American Highway allows KNLS listeners to travel America's back roads, highways, and byways.  You'll find some of this nation's most interesting people, places and events in the transcripts below.

Rattlesnake Roundup

There’s a great deal to see and do along the highways of the American west, but perhaps the strangest sight of all is the Sweetwater, Texas Rattlesnake Roundup. The rattler is a deadly poisonous snake that can be found throughout North America, but nowhere is it more abundant than in the deserts and plains of the American West. In the small west Texas town of Sweetwater, townsfolk have turned the potentially deadly pest into an annual event that attracts more than 30,000 visitors. Sweetwater’s Ken Becker talks about how the Rattlesnake Roundup got started.

Ken Becker: The roundup was started back in 1958 by a group of ranchers who were just having a problem with the rattlesnake population biting their animals and really causing a lot of havoc with their livestock. The following year a group of Jaycees took this program over and we’re getting ready to do year number 40. In the previous 39 years we’ve collected over 220,000 tons of rattlesnakes.

Attend the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup and you can watch a snake-handling demonstration, go out into the countryside on your own snake roundup, and even eat rattlesnake meat cooked in everything from barbecue to Texas chili.

Ken Becker: We have deep-fried rattlesnake meat which you cook kind of like you would a fish. We also have a very large cook-off which includes rattlesnake meat as one of the meat options cooked that we have over 150 teams come in and do each year.

Wondering what a rattlesnake sounds like? (SFX: Rattlesnake rattle) If you’re ever visiting the American West and hear that sound, be real careful about where you step next. The Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup; another stop along the American highway.

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Montana Skijoring Competition

Americans are known for embracing some unusual sports, but skijoring may be one of the strangest yet.

Travel American Highway 212 west and south out of Billings, Montana, and you’ll soon pass through the small town of Red Lodge. Visit Red Lodge in winter and you may get a chance to attend a skijoring race. Not familiar with the sport? As the name indicates, skijoring is a skiing event, but with a twist. The skier is pulled behind a horse and rider. Red Lodge area resident and skijoring racer Rick McGee says that skijoring came to the U.S. from Scandinavia where the skiers are pulled by reindeer.

Rick McGee: Here we don’t have very many reindeer so we use the next best thing which we have a lot of, which is horses. The sport consists of a team of a horse, rider, and skier. The skier is then pulled through a race course of 15-20 ski gates and 3-4 jumps similar to the Olympic event of giant slalom racing except it’s on a flat course oval in shape. Winning times in skijoring are 17-18 seconds over a course of about 1900 feet. It’s fairly fast paced.

Something of an understatement! The horses and riders whip around the track at breakneck speed. Travelling American Highway 212 through Red Lodge, Montana to attend a skijoring race.

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Natural Bridge National Memorial

Travel along Highway 191 in southeastern Utah and you enter an area that contains some of North America’s most spectacular natural wonders.

Many of Hollywood’s best westerns were filmed in southeastern Utah. The area is home to some unique sandstone formations. Some of the most remarkable are to be found at Natural Bridge National Memorial, home to three of the world’s longest freestanding natural rock spans. Chief Park Ranger, Jim Dugan, describes what it’s like to walk the trail to the largest of the spans.

Jim Dugan: As the canyon snakes around the bend, a magnificent span of stone over 200 feet above your head surprises you. It is a surprise because it is so massive, it defies gravity hanging above your head.

Wind and water continues to erode these natural bridges and Ranger Dugan talks about a recent rock fall.

Jim Dugan: My first season here in 1992, I believe it was June 22, 4,000 tons sloughed off one side of the Cachina Bridge and came crashing into the canyon below. It happened overnight and incredibly nobody even heard or saw it.

These natural bridges and the surrounding canyons were once home to a vanished people that many refer to as the Anasazi.

Jim Dugan: Today there are structural remains indicating a culture that was fairly stable, one that relied on a cultivation of corn, beans and squash and intensively used the nearby resources. Roughly around AD 1250, the people began to leave the area and it is not known exactly why they did that, but it’s thought that perhaps it was the overuse of the resources.

Visiting the natural bridges national memorial in the four corners area of Utah. Another stop along the American highways.

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Traditional Plowing Match

Travel Highway 4 across rural Vermont and you’ll pass through the small town of Woodstock. This small farming community is home to the Billings Farm and Museum a living history project for showing farmlife in the 1890’s. Farm manager, David Yates, talks about what visitors see there.

David Yates: Along with the working dairy farm, we have a restored farmhouse and a creamery downstairs. Then we have the working farm itself, which is about 244 acres. It started off as a folk-like project back 16 years ago. The Billings Farm evolved out of that folk-like project. Most of the artifacts that go with the museum come from around the 1890 period.

The farm is also the site of an annual traditional plowing match. The match attracts competitors from five states and serves as a demonstration of plowing techniques of the last century.

