A Colorado rodeo legend clinches one more title: his name in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame

At 75 years old, J.C. Trujillo can still feel the moment he became a rodeo cowboy.

He was 6.

He remembers his first calf-riding competition for kids “as clear as day,” he said. “I was scared as you could be, to have to get on one of those calves.”

But he did and was able to stay on by clutching onto the calf’s side. Trujillo won himself the second-place prize: $10.80.

“And by golly, I thought I'd never see a poor day,” he said.

Almost 70 years later, the former national bareback champion likes to say that just about everything he’s achieved in his life “is basically because of the sport of rodeo.”

That includes his ranch, his collection of shiny belt buckles won in competition — including one presented to him by President Ronald Reagan — and on Nov. 11, the highest honor a cowboy like him can imagine: being recognized by the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, colloquially known as the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

“It's such a great honor that I'll never get over that for sure,” Trujillo said, in his straw cowboy hat and denim Western shirt with his tiny initials, JCT, embroidered on the front.

He was sitting between an old bunkhouse and a former schoolhouse that he and his wife, Margo, turned into their home on a 50-acre spread more than an hour away from Steamboat Springs. A dirt road leads to the ranch, which is surrounded by mountains thick with trees draped with golden leaves that look like fire in the autumn sunlight.

“You never get your eyes full of this kind of country,” Trujillo said.“You never get tired of looking at it.”

God’s country, as Trujillo calls it, which is also how he describes the land near Prescott, Ariz., where he grew up. His father was a ranch cowboy, and his mother was nervous about him rodeo-ing “until her dying day.” Still, she always supported him. The couple bought Trujillo and his brother horses and paid their entry fees at junior rodeos, yet were always clear that to make something of himself, Trujillo had to go to college.

“And by golly, I did,” he said. Trujillo graduated from Arizona State University. “And that made them happy.”

At the same time, Trujillo’s rodeo career was steadily building. Instead of going to teaching school, as originally planned, “I went to riding bareback horses and never looked back,” he said.