What the Hay?

What the Hay?

The first “What the Hay” contest started as a joke. At the end of haying in 1989, rancher Rod Mikkelson stuffed straw into a pair of pants and boots and placed them into the side of a hay bale. The next day, his neighbor, rancher Don Derks, turned the bale on its end and posted a “No diving” sign.

Next came a cocktail napkin. Sarah Stevenson, a cattle rancher and owner of the Circle Bar Dude Ranch, and Dean Newton, a Lewistown, Mont., Cadillac dealer, liked the joke so much they sketched out ideas on a cocktail napkin for an annual contest. A year later, with the help of the Utica Rod and Gun Club, there were 10 entries in the first “What the Hay” sculpture contest.

In its 12th year, the contest now attracts bumper-to-bumper traffic from Windham through Utica to Hobson, three ranching communities in the Judith Basin of Montana.

Spectators pass by 25 cattle ranches between the Highwood, Little Belt, and Big Snowy mountains, through country depicted by painter Charlie Russell. Passengers gawk at sculptures of hay or straw with punning titles. Some are fanciful: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: GrumpHay, SleepHay, DopeHay, or FrogHay Went A-Courtin’. Some are practical, such as the Hay-1 Auto lot with a MassHay Ferguson Tractor, a play on the Massey Ferguson tractor used by many ranchers—often to harvest hay.

Others make light of the severe drought that has plagued the area: a life-size straw camel is titled, “The New Central Montana Cow.”

The sculptures stay up a week, then become cattle feed. Held the second Sunday of September, the contest has grown to include cash prizes for mechanized entries, children’s and adults’ entries, and a “People’s Choice” award chosen by ballot of the passers-by. Last year, buses and cars from around the West drove past the 53 sculptures lining the highway.

The rest of the year, Windham, Utica, and Hobson are quiet—Utica dominated by the Oxen Yoke Inn, Hobson by its towering grain elevators, and Windham by its highway bar.

On contest day, however, lines of cars snake through the towns; pickups are parked helter-skelter across parking lots; and people are everywhere, snapping pictures of sculptures or simply gawking.

Center of activity is Utica, a town of 20, known as the spot where Yogo sapphires are mined. In the 1890s, Utica was the site of huge cattle roundups in the Judith Basin. The contest is held with Utica Days, an arts & crafts festival with everything from goat milk soap to homemade pie for sale.

The festival is held near the Utica Historical Museum, which features memorabilia from Utica’s cowboy days, when, as one local described it, it was “wild and woolly and full of fleas.” There are saddles, wagons, branding irons, even a pump organ, and displays about former residents Russell and Calamity Jane. Crowds also gather in Utica’s Oxen Yoke Inn, a dark tavern decorated with local brands and baseball caps, for the announcement of contest winners and hamburgers the size of dinner plates.

The contest celebrates the agricultural way of life: the humor, the hard work, the hospitality, and family. Whole families join in, some driving pickups loaded with bales, others decorating the bales.

In front of his 1913 home, rancher Jeff Morrison was decorating sculptures of the CookieHay Monster and Straw Wars, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. “We do this as a family,” says Morrison, his glasses flecked with spray paint. “We have family and neighbors putting up bales, and we have a big dinner when we’re done.”

Stevenson and Mikkelson agree that it’s all for fun.

“It gives the locals a chance to laugh about things like drought,” Mikkelson adds. “And if you can laugh about that, you’re doing pretty good.”

Caroline Patterson is a freelance writer in Missoula, Mont.

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