When her horse, Monty, reared back in the breakaway roping box and pinned Anna Tretter to the back wall, the needle swung to “big mistake.”

Tretter was 14 and roughly two years into ownership of her own horse, which seems like plenty of time for the two to get used to each other.  It wasn’t going well. It had never gone extremely well — but this was a serious slip backwards. 

“After that my mom was like, ‘What are we doing,’ Tretter said.  

Four years later Tretter and Monty get along famously, if their time of 3.62 seconds Saturday at a high school rodeo in Conrad means anything. Or the 3.15 they clocked on April 12 in Deer Lodge.  

Things have gone so swimmingly that Tretter, now a senior at Glacier High School, has signed to keep breakaway roping for Montana State University’s rodeo team, continuing a journey that included a stop in Townsend. 

That’s where Tretter and her parents ended up after a trip to see a horse for sale in White Sulphur Springs. Tretter was 12, and they determined that the horse wasn’t for her. 

“I didn’t feel a connection, I guess,” she said. “We kind of decided she wasn’t a great fit. So we asked about a good place to eat, and they told us the Full Belly Deli in Townsend.“ 

The conversation stayed on horses at the restaurant, and when the woman in the booth next to them left she paused and told them she had a horse in a trailer outside, along with the keys to a local corral if Tretter wanted a test ride. 

Anna, meet Monty. Monty, Anna. “He walked, trotted, and just stopped,” Tretter said. “But I fell in love with him. I knew it was either fate, or a big mistake.” 

Early indications were the latter. 

“We got him home and he was terrible,” Tretter said. “He bucked me off so many times. I’d say I cried three out of five times I rode him.” 

The turnaround started at the same place where Tretter began really honing her roping skills: A corral owned by Tammy Jo and Richard Carpenter.  

“I started just barely roping and we heard about them and went to an open practice,” Tretter said. “Winter of freshman year I started roping with them, and just kind of worked my way up. “ 

They also helped her get Monty used to roping: That is, they helped Tretter get her horse squared away. 

“He didn’t know his job,” Tammy Jo Carpenter said. “So we tried to help her understand what the job is and walk her through the process of having him do his job. 

”It wasn’t that he was a bad horse. It happens, the box is small and it can go bad real fast. You just have to have the skills to know what do, when, and we helped her develop those skills.” 

Somewhere in there the Carpenters — “She’s a great kid,” said Tammy Jo — also told her: You’re good enough to do this in college. 

“I don’t know if they were just saying that to make me feel good,” Tretter said. “But it was after that I started to take myself a little more seriously.” 

It’s worth noting that Tammy Jo and Richard both competed in rodeo at MSU, and that Tretter is interested in engineering. She said as much to Bryce Wilson, who as Director of Work-Based Learning at Glacier helped her look at some local engineering firms. This is how she ended up being an intern at Core Water Consulting. 

All of this dovetails with Montana State, home to excellent programs for engineering and rodeo. Tretter has committed to breakaway roping, so much so that the talented distance runner has foregone her senior season of track. She’s even more excited about MSU. 

She says this on her way back to Kila, where she’s lived and rode horses as far back as she can remember. Then, six years ago, she found a horse of her own. 

“I couldn’t ask for a better horse,” she says of Monty. “He does his job for me every time. He’s a game-changer.” 

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or at [email protected].