Ty Schiferl

The Schiferl Ranch had a booth right next to ours in Des Moines.  They do a Christmas thing that I am unfamiliar with, among a bunch of other stuff I am sure, if you want details just check out their website. The only thing I am sure of is that their son Ty is one of the coolest young men walking the planet.  He does rope tricks, and used the big area in front of our booth to demonstrate his skills when there weren’t a lot of people around so he wouldn’t hit anyone (he’s thoughtful that way).  There were always little kids involved. He has two ropes. One is his vertical rope and one the horizontal rope.  He starts out by recruiting a young interested party or two and ask them if they can help him with a rope trick.  He asks them to hold his vertical rope while he does his horizontal rope stuff.  After jumping in and out of the flat rope off the ground, he has them come help him by coming into his loop (so to speak, well literally). His next trick is switching ropes, and he starts a vertical loop that he jumps through. He has them pick a number between one and ten, and they help him count while he jumps through the loop however many times they say.  This guy is over six feet tall, and add the hat, the fact that he can clear that loop consistently is pretty amazing.  He is very engaging.  One little girl had a pink zebra striped coat on. It had the little black mane and pink ears on the hood.  He told her he wanted to show her a trick but he needed help and it would only work with a little girl in a pink zebra coat. Could she help him? He’s so cute when he talks to kids. I don’t know how old he is, I am a  horrible age guesser. All the rodeo guys I can think of range from age 15 to 30 and any one of them could be either 15 or 30. I am usually shocked to learn how old they really are. So I will take a wild guess and say that Ty is either 15 or 30 or somewhere in between and I will not be wrong.  I know everyone he comes into contact with is very charmed by him.  The Schifer JW Ranch is a great neighbor to have at a horse fair.  I hope they have the same booth next year. It will be fun to see how tall Ty gets, unless he’s thirty, and then that would be kind of weird.