Main Street in the village of Cerrillos isn’t normally this crowded.
But today, people from around the Southwest have gathered for the Turquoise Trail Pack Burro Race. The race features two courses, one three miles and the other six. Burros of all sizes and speeds run with their handlers.
Bruce Bigelow, a Cerrillos resident, ran with a friend’s burro named Carlotta. This is his second year participating in the race.
“We found that burro people are just awesome," Bigelow remarked. "Haven't met one burro person who's not great.”
The "burro people” had lived around the village for years when a park ranger named Peter Lipscomb got the idea to hold an annual race.
"We were having donkey hikes in the park," he said, because he "wanted to connect our park visitors with the cultural history and the fact that the burros were doing all the heavy lifting during the mining times. I thought that was a really appropriate thing to bring in and offer for our visitorship. We had period tack and period costumes for the people who brought their burros.
"And afterwards, as people were packing out, I met somebody, and I said I'd like to kind of develop an event that maybe could be something that the village could use the park trails as the course. And that was Shane Weigand, who is the race director for the New Mexico Pack Burros.”
Cerrillos held its first burro race in 2022, with more and more people showing up every year. While some just come to race, others are also here to educate people about the current issues facing burros.
Anna Eby runs the Blue Moon Sanctuary for burros in Georgetown, Texas. She described how burros can often end up without a home: “They can live for 40 or 50 years, so a lot of times it's a challenge for them to stay in their homes their entire lives because of things that happen in folks’ lives.
"In Texas in particular, a lot of people are selling their land, selling their ranches and things like that, and they can't take their donkeys with them or they don't want to.”
Burros are still quite common in the Southwest. Lipscomb explained that the animals used to be essential to Southwestern life.
"When I think about people migrating westward, there was the Santa Fe trail, there was the Oregon trail. That kind of terrain is okay for large ox carts and other kinds of drey animals. But when you get into the rocky, arid western parts of the country, the only thing that's really going to make it for those changes in elevation and with the scrappy conditions to browse on is the burros.”
According to Eby, there’s still a common belief that burros are only useful as pack animals. “A lot of people view donkeys more as livestock," she said, adding that, "horses are viewed more favorably just generally in the culture as like companion.
"People think donkeys are more cartoonish and they're not. They're extremely intelligent and they're wonderful animals, but you just, people need more education about that.”
Today, Eby raced with a burro named Buddy, but he’s actually not one of hers. Buddy is from another burro rescue called Forever Home in Benson, Arizona.
Jennifer Volpe, a volunteer with the organization, showed up to today's race with ten burros in tow. “People actually pay a fee to run or walk with a donkey," she explained.
Volpe wore a headband with floppy donkey ears. Above all, she said, her organization came to the race "for awareness. Getting out to the community the importance of helping donkeys.”
For Lipscomb, burro races serve another purpose: keeping alive the unique history of the Southwest, or what he called the sense of place. “I think a sense of place is recognizing the multicultural heritage here, everything from the indigenous times up to the present day, and how we evolved through those periods of time."
The burro races, he said, offer people "a way to connect to what was meaningful and also have them give them some insight as to, you know, how rugged conditions were. Burros were the ones that could help us out in so many ways during that time.”
Burro races will continue in New Mexico and Colorado throughout the summer. The next race starts on Sunday, May 17, in the village of Magdalena.