David Yates: We actually have two events. We have one for the horses and the oxen and we have two different competitions. We have a walking plow competition and a sulkey plow which is a plow that you ride. We start with the walking plow and we judge for different criteria. It’s all in how you handle your team; you don’t want to be out there hollering at your animals. The other thing is when we talk about the furrow; we want it nice and straight. We want the furrows uniform in depth and clean. Clean means turning over the trash that’s on top of the soil uniform and with nice rectangular plots and minimum disturbance to the head ground. It’s important to get that plow out at the same spot every time.

The annual traditional plowing match held on Billings farm in Woodstock, Vermont. Another stop along the American highway.

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Tom Sawyer Days

Travel Highway 61 through Missouri along the mighty Mississippi and you’ll pass through Mark Twain territory, the small town of Hannibal.

Hannibal, Missouri celebrates the writings of Samuel Clemens with an annual Tom Sawyer Day. Director Fay Blythe says Hannibal is proud to celebrate the life and work of her most famous son.

Fay Blythe: Mark Twain, or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born here in Hannibal and he lived here until he was in his teenage years. Several of his books have a good foundation from Hannibal, especially the book Tom Sawyer, which is read all over the world, and parts of Huckleberry Finn. He refers to many of the people and the places and the events that occurred in his own life right here in Hannibal, Missouri.

Several of the festival’s events center around incidents in the book. There is a fence painting, of course, and even a frog-jumping contest.

Fay Blythe: We have close to 300 young people who will jump frogs. By that I mean they take a frog and they get three tries on how far that frog can jump in three jumps. People from, not just Hannibal, anywhere in the world can enter that contest.

Director Blythe talks about why she believes Twain’s writings and Hannibal’s annual celebration remain popular.

Fay Blythe: They come and have so much fun that they really want to come back to the town that they’re reading about. They actually want to step back in time and experience that excitement and that magic and the romance and the spirit of adventure from the days of Tom and Huck.

The Hannibal, Missouri Tom Sawyer Days Festival. Another stop along the American highway.

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Baraboo Circus Parade

Travel Highway 136 through south central Wisconsin and you’ll pass through the small town of Baraboo, a place where you can visit the circus everyday.

Carrie Olson of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo says the state of Wisconsin and Baraboo, in particular, have a rich circus history.

Carrie Olson: Baraboo is the home of the Ringling Brothers, who began their circus in this small Midwestern community in 1884. They continued to operate their circus from Baraboo until 1918, so we consider ourselves to be the home of the Ringling Brothers circus.

Each year the circus conducts an old fashioned circus parade to and through nearby Milwaukee. 800,000 people turn out to watch the parade.

Carrie Olson: Circus World Museum preserves the world’s largest collection of antique circus wagons. These are wood carved, huge, heavy vehicles that were used in early days of the American Circus to transport circus equipment as the circus travelled from town to town. Those wagons are actually magnificent works of art and we generally take approximately 75 of our more than 200 antique circus wagons to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The parade will feature approximately 2,000 costumed participants, approximately 700 horses, 55 antique circus wagons, exotic animals, clowns, musicians and more.

Preserving a bit of circus history in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Another stop along the American highways.

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National Modified Truck and Tractor Pull

Get anywhere near the small town of Lexington, Alabama in mid-summer and you may feel the earth move.

It isn’t an earthquake, just the Annual National Modified Truck and Tractor Pull held in Alabama each summer. The ground-shaking, ear-shattering event draws competitors and spectators from 20 states. Lexington’s Sam Newton says these bizarre machines are built for one purpose.

Sam Newton: Power. Not speed. Power. We have some equipment coming in from tractors that are modified tractors that consist of five engines hooked into one gear box, turning one set of rear wheels to try to pull a 60,000 pound weight transfer machine called a sled. The object is to pull it 300 feet on the dirt track. It gets harder to pull the more distance you do because of the weight transfer moving forward. Back about 10-11 years ago, we had an earthquake here in north Alabama. This earthquake happened at 7:03, and we had started our truck and tractor pull at 7:00 sharp. People that were at the event, about 10,000 of them, didn’t even know that the earthquake had occurred.

The methane machines are noisy enough, imagine what a jet engine would sound like.

Sam Newton: We have one tractor that comes from New Hampshire that has four turbine jet engines. This thing belches fire and it’s an awesome sight with the wheel speed. It’s the most powerful tractor on earth.

If the big machines are a bit too much for you, you might enjoy watching the modified garden tractors take their turn on the course. The Alabama National Modified Truck and Tractor Pull. Another stop along the American highways.

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National Hobo Convention

Travel Highway 18 through northern Iowa in mid summer and you may pass some colorful characters all headed toward the small town of Brit.

Each August, Brit, Iowa hosts the nation’s largest gathering of hobos for the National Hobo Convention. The folks of Brit have been hosting this annual gathering for nearly a century. Brit’s Ester Higgins talks about what happens at a hobo convention.

Ester Higgins: We actually have a hobo council now and they have their own set of governing rules, how they elect a king and a queen every year. Many friendships are formed as people come here year after year. Some of them are hobos and hobo all year and some that just hobo the week they are here in Brit, or the want-to-be hobos. In the hobo world, it’s a place to be the second week of August.

About 30,000 of those want-to-be’s visit Brit each year to enjoy the hobos and learn a bit more about their carefree life. The hobos are more than obliging, inviting their guests to participate in a number of hobo traditions, including the annual selection of a new hobo king and queen.

Ester Higgins: Their coronation is held right here in our town park and each candidate gets up and tells you why they want to be king or queen and then the hobos vote and the audience can also vote by applause. They are actually crowned; they have a beautiful velvet flowing robe for both of them and a crown and the crown is wonderful. It is made out of tin cans and it’s a real hobo crown. That person has quite an honor for a year when they are named king or queen.

Guests also get to enjoy evenings around a hobo campfire with singings, storytelling, and even a taste of mulligan stew. The National Hobo Convention held each summer in Brit, Iowa. Just another stop along the American highways.

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Kinetic Sculpture Race

Travel northwest out of the city of Denver and you quickly reach Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is home to the annual Kinetic Sculpture Challenge, a race that pits huge human powered sculptures against each other over land and water. Boulder’s Kate Culligan describes the torturous course.

Kate Culligan: There’s a different course every year – it’s about a three mile course and about two-thirds of it is on water. It’s on a reservoir which is right outside of Boulder. At least two or three crafts sink right away. It’s usually pretty funny. There’s a lot of competition when they’re out there trying to sink each other or splash each other and they go across the water, come out, go in some real bumpy terrain, then they go back in the water and there’s an obstacle course where they have to go around some buoys. This year they’re going to come out again and then all of the team members have to slide down a slip-n-slide, which is a water slide, then come back in the water and then they finish up on the beach again where all the people are.

Kate says the entrants are always imaginative. A recent team used an Egyptian theme.

Kate Culligan: The guys were dressed like Pharaohs, then their craft was like a pyramid and that was really gorgeous and they were the number one placing craft. They built it like a pyramid and the wheels were within the craft. It floated and the costumes were just gorgeous gold, shiny with the pharaoh-type hats. It was just a magnificent craft.

The Kinetic Sculpture Challenge held annually in Boulder, Colorado. Another stop along the American highways.

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Barbed Wire Convention & Museum

If you ever find yourself in the heart of Kansas, then you’re probably close to the small farming community of LaCrosse. Straddling State Highway 183, LaCrosse is home to the Barbed Wire Museum. This is a natural spot for the museum since barbed wire’s invention was a turning point in the history of the American Great Plains. Director Bradley Pinka explains why.

Bradley Pinka: When Kansas settled back in the latter part of 1860, it was pretty well wide-open spaces. As the settlers began to come out, a lot of them started cultivating land and raising crops. At the same time there was a lot of other farms who worked like ranchers and had cattle and other types of livestock that grazed. And there began to be problems when the livestock would cross over into the cultivated lands and damage the crops. When barbed wire was invented in about 1873, it provided a cheap means for the farmers to fence in the crops and protect them from the livestock.

Wherever the wire went up, range wars often broke out.

Bradley Pinka: A lot of large ranchers would drive their cattle south into the area around Texas and Oklahoma during the winter months, which could be pretty harsh in Kansas. What happened is when a lot of them started driving their cattle south in the winter, they ran into these new fences that were being put up. That didn’t set too well with them and a lot of battles were fought between farmers and ranchers. A lot of cattle ended up freezing to death because they couldn’t move them any further.

Barbed wire is now a collector’s item. Some fetching surprisingly high prices.

Bradley Pinka: It's collected in 18 inch sections, these strands range in value from basically free, which can be picked up out of the country, all the way up to $300 and $400.

The Barbed Wire Museum in LaCrosse, Kansas. Another stop along the American highways.

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Dayton, Ohio Hamvention

Travel through Dayton, Ohio along interstate 75 in late spring and you may have to share the road with a few Hams.

Dayton, Ohio is the sight of the largest annual gathering of Hams in the world. We’re not talking about the hams you eat, instead we’re talking about Ham operators; Amateur radio enthusiasts who make a hobby of talking to other Hams all over the world. Ham veteran Fred Osterman:

Fred Osterman: It is primarily a show for the radio amateur operator, but there are things that interest both the radio listener and computer hobbyist, too. The show is basically divided into two sections. Within the convention center are the manufacturers and the dealers showing all the latest and greatest in radio equipment and gizmos. Outside in the huge parking lot is the flea market. This is where smaller dealers and individuals bring their own surplus equipment to sell. This flea market is like a disorganized museum of radio history. You can see and buy an amazing assortment of communications equipment dating all the way back to the early days of radio.

Osterman says he enjoys seeing the new equipment, but spends most of his time at the flea market.

Fred Osterman: I think many of the radio enthusiasts, especially my age and older, also enjoy looking at, collecting and studying old time radio. The big old tube equipment has a certain lure and mystic that the new ultra sophisticated, ultra compact just doesn’t have.

This is often more than just a hobby. Ham operators and their gear are often pressed into service during natural disasters and other emergencies to provide vital communication services to their community. The Dayton Hamvention. Just another stop along the American highways.

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