trick riders performing at all of the rodeos. But for some reason, it started to die out and there were only a handful of people doing this sport in the entire US! There was no one to teach me! There were no YouTube videos, no DVDs, nothing in Google that showed me how to trick ride. NOTHING! The only thing that I found was a book called “Trick and Fancy Riding, 140 ways to break your neck” that was written about 50 years ago. In this book were stunts that were done on a galloping horse with little stick figure drawings showing the prospective lunatic how to get in and out of each trick! NUTS!

Then one day, after searching and searching in Google about anything to do with horse stunt riding and finding zilch, I came upon a very crude personal webpage of a man named Rex Rossi about 20 pages deep in the dark reaches of Google. Rex Rossi is in the Stunt Man Hall of Fame. His trick riding saddle is on display in the Gene Autry Museum in LA. He was a national Trick Riding Champion many times over and performed at Madison Square Garden for 19 consecutive years as a trick rider and trick roper. He had been in a zillion movies and had doubled for John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Clint Eastwood and many others. He was also a stunt man on TV shows such as Bonanza. He was legendary. I about fainted when I clicked on his contact page and it said he lived only 45 minutes from my house!

I practically had to audition for the man in order to get lessons from him. Once I proved I was serious, he finally let me bring my horse to his ranch. He was in his 80s at this time and I was lucky to find him when I did. He passed away a couple of years later!

I became a professional trick rider performing at fairs, rodeos and private events throughout the state. I started my own trick riding team called the radical riders. I gave lessons, filmed a trick riding documentary and started the website www.rodeotrickrider.com that had the first forum about the sport before Facebook was around. I have to say that my website brought so many people into this sport and trick riding has made huge comeback. I was also profiled in this fantastic book call Wild Women and Tricky Ladies by Jill Stanford about legendary and present day trick riders!

In 2008, I broke my arm while trick riding at a rodeo and this led to the end of my performing because my doc said I had bone density issues and I didn’t need to be hanging upside down from a horse any longer. However, I still gave lessons at my ranch and traveled to other states to give clinics and private lessons.

Today, my chapter in this wonderful world of trick and fancy riding has come to a complete end as I start another chapter in my life. My horse is old and I quit giving lessons at my ranch. The sand in my arena has washed away from the past two winters, and I’m selling my custom trick riding saddle that I had specially made in 2008. That was a hard decision. But, its just sitting in the barn and I need the funds to buy backpacking gear! My new chapter!

What will I do next? Hike a few hundred miles? We shall call it my golden years crisis!