Maryland’s Miss Outdoors Pageant, Muskrats and All

It’s a beauty pageant. With muskrats.

The Miss Outdoors Pageant has been a long-running staple of Golden Hill, Maryland. As it happened, this beauty pageant shared the stage with another contest: the World Championship Muskrat Skinning Contest, which drew crowds of hundreds. The contests usually take place, back-to-back. But these days, some contestants decided to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Tiffany Brittingham did in first, in 2003: skinned a muskrat, in the pageant’s talent portion, while dressed in sparkly earrings and full make-up. Now a 6th-grade teacher, she was actually the subject of the documentary, ‘Muskrat Lovely,’ filmed in 2004. Brittingham finally won the beauty pageant in 2005, during which a man yelled from the audience, ‘I want to marry you.’

All of this makes perfect sense, in Chesapeake marsh country. The traditions are fading, of course: many lifelong muskrat trappers have had to find office jobs. But in 2008, 16-year old Dakota Abbott won both the Miss Outdoors contest on Friday. And the next day, she won the Woman’s Junior World Championship, by skinning two muskrats in a mere 102 seconds.