When Stacy Westfall won the freestyle reining competition at the 2003 National Reining Horse Association Futurity, folks were stunned. She rode into the arena with her hair tucked up in her hat and a bandanna covering her face. A dark duster jacket, jeans, and boots completed her costume as the "mystery rider." It took a second for the crowd to realize that her mount, Can Can Lena, wasn't wearing a bridle-and not so much as a neck rope. By the time she finished a nearly flawless pattern, the crowd was on its feet cheering.

Since that first run, Westfall, 32, has gone on to win nine consecutive freestyle reining championships throughout the country. In 2006 she won both the Tulsa Reining Classic and the All American Quarter Horse Congress freestyle events riding both bareback and bridle-less. And also in 2006, as the first woman to compete in the Road to the Horse colt starting competition, she bested trainers Craig Cameron, Van Hargis, and Martin Black to take the championship title.

Watching Westfall riding bareback, or seeing her gentle a fresh colt, you get the feeling she's part horse herself. It's not uncommon to hear her voice the horse's thoughts-or what she thinks those thoughts are. "I'm tired of this, Stacy. Can't we do something else?" And she says it like a Brit, if, to her sensibilities, that horse has a British accent. She seems to channel their personalities.

"She's got what I call the brain to train," says trainer and natural horseman Pat Parelli. Also known for his bridle-less riding, Parelli first saw Westfall ride at the 2003 NRHA event. "People were just sure she was one of my students," he says. In reality, clinics and trainers were few and far-between in rural Maine, where Westfall grew up. A single clinic was all she managed to take in, and she didn't even ride. "I watched one John Lyons clinic when I was about 14," she recalls. "That was the first time I saw someone ride without a bridle, and it stuck with me."

She credits the horses of her childhood-a pony, Misty, and a filly, Bay-for much of what she knows about understanding horses. Oh, and her mother, who never stopped reminding her to think like the dog, horse, or whatever it was she was trying to train.

If it weren't for a trip to the All American Quarter Horse Congress right before college, who knows what Westfall would be doing today. While the reining was underway, she happened to walk past the venue.

"The oohs and ahs and whistling and cheering that was coming out of the arena got me wondering what was going on in there," she recalls. "I had never seen anything like it. It was so exciting and the crowd was really into it. That's when I knew what I wanted to do."

She headed to the University of Findlay to get a degree in equestrian studies, and during her time there she worked for NRHA Champions Mike Flarida and Dan Huss. She met her husband, Jesse, at Congress in 1994. They married three years later and by 2000 had established a horse training business at their home in Mt. Gilead, Ohio.

When the Road to the Horse competition commenced last year, Westfall was virtually unknown outside of the reining world. Although she had been starting colts for years, the consensus was pretty much, "Good for her for trying, but she doesn't stand much of a chance."

Added to the stress of competing was the fact that her three young sons were all sick with fevers. She spent the nights of the event mostly sleepless, comforting her kids.

But in the round pen, her focus was unwavering.

Her rivals each roped their horses within the first few minutes. "I can remember about 35 minutes into that first hour feeling like the crowd was wondering if I was ever going to catch my horse," Westfall says. But she was working her plan, reading her horse, and taking the time to let the horse connect with her. Patience paid off, and when Westfall rode her colt through the obstacle course in the final stage of the contest, there was no doubt she had won handily.

"Some people are good trainers and some people are good riders," says Parelli. "She's one of the few people who are good at both."

Jan Lyons is serving coffee and just-made apple crunch in the kitchen of her rural Riley County, Kansas home this Friday a.m. She has in the past minute comforted a dear friend who has suffered a death in the family and Jan Lyons, she hangs that telephone receiver up just like loss, and in a voice so softly reassuring as to be almost inaudible she says, "Isn't it warm and beautiful this morning?"

And indeed it is.

Her husband Frank a respected radiologist serving small Kan., towns with a big city's sort of medical expertise, a subspecialty in which, like cattle ranching, there's something new be learned every 24 hours or so. The ranch's 19th annual bull and heifer sale just a week away, with cattle that Jan describes in the sale's catalogs welcome letter as "honest and straightforward," cattle recognized in Kansas and surrounding states for their primo Angus genetics, genetics all Jan-selected, the foundation females chosen from the major reputation breeders in the region. The entire extended family-daughters Amy and Debbie and their husbands Karl Langvardt and Duane Blythe-working day to day and side by side together on the ranch. All seven grandchildren showing their calves down Highway 177 at the Morris County Fair, their grandmother just beaming there with her camera, remembering her own days with the Helping Hands 4H club of Columbiana County, Ohio.

"My dad still runs cattle on the farm where I grew up," she says. "As a little girl I was always more interested in following him around than staying in the house with my mom." Off then to The Ohio State University where she and Frank found each other, before coming to Kansas, to Fort Riley, the post where Frank's military obligation called him to first practice medicine, where at Kansas State University Jan earned a master's degree in counseling, where six years later and the girls just toddlers she and Frank discovered out there by McDowell Creek, just south of Manhattan, a place to make a stand.

Determined that her daughters would enjoy the outdoor joys, the quiet lessons of the ranching life that had been her own girlhood, she brought them along as her leadership activities in the industry grew from local volunteering with 4H beef programs and property-rights groups, on to become president of the Angus association and then a representative to the Purebred Council, and president of the Kansas Livestock Association in its 1994 centennial year, a position which involved her with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association where more and more committee work at last led to her accepting the association's chairmanship in 2004.

She was chairman when CNN reported that a solitary dairy cow had turned up positive for bovine spongiform encephalopathy in upstate Washington. And she woke up every morning to address the mad-cow frenzy in news conferences full of questions both pertinent and impossibly ignorant, in press releases waiting to counter the day's big-media take on everything that might be wrong with hamburger in America. "As we took on that whole issue, we quickly learned that targeted messages full of factual, scientific information delivered in a calm, thoughtful, forthright, and transparent way were the best way to effectively communicate the ongoing safety of our product." This nation's beef industry survived that scare just fine, and Jan came on home then, back to her family and the bloodlines building there. She still speaks of the "pride and gratification I felt watching the family come together, taking on more and more of the daily operation of the ranch when I was forced to be away so much."

The Lyons Angus Ranch is a strong, clean spread with native grass that grows thick above the limestone soil, a hilled and watery place with a century-old, big-porched house that the Lyons family has made beautiful, lived-in with the squeals of little kids running to follow their grandparents around, a place very far away from a world where the idiot winds of zealotry blow office buildings down, where hatred might fly blind in stolen planes to spray death from the sky. But Jan Lyons once more has succumbed to a lifelong inability to say "no" to a good agricultural cause, and she sits knowledgeably among U.S. senators and generals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and agribusiness executives as a member of a task force seeking to bring the proposed National Bioagro Defense Facility to Kansas. The Homeland Security folks' decision about the location of the facility is still a year or more away, and she will be working all the while, as always she has, to ensure that rational, direct, honest, and straightforward thinking prevails.

Whether in confronting global terrorism or in the choice of a 4H club calf, Jan Lyons wouldn't have it any other way. And isn't it warm and beautiful this morning?