10-4 Magazine January 2025

10-4 Magazine / January 2025 23 to Ryan Maggini (I mean Upton), who brought the infamous Maggini 2-axle 379 (#13) that has been featured twice on our cover over the years. Best Lights went to Ronnie DeVries and one of his stellar yellow and purple Peterbilt cattle trucks, and Best Bobtail went to Troy Charboneau and his red Peterbilt 359. The hay bucking was the final competition, and it featured four teams of two people that went head-to-head, loading 48 bales on a trailer with an old-school boom truck, backing up about 100 feet, then hand unloading and stacking the bales back on the ground. The winning team came from behind to win by just two seconds, completing the entire process in just over six minutes. It was awesome watching these guys toss 100-pound bales of hay around like toys! Very big thanks go out to Gary and his son John at B&G Hay in Bakersfield for providing and bringing all the hay – two full loads of big bales and one full load of small bales – for all the hay related contests. Gary was also a great resource for me when figuring out how to run these hay competitions. Thanks for letting me “bend your ear” several times about all this, Gary. And did we mention the custom belt buckle awards for all the competition class winners? For each of the ten classes, we had a custom rodeo-style belt buckle made by the folks at Molly’s Custom Silver in Texas – and these things were awesome. Thanks to our friend Jeff Botelho at Botelho Custom Trucks for sponsoring these amazing awards and keepsakes, which will most definitely be an annual tradition at this event, because everyone loved them. We hope to see folks wearing them, as they defend their titles, next year. After Mark Pounds of Central Valley Transpor t did his award-winning burnout in his red Freightliner cabover at about 3:30 PM and that final buckle was handed out, the show began to wind down, and folks started rolling out. We were at the raceway until it got dark (which was not that long since we had just turned the clocks back the night before), closing everything down and packing it all up. After that was finished, we headed over to Rancho Grande Mexican Grill in Bakersfield, CA for a celebration dinner with 18 of our volunteers and helpers. What a fun time that was. We cannot thank all our helpers enough, including JT, Jed, Sean, and all three of the Bobs, who cooked for our volunteers all weekend. This was a huge event with lots of moving parts, but it ran like a well-oiled machine, for the most part. Of course, there were a few hiccups here and there, but overall, the good far outweighed any bad. Whew!! We would like to thank everyone at Central Valley Transport in Bakersfield, CA for all the help before and during the show, Jake Bast and Marty Miles for suggesting and then helping put together the cow loading competition (and promoting the heck out of it), and a bunch of folks for helping with the rules and procedures for the hay contests including Jeff Botelho, Mike Maggini, Roger Ghidelli, Gary Haagsma, and so many more (please forgive me if I forgot you). Another person that helped out so much before and during the event was Angelina Gaare. This girl really knows how to get things done, and we