Emily Beisel has been calling Pipewrench her OG for 11 years. She bought him as a 5-year-old in July 2015 with about $1,000 in futurity earnings to his name. He is 16 now, has more than $265,000 in QData lifetime earnings,and is actively winning at both ProRodeos and massive Open races like the Ruby Buckle.

“Pipewrench started all of this for me,” Beisel said. “He fits me like a glove. He is like Cinderella’s slipper. When I am on Pipewrench, it is so fun and effortless. It’s just like being at home. That’s the original OG.”

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The sorrel gelding registered as Namgis D 35 is the horse that put Beisel in the conversation. He climbed her from a dental hygiene student’s weekend rodeo schedule to a Calgary Stampede pool champion and seventh in the WPRA world standings the first time her summer ever bent that way.

“None of it was one big check,” Beisel said, scrolling through his career numbers in QData. “The biggest is $26,500 he won at Calgary in 2017 over six runs. He has earned every penny.”

Two Five-Year-Olds

July 2015. Beisel was 22, circuit rodeoing on Rare Bugs Alive and Playrocket, and both horses were hurt. She called Kylie Weast about leasing Wolfie, the Namgis program’s first big futurity standout. The answer was no on the lease, but yes on a sale: the Wards had two 5-year-olds available, one of them Wolfie’s full brother.

Beisel drove down and tried both. The other five-year-old, registered Namgis D 33 and now known as Chongo, had close to $20,000 won as a futurity horse. Pipewrench had about $1,000.

“Pipewrench fit me like a glove,” Beisel said. “He has a presence about him. He’s put together perfectly. Quite frankly, he’s just pretty sexy. Chongo had a way more successful futurity career up to that point, but I was at a place in my life where I wanted the more consistent one, even though he didn’t have as big a record. I thought Pipewrench would be a better fit for me.”

She bought him. Three weeks in, his third ProRodeo was Sidney, Iowa.

“He won it bottom of the ground in slack, which back then was unheard back then of because Sidney was big and so deep. He won it by three tenths,” Beisel said. “And then from the end of July through Labor Day weekend, he climbed me all the way up to second in the circuit standings. That’s when my new goal became to win the circuit in 2016.”

From Kissimmee to Calgary

April 2016. Prairie Circuit champ Kim Couch had sold Easy French Alibi and didn’t have a horse to take to the RNCFR, the precursor to the NFR Open. Beisel got the replacement call.

“I was still in dental hygiene school five days a week. April of your senior year of dental hygiene school is insane. Taking a whole entire week off school to go to the RNCFR was impossible,” Beisel said. “But the supervising dentist at the OU location in Weatherford loved rodeo, and he was like, ‘you guys will excuse this absence, you’re going to let this girl go.’ I won $17,000 at the RNCFR that year as a replacement, and I didn’t even make the final four.”

She graduated in May. The dental office didn’t “really,” need her until August, right? Beisel rodeoed all summer in between, just bested Mary Burger to the 2016 Prairie Circuit title on $15,500 at the Circuit Finals, and came back to Kissimmee in April 2017 to win the whole thing on a 15.27.

Calgary Stampede was next. Pipewrench won $26,500 over six runs.

“Calgary was just two pools back then. I won my pool, made the final four, and I left Calgary sitting seventh in the world and was coming back home to a full-time job,” Beisel said. “I had no idea how that worked. Very naive. I missed all the books for all the important rodeos. But that run at Kissimmee completely swapped it around for me. There is a way to do this. There is a way for this to be how you keep the lights on.”

Almost making the NFR

Pipewrench finished 2017 with a stress-fractured coffin bone, sustained at Calgary. Beisel finished 17th in the world.

The coffin bone healed. He came back, and he wasn’t right.

“His flapper was lazy. He ended up having several surgeries on his throat. Tiebacks, tie forwards, vocal cords, all that stuff,” Beisel said. “Every time it should have been an easy surgery, it didn’t go smoothly for him. The surgeon was like, ‘this happens in one out of a hundred horses.’ That scenario happened to him multiple times.”

By Spanish Fork, Utah, in 2019, he sounded like a dinosaur.

“I honestly thought he was going to die,” Beisel said. “The way he was breathing, it sounded like a dinosaur, and it scared him. You may get him back physically, but mentally that’s a whole different animal. Trying to get a horse back, especially when they couldn’t breathe, trying to get them to overcome the nightmare or the fear that they experienced from not being able to breathe.”

When nothing goes right, go left.

The throat resolved. The fear didn’t. Pipewrench would hit a spot where he had panicked before, and he would panic again.

“I had a lot of people that didn’t think he’d come back. They flat told me he’ll never be the same,” Beisel said. “I switched him left for a little while, just to reset his brain and say, ‘hey, I need you to listen to me.’”

He won a ProRodeo to the left.

She brought him back to the right. He placed at the Pink Buckle and Ogden and finished third at the 2023 Calgary Stampede at 13. In October 2024 he won a round at the Prairie Circuit Finals. In 2025 he stacked circuit and incentive money while Chongo carried Beisel to her seventh straight NFR.

Sixteen

“It took a lot of years, a lot of love, a lot of patience,” Beisel said. “I’ve ridden some really, really special horses in my life, but I’m telling you, he is like Cinderella’s slipper. To be 16 and run the fastest time of any open horse at the Ruby Buckle, that in itself is just so stinking cool. And that tells you what that horse’s heart has always been. He has a big heart, and he loves to run.”

Beisel rode him the morning after the Ruby Buckle in a hackamore, ponying Chewy. Pipewrench tried to run off with her.

“He’s so competitive,” she said. “I swear he’s in the back watching the times. He sizes them up. He looks at his competition. He knows.”

Beisel was 22 when she bought Pipewrench. She is 33 now. He is the horse she learned the sport on, and the horse she still rides like the kid she was when she bought him. She just cashed in last weekend, as a matter of fact, at multiple circuit rodeos thanks to Pipewrench’s efforts. He still loves the Prairie Circuit as much as his owner.