What is Buffalo Chip bull riding?
A bull weighs as much as a small car, and twice a week one of them explodes out of a chute thirty feet from the back bar of a saloon in Cave Creek. The Buffalo Chip Saloon & Steakhouse at 6823 E Cave Creek Road runs live bull riding every Wednesday and Friday evening in the dirt arena behind the building, with gates at 6 p.m. and the first rides after dark. It is not a rodeo in the sanctioned sense. The riders are amateurs who sign a waiver, the announcer knows most of them by name, and the audience is a mix of Harley riders, winter visitors in new boots and Cave Creek locals who have been coming for twenty years.
The event has been $10 cash at the arena gate for as long as anyone has written about it, with bleacher seats first come and standing room along the rail; reviewers in 2026 also mentioned a $20 VIP tier. The saloon itself, the restaurant and the dance floor cost nothing to enter. Rides have been reported around 7:30 and 9 on Wednesdays and in three rounds on Fridays, but the saloon publishes only the gate time, so treat the ride times as a pattern, not a schedule.
The Chip has been owned since 1998 by Larry Wendt, who turned a 1950s roadhouse into a Western dance hall, steakhouse and the unofficial Arizona headquarters of the Green Bay Packers. On Thanksgiving morning 2015 the whole main building burned to the slab in a fire the sheriff’s office said was set deliberately. The arena survived, Wendt poured drinks from it while the saloon was rebuilt, and the new building opened about a year later. The bulls never stopped. For a visitor based in Scottsdale, this is the cheapest and most authentic piece of Western theater within forty minutes, and it runs the weeks the big events do not. Our Scottsdale every week calendar lists it under Wednesday and Friday for that reason.
How to do a bull-riding night
Pick the night. Friday is the full show: three rounds, the house band after, two dance floors and a line at the gate. Wednesday is the same bulls with half the people, which is the better night if you actually want to see the ride rather than the hat in front of you. Both run year-round; summer nights start warm and are fine by the second round, and January nights up here are twenty degrees colder than Old Town, so bring the jacket.
Arrive early. Gates open at 6 and the rail fills by 7. The move is to come at 5:30, eat at one of the tables on the arena side of the patio so you keep a seat, and walk to the chutes when you hear the announcer. Admission is cash at the gate behind the saloon; the saloon’s own site lists only “gates open at 6 p.m.,” so if your evening depends on a particular ride time, call. Bring small bills.
Eat first. The kitchen does steaks off the grill, Texas-style brisket and nothing delicate, and a cookout is the correct mood. The bar is busy from the first ride on. Children are common until about 8, when the band starts and the floor belongs to the two-steppers.
Getting there. From Old Town take Scottsdale Road or Pima north to Cave Creek Road and turn west; the Chip is on the north side of the road in the heart of the saloon strip, about 40 minutes without traffic. Parking is a dirt lot that spills onto the shoulder. If you drink, use a rideshare back; the pickup wait in Cave Creek is real, so order before the last ride.
The rest of the strip. Harold’s Corral is across the road and is the second stop of a Cave Creek evening: picnic tables, a Steelers bar, cornhole. Frontier Town’s boardwalk is a half-mile west for the daylight version. If the bulls get you curious about the real thing, Cave Creek Rodeo Days in late March puts PRCA stock in Memorial Arena a mile east, and the Chip hosts the kickoff dance. For the two-step side of the night, read our country bars and line dancing guide; the Chip’s free lessons run on the non-bull nights.
What first-timers get wrong. They come at 8, pay at the gate, and watch the backs of a hundred heads. They also assume the riders are pros. They are not, which is the point: the rides are two seconds, the wrecks are frequent, and the crowd cheers for the guy who gets up.
A saloon that kept its bulls
Cave Creek incorporated in 1986 to stay rural, and the saloon strip on Cave Creek Road is where that decision is most visible. Harold’s dates to 1935 and the dam-building boom on the Verde. The building that became the Buffalo Chip went up in the 1950s. Larry Wendt, a former chief deputy in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, took it over in 1998 and built the version that exists now: a Western dance hall with a rodeo arena out back, live music most nights, a mechanical bull inside and a wall of Green Bay Packers memorabilia that started when the late Packers receiver Max McGee found the place.
The bull riding became the Chip’s signature because nothing else in the Valley offers it on a weeknight. Scottsdale’s own rodeos, the Parada del Sol Rodeo and the West’s Most Western Rodeo, happen one weekend a year in WestWorld’s facilities. Rawhide left Scottsdale for Chandler in 2005. The Chip’s arena is the one place a visitor can see a bucking bull in a dirt ring, with no ticket window and no season, forty minutes from a resort pool.
Then it burned. On the morning of November 26, 2015, Thanksgiving Day, a fire went through the roof of the 6,000-square-foot building. More than a hundred firefighters protected the neighbors; the Chip itself was, in the words of a Phoenix fire captain, a complete and total loss. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said the fire was intentionally set; Wendt said investigators found someone had lit rolls of toilet paper in a restroom. The saloon had planned a Thanksgiving dinner and a Packers watch party that night. No one was hurt, and no arrest has been reported.
Wendt later told the Phoenix New Times he thought about walking away for about three days. He had been paying $180,000 a year to insure the bull riding and the liquor liability and only $150,000 on the building. Then the town council, the customers and the Packers organization, which sent memorabilia to refill the walls, changed his mind. The arena had survived, so he kept the bulls running and served drinks from it while a new building, about 540 square feet bigger and “hopefully a little more fire-resistant,” went up on the slab. It reopened in the fall of 2016.
Why it matters to Scottsdale
Scottsdale calls itself the West’s Most Western Town and has spent seventy years bulldozing the evidence. The things that survive are either civic productions, like Western Week, or private businesses that decided to stay what they were. The Chip is the second kind, and it is worth the drive precisely because it was never designed for visitors. The waiver is real, the riders are your neighbors, and the night costs ten dollars plus dinner. In a region where the Western experience is increasingly a resort amenity, a saloon that rebuilt itself around a bull arena is the genuine article. Go on a Wednesday, stand at the rail, and let the announcer explain the rest.